The health report – August

Last month I relaxed a bit on the diet front, feeling I deserved a bit of a break and I wanted to enjoy the summer a bit. I’ll go into the details below. But all in all I am feeling pretty good!

Fase 1: Swimming

All good here. Didn’t miss a single session in the last month. I am also swimming a bit faster than I was a few months ago. Progress, yeah!

Next month is going to be a tough as I have 2 festivals and 1 party planned. Getting to the pool on Sunday is going to be a challenge. Perhaps I’ll just party hard till 8 AM and then go straight to the pool? Also, my pool is closed for 10 days for cleaning. I’ll look into Leuven to perhaps go swimming there. But those are worries for next month. Swim wise, the past month was great! Also starting the really like my shoulders! Nothing like swimming 3 times a week 2 km to build some nice shoulders!

Fase 2: a very strict diet

I was at 101 kg last month. Then I buckled down, smashed through the 100 kg all the way to 97 kg. Then I had three weeks of hard core dieting interchanged with eating a lot. A lot like in the extra large dominos pizza all on my own, burp!. I finished at 99 kg.

It was by choice as I realized that even by sticking to the very strict diet I would only reach my weight goal somewhere in November. That is the middle of winter. And reaching it in November, December or even January doesn’t really make any difference to me. There is some stuff I look forward to doing when I am at my ideal weight. Like buying some cool t-shirts. But none of it is in the winter. Winter for us is huddling down at the farm. We are half in hibernation during those months. And now it is still summer. With places to visit and stuff to do. I want to cut loose a bit for the month of August. So I am.

I am also, finally, loosing belly fat again. On of the most frustrating things is you do not get to chose where your body loses fat. I want to get rid of the belly. So what does my body do? Add fat first and foremost to the belly but only burn it the last! Looks like my body is finally running out of others places to burn fat and is dipping into the belly stash once again!

Yes, I know. I still need to work on viewing eating lots of greasy food as a reward. But I am more confident that I am going to keep it up. Even if, occasionally, I am less strict. I definitely noticed the extra large pizza went I went swimming 2 days later! So I have a correction mechanism in place to prevent me to pig out all the time. Especially now that I started with the fitness again.

Fase 3: fitness

I started with the 7 weeks to 100 push-ups. It is slow going.

Doing the beginner approach because being a couch potato for over a decade really killed my strength and I am still carrying around 15 kg of fat. I am also concentrating on getting my form right. So I am now doing week 2 for a second time. I am currently at 3 – 5 – 3 – 3 – 6. I’ll probably do week 2 on more time next week. But I can definitely see the progress. I also noticed the huge difference with the last time I tried this. I still was 115 kg heavy then and boy that was a disaster! So it is going a lot better minus the 15 kg of fat I have now. That really motivates me to keep going!

Like I mentioned above, the next month is pretty party heavy. So I am limiting the fitness to the push-ups. After the next update on 15 September I’ll add sit-ups to it. And after that, I’ll see when I can get my fitness equipment in our utility room. Slow and steady progress! It is the way of the sloth after all!