Slow-Carb First Week Update

Right to the chase…

I have lost 9.6 lbs since Monday morning! Only 5 days! Since I started on a Monday I will not be going a full 6 days before having my first cheat day today! Funny thing is I’m not really craving anything but I did make a list of the things I would eat today. Every time I had a small craving I put it on my list!

Worst Meal Ever

Half way through the week I decided to try and integrate Slow-Carb foods that Tim has listed as higher in electrolytes like Potassium, Magnesium, and Calcium. I had a shoulder cramp on Tuesday all day and that was not fun since I was a work. I know that when I was doing the Atkins Low-Carb Diet I was prone to very painful leg cramps in the middle of the night. If you see in Tim’s book he has a list of foods that naturally give you electrolytes.

I have also bought a special “HealtheSalt” to keep my sodium intake lower but giving me extra Potassium that I put on each meal.

So I created a meal with salmon with bones (from the can), spinach (from frozen with butter), lima beans (from can), and HealtheSalt!  I’m not a fancy cook and when I cook for myself I just cook the parts and eat them as is. This meal was not good at all! I forced it down just because I didn’t want to waste any food since money is tight right now.

Pleasant Surprise

I thought for sure I would have cravings like mad all week but I didn’t. I think only one time did I feel weak enough that if someone asked to would cheat. After finding our Almonds and Peanuts are Slow-Carb foods I got very excited! Now I have a bunch with each meal and it’s the perfect snack food while watching TV when other people in the house are eating junk food! On the first and second nights I did have about 2 tablespoons of almond butter to get me through the evening minor cravings.

A second surprise I had was the fact that I really like the taste of frozen veggies and Lentils! I cook the frozen veggies, Lentils from a can, half teaspoon of HealtheSalt, some garlic powder, and a little butter for 4 minutes in the microwave. Sounds boring but I’m loving it and if I’m having it at least 2 times per day it really seems to keep my satisfied.

The third surprise was the fact that I really didn’t have to make many adjustments to the size of my meals as I went along. I started out thinking I was going to be hungry so I just made a lot! It was a bit hard to eat so much food first thing in the morning when I have been use to smoothies from my last diet program. Also, I have been getting hungry by 11am but I wait till noon to eat when I’m at work. I just thought of it now but I should be bringing extra baggy of nuts to work for a morning snack!

No Exercise

I didn’t do any special exercises this week at all! I had Monday off for New Year but I spent the day sitting on the couch watching TV. I rest of the week I was at work like normal. Some days at work I do run around the office a bit trying to get things done but this week was about normal. The washroom in our area was out of order for a day so I did have to make a few trips up to the second floor washroom so I guess maybe I got a little extra exercise there but not much. Each night after work we came home and watched NetFlix but one night we did have to stop at the Real Canadian Superstore to shop so that was about an hour long slow walk that could have been counted as exercise.

Point is my week was about normal for me. As the months roll on and I loose a bit more I will be starting to do some the exercises that Tim talks about in his book The 4-Hour Body but that will not be for some time I think.

I’m off to start my cheat day! I did have a Slow-Carb breakfast when I woke up at 11am this fine Saturday and I’m just now getting hungry again.

PS – My body fat also went down 0.8% over the last 5 days.

Have a great day,
-Ian

Week 13 Day 6: First Kettle Bell Workout!

Yesterday my wife convinced me to go to the pool again...don't get me wrong I love the pool! I don't like that there has to be annoying people there! Creepy guys checking out my wife and then the same creepy guys walking around naked in the change room!

Well she wanted to spend some time on the elliptical so I brought by copy of The 4-Hour Body and headed to the stretching dumbbell area on the second floor of the pool. I read over the section on kettle bells and started my workout.

I started with the 20 pound kettle bell like 4HB recommends. The first set of 25 was not that hard! I almost thought I should get a heaver kettle bell for the second set but decided not to. Good thing...the second set was harder I had to really push out the last 2 and started to lose my form for the last 4.

The third set was OK till about 15 and then it got fun! I started losing my form at about 17 and really had to concentrate for the rest. The last 5 were a real challenge and made me feel like I did a great workout.

Took me about 15 minutes from start to finish with about 3 minutes rest between sets.

I plan to do it again sometime half way through the week maybe Thursday if my legs feel up to it. My legs were like Jello after the workout! I had some fun getting down the stairs to the basement to see my wife. Then even more fun trying to get up the stairs!

Bottom line...I enjoyed the workout and will be trying to continue!

