Tag: weight loss

The summer seems to continue forever in Belgium so our winter hibernation has also been postponed a bit. There were a few restaurant visits and a dinner date. Despite i was able to  refocused my efforts on the diet. It was a little bit of a bumpy start but in the end I got there.

Fase 1: Swimming

Perfect score on this account. Didn’t mis one session. And I have the impression I even got a little bit faster this last month.

Fase 2: a very strict diet

Like I said, a bumpy start. Getting back to the hyper focused diet stage wasn’t that easy. The first two weeks I gradually improved. But the small improvements made me feel a whole lot better. This in turn helped me to get my focus back 100%. The clubbing also helped! Yes, I want to be that 50 year old geezer with the great body, banging his head out on some old trance tunes and embarrassing his wife #relationshipgoals. So the last two weeks were spot on!

The numbers:

Yes! An all time low and I got rid of the cm gained in the summer!

Perhaps even more important: I feel great! More energy, more power, more stamina. Although I celebrated my 44th birthday  end of August I actually feel younger (and a hell of a lot sexier).

Fase 3: fitness

Well, you can’t win them all. Not only did I not add the sit ups to my regime. I even skipped a whole week. Did make a little bit of progress:

I think I am not that motivated to do them because I only do the push up. It’s not enough. 5 minutes and puff it is over.  I don’t get into a groove like I do with the swimming.

What I want to do is a full fitness set and really feel the muscles burning. But for that i need to wait until the utility room is ready and we have a place to set up my fitness bench (I checked, it was a hard no from the misses to set it up in the living room 😉

But there is some good news on that front. The paint is done (by dad and me). This week the floor goes in. After that, all we need is to get a big ass closet installed and the fitness bench can go in. i am guessing/hoping early December. until then I jsut need to remind myself that any progress i make with the push ups will pay dividends later.

But I have always been an all or nothing guy so this ‘little bit’ of fitness really isn’t my style. On the other hand, the all or nothing approach hasn’t really worked for me health wise the last 20 years. Perhaps moderation is key. The question is, can this old Sloth change its ways?

Last month there was even more relaxing on the diet front than the month before. As said last time:  reaching my goal in December or February doesn’t really make any difference for me. And I wanted to enjoy the last month of summer without devoting all my time and energy to the diet. So I relaxed even more on the diet front. This off course, came with a price…

Fase 1: Swimming

I knew it was going a challenging 4 weeks with the parties I had planned  the pool being closed for cleaning. So I am really glad to report I only missed two swim sessions!

One was because we only got home after 18h on Sunday so the pool here was closed. i did discover there was a pool really close to where we stayed/partied so next year I’ll bring my swimming gear and might just skip the festivities to go swimming for an hour 😉

The other missed swim session also was on a Sunday because the pool was closed for cleaning. During the week I went to a swimming pool close to my work but I didn’t feel like doing that drive on Sunday as well. Taking all the obstacles into account I am pretty happy with only 2 missed sessions! I still went 10 times which comes down to 20 km’s of swimming.

Fase 2: A very strict diet

Well, not very strict this month… As explained above and in last months post I relaxed a bit to enjoy the last of the summer and then will go full throttle when it’s winter and there are no more summer activities to attend.

What was the damage? Let’s look at the numbers.

Ouch! Gained two kilo’s and one cm of belly back!!

This proves two things.

First: I really need to be strict to lose weight. Strict diet AND lots of exercise or weight lose just doesn’t happen for me. Some people can eat a little bit less and lose a few kilo’s. some people can start exercising a little bit and lose weight. Not me. I have to eat almost nothing and do lots of exercise to lose weight. All or nothing. It’s not just my personality but also my body. Which begs the question, did my body type shape my personality or is it the other way around?

Second: I have not yet build up enough muscles to get away with eating more. This despite the 3 x 2 km swimming every week and the push-ups I am now doing. So we better finish up our utility room so I can start with weights also.

Fase 3: fitness

Still doing the 7 weeks to 100 push-ups (even if I am now in week 8, lol). Still slow going.

The above is also 3 times a week, usually Monday – Wednesday – Friday.