-Ian

Week 9 Day 7: Salty Bosu Balls

Salt intake is keeping us from losing weight faster! I guess a problem with a balanced diet is when you have a higher than normal salt intake it has adverse affects on your water retention. One salty meal means weight gain or several days of no weight loss because of water retention.

So how can you help prevent the bad effects of high salt intake?

Lemon Water...and a lot of it!

I've been told real lemon is the best but we use the lemon juice in the big bottle. Start drinking it right after your high salt meal and continue for the next 2 days at least 3 times a day. Since you should be having a snack between meals this is another opportunity to have more lemon water making that 5 or more cups per day. I have blogged about it before but water intake is very important for weight loss and this will help you get the water intake you need each day.

In an attempt to start exercising more we went out to buy Kettle bells...but they didn't have any! Boo! But they did have a Bosu ball! So we spent the $120 to get the half ball just so we could do the 6 Minute Abs workout from Timothy Ferris's book The 4-Hour Body.

I only did 4 of the full motion crunches on the Bosu ball before writhing in pain on the floor for about 3 minutes. When I regained my composure I did about 8 Cat Vomit exercises but they didn't hurt as much as the crunches. I spent 3 days this week with extremely sore abs!

The plan was to do more again on Friday evening or if I was still sore I would wait longer to do them again. This falls in line with The 4-Hour Body rules of giving your muscles enough time to build and repair before working them again. I did the exercises again Friday and they still hurt like hell but I'm starting to feel real good about myself. The pain I got for 3 days after the first workout seems to gone already after a day and half so this might be a good thing.

On a side note: We found kettle bells at the local pool exercise room that we could use! This will save us over $100 because we don't have to buy them. Using kettle bells as a main weight loss exercise is also from The 4-Hour Body!

I have updated the My Stats page to reflect weekly averages for my body weight, body fat, BMR and BMI. My spreadsheet is setup to go from Sunday to Saturday so I will try to post these numbers every Saturday morning.

Also, I will be setting up an e-mail list that you can join to get my top weight loss tips and favorite recipes. I decided not to post them on the blog because some of this info is from sources that may object to me reprinting or sharing the info for free. So I figured an e-mail list will be a happy medium.

Have a great day,

-Ian

Week 5 Day 5: Damage Control

On Monday May 23 we had a cheat day as per page 100 of The 4-Hour Body (4HB). We did it because my wife has been volunteering down a the evacuee center for the Slave Lake fire and she has not been able to follow the program to a tee. Different companies where donating lunches to the volunteers so she had not control over what she ate because they were told they wouldn't have any space to store personal things like lunches. This change is daily routine was bothering her and in turn affecting me so we planned an organized preemptive strike!

The Damage Control chapter in 4HB is an important part of shocking the body out of routine to help spur further weight loss. The basics of it are take special supplements that day, then do special yet very simple exercises at certain times through the day and eat a couple of helpful foods during the day. The results were interesting.

I gained 4.4 lbs in that one day...is this bad? Did the cheat day rules not work?

I also LOST 0.5% body fat that day! What does this mean?

I gained weight but lost body fat so...I gained muscle! I would have to say it was a very successful cheat day even though after 5 days my body is still sore all over from the exercises we did that day.

But the real damage control I was speaking about in this posts title would be the next two days after our cheat day.

Even though on our cheat day we got very full and sick from the crap food we were eating we ended up cheating the next 2 evenings. I think we cheated these two other times because we still couldn't get back onto our regular routine the very next day. We were also foolish enough to cheat the second 2 times without following the 4HB rules of cheat days or cheat meals. This is where my problems were this week.

We needed to get right back on program as strict as ever!

Well it's been 1 full day since getting back on full program and I'm already almost back to my weight and body fat pre-cheat day. On Monday I will be getting measured again and I plan on getting the numbers from the weight loss clinic to share with you.

I think after 3 good days on program with weekend the results will be good.

-Ian

Week 3 – Day 6: Water for Occam

This busy life of shopping, cooking, eating and now a bit of exercise is really taking a lot of our time. I may only try to post one or two times per week. Maybe one long post on Saturdays and a short post Monday or Tuesday nights what I will try for. Saturdays we have more time and Monday evening is our official weigh and measuring night at the weight loss clinic so I will want to update you with the my stats that day.

Speaking of stats I'm trying to record more information for comparison. Something that I'm hearing from everyplace especially from Timothy Ferriss's book “The 4-Hour Body” that I will talk to you more about below. So I will be posting pictures on my pictures page along with tracking my weight, body fat percentage and measurements. I will be posting all the stats on a new page and updating that as I go. If I'm really busy I may just update the stats page without posting a main blog post so check it even if you don't see something new here. Like I said I will try to post my stats every Monday or Tuesday.

Now for some bad news...I gained 2 LBS one visit to the weight loss clinic. It was a little upsetting but they gave me the suggestion that I may not be drinking enough water. I always thought I drank enough water before joining the weight loss clinic and after we joined I started drinking more water. I was averaging 10-15 cups of water before program and was getting 13-17 cups after joining program. So it was even more upsetting to have them tell me I need to drink more water!

Well the next day I began drinking more water and now I'm averaging 15-20 cups of water each day. Guess what? The next weigh in I lost 3 LBS!!!! Crazy what the right amounts of water can do. Funny but at the same time I was reading the part in Timothy Ferriss's book about how he recommends large amounts of water also. Needless to say I got this message compounded into my brain this past week and it paid off!

Now that we know the program is starting to work we have begun telling some of our friends and family about it. I was nervous about telling people because we have been trying to lose weight for so long I didn't want to hear any negative comments. We have chosen not to tell people about how much money we spent pre-paying for 25 weeks of the program again just to avoid any negative comments. Our health is important and we are at the breaking point.

Two friends we told last night where very supportive and asked us a lot of positive questions while giving us a few tips. The experience of telling them was better then I expect from say our close family members. These friends are very into cooking so they got very interested in our meal plans and we even made plans to have them over for a healthy smoothy tasting. This should be fun we have it planned for two weekends from now.

Our friends were also very interested in the vitamins and supplements that we're taking as part of the program. When we joined the weight loss clinic the girl doing our consultation was explaining the program and showed us a book called “Nutrisearch Comparative Guide to Nutritional Supplements” by Lyle MacWilliam. This book shows independent research about the quality and absorption rates of over 1500 nutritional supplements available in the United States and Canada. This was the real kicker that got me to agree to dish out the money for the program. The company that makes the weight loss clinic's vitamins we would be taking got a 5 out of 5 star rating! It's crazy but common big name vitamins like Centrum rated 1 star or less and many of it's products rated 0 stars. Anyway I think this book will be very useful when you're trying to choose the right vitamins for yourself or family.

4-Hour Body – Review Part 1

So the new book I bought last weekend “The 4-Hour Body” by Timothy Ferriss is great! Don't bother reading any more of my review because if you want to transform your body, lose weight, gain muscle, recover from any injury, improve sleep or improve your sex life you need this book...BUY IT!

Ok...I'm a little mad that I spent all that money joining the weight loss clinic when all I needed was this book! That being said the money spent has been a real motivator so I don't really have any regrets. My plan is to stay with the weight loss clinic for the full 25 weeks we paid for and lose as much weight so we can adjust to a new healthy lifestyle. While doing that I will begin implementing some of the ideas set forth by Timothy.

The ideas Timothy sets forth in his book are simple to the point of non-believable at first. He always backs up his crazy ideas with research of top people and pictures or facts of his personal experience.

Have you heard of Minimal Effective Dose (MED) or Occam's Protocol?

That's when taking a certain amount of a drug or doing a certain amount of something is the minimum amount needed to get a result. You only need 1 or 2 pain killers to get rid of your headache so why take 3 or 4? In regards to bodybuilding if you want to gain muscle mass you only need to do enough exercise and the right exercise to stimulate the hormones in your body to start building muscle THEN give your body several days of rest. Muscle building hormones stay in your body building muscle for days and over training can hinder your muscle growth.

Occam's Razor: “Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity” or rephrased as “The simplest answer is usually the correct answer ” but I like to say KISS – Keep It Simple Silly!

Occam's Protocol page 193 of his book is what I plan to be using to gain muscle mass in the weeks to come. I may not start if for a few weeks as we adjust to our healthy lifestyle more. The Protocol is a workout plan that has 2 different workouts that should only take about 30 minutes to do and are alternated every 3 or 4 days. So workout A today then 4 days later workout B another 4 more days before workout A again and so on for about 4 hours of workout time per month. This is where the book got it's name...you only need to work out 4 hours per month to build a great body!

I also read the section on weight loss but I will not get into that until after we complete the 25 weeks at our current program. At the start of the book Timothy recommends reading the basic parts of the book first and then reading the parts that interest you like a reference book. If you're only looking to gain muscle mass then just read those pages or just read the pages on improving your sex life.

I will post more reviews of the book another time also I will not be updating my stats here because I'm about to build that new stats page to keep everything in order.

Have a great day!

-Ian