I can notice the difference in upper body strength but gaining 2 kg’s probably didn’t help with the progress. As promised last time I’ll add sit-ups to this exercise regime as off Monday. With the renewed focus on the diet I am hoping to make a bit more progress here by next month.

You often hear people say that your health is the most important thing in life.

And guess what? They are right!

Without health, a big pile of money will not do you a lot of good. And with both my mother and the girlfriend working at an institution for people with disabilities I really, REALLY know that being born with full physical and mental capabilities is a great gift.

Knowing this you would think I would have taken better care of my health but as those who have met me in real life can attest, I didn’t.

Squandering a great gift

Actually, I have really squandered this gift. First off: the last time I was somewhat serious about exercising was in my university years. Since I spend my working hours behind a desk that was not a good move. Second, I got fat. This too started after my university years. A sedentairy life style + eating large quantities of food (because moderation doesn’t really fit my personality) resulted in weight gain. Adding a few kilo’s every year which seems OKish. But fast forward 20 years and I ended up at 115 kg. With a height of 1m78 I had firmly nestled myself in the obese category. Health wise not good.

I also take some other measurements so here is a full overview of my starting point:

Financial freedom wise this was also not good. There are only two ways to increase the number of freedom years you have. Either you retire earlier or you add more healthy years after you retire. And if there is a sure way to reduce your healthy years in life it is being overweight (well that and being homeless or develop a bad drug habit, neither of which is going to happen).

So one of my big goals apart from achieving financial freedom is getting my weight down to a healthy level and start exercising. It was actually goal number two in my mission statement way back in December 2016.

The lazy side is strong in this one! After formulating the goal it actually took me until march 2018 to really start. I do have a few excuses, most of them crap. So let’s just skip them and get to the positive!

Learning from the past

I did learn from my past mistake of losing weight but never starting to exercise (because I am lazy that way) and also putting up strict goals which I then didn’t achieve. This failure then lead to losing motivation which in turn lead to me abandoning the effort all together. And then gaining back the weight… it was a very bad feedback loop of my own creation.

So this time I would exercise and I would make my goals less specific.

I went for a three fase approach.

Fase 1: swimming 2 km 3 times a week

During my last bout of unemployment I had actually achieved this but my back aching up plus starting a new job had me falter again. So I started it back up again in February. Old habits die hard so I did have the occasional thought crop up in my head that I should reach that goal by the first of April. Luckily it was only an occasional thought and I immediately squashed it by reaffirming to myself that every week I went swimming was a good week. That was a good mindset since it actually took me till the second half of April to get there.

Fase 2: a very strict diet

Originally I wanted to have completed fase 1 before starting this but that was taking a bit longer than anticipated (and I was fine with that, honestly I was!). I also was being pretty fed up with being overweight. Being fine with a not so strict time table is one thing but the weather is improving and I have a few cool t-shirts I’d like to be able to wear this summer! So I started the strict diet on the first of April. How strict? Remember the bit about me not really being a fan of moderation? Well, I hover around a 1.000 kcal a day for the moment. Probably a not too healthy  approach, definitely not very sane. But it is working for me.

On the 15^th April I stood at:

(No update from today since part of my new approach is not weighing myself too often.)

Fase 3 will be the addition of fitness/weight training 3 times a week. I will probably start with this on the 1^st of July for no other reason that the Gym has a 6 months subscription for a 100 euro’s.

I will then exercise 6 times a week for 1 hour. This should get me in a reasonable shape and hopefully prevent me from gaining back my weight once I stop with the strict diet. Well, I’ll probably need to start eating healthier also. Not looking forward to that, let me tell you …

I should end up around 90 kg, depending on how much muscle the weigh training adds. Somewhere around 95 kg I am planning on spending some money to get a full body scan to determine my fat percentage and muscle ratio so I can fine tune the work-out regime. If I would have to guess I think that at present I still need to lose between 13 to 15 kg of fat and add somewhere between 3 to 5 kg of muscle to be in a decent shape. The body scan will give the hard data I need.

I’ll try to make this a monthly series but no promises (after all I am a lazy sloth and I have discovered that I am not a big fan of self-imposed deadlines).