It was pretty simple really. I just wanted to see where I would be if I did a bit of exercise everyday and did my best to stay away from bad food. I know millions of people make this kind of resolution at the beginning of the year, and I was just one more of them. I remember thinking to myself “I’m 33 this year… if I don’t take charge of my self-image now and my health, when will I start?” I was sick of being overweight. I knew I wasn’t always like this as when I looked at my old high school photos, I saw someone who was much fitter (well, at least slimmer) than the person I saw now. What were the lines from that Baz Lurman song? Something along the lines of “Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth… Oh never mind, you won’t understand the power and beauty of youth until they’re gone.” I wanted to be able to look at my body and for once be proud of what I saw.
Hahaha… I think it also had a little something to do with seeing friends and relatives over the holidays. You see… I’m Filipino. I was born and raised in suburb of Manila then immigrated to Ontario, Canada in 1982. I love my heritage and my family but man … sometimes Filipinos are brutally honest and lack any sense of tact when greeting one another after an extended period of absence. Seeing some of my parents’ old school mates (they belong to their old university alma mater which has a pretty large branch here in the Greater Toronto Area), they would sometimes come up to me over the Christmas season and say things like “Merry Christmas! … Hoy! … Ikaw ay maging mataba!” Which literally translates into “Merry Christmas … Wow, you’ve gotten fat!”. I have NEVER heard any of my non-Filipino friends greeted like that by their family during the holidays. Maybe they do… hopefully, it happens in private. For Filipinos, it could be the middle of a high school prom, a graduation, a baptism and you can get that greeting dropped in your lap. To which I would mumble… “Ah yeah…oh Merry Christmas to you too… thanks.” Then walk away and whisper to myself “I plan to kill you in your sleep, you bastard.”
So on January 1st I stepped on the treadmill with the intention of doing it 5 days a week, allowing for 2 rest days. I figure I would start off light. I chose the ‘Weight Loss’ setting then picked program 1. I remember it being painful and sweating and being out of breath by the end of the 20 min. If I recall correctly, the routine only covered a distance of 1.2 miles, a max incline of 5 and it burned about 160 calories. I decided that I would stick with this program for the entire month. My reasoning was I wanted this to be a life altering decision. So I should try and resist the urge to ramp up the difficulty as quickly as possible… I wanted to be able to exercise consecutively every day for as long as I possibly could. Well, since there were 5 settings on the Weight Loss program line of the treadmill and I believed them to go up incrementally in terms of difficulty, I would aim to do each program per corresponding month starting with 1 in January and ending with program 5 in May.
As for nutrition, my wife and I just decided to try and shop a little smarter. We figured if we didn’t buy it, it wouldn’t be in the house to tempt us to eat it. Instead of chips, we got light popcorn and flavored rice crackers. We got diet soda and granola bars instead of regular pop and chocolate. We tried our best to buy things in 100 calorie snack packs; this way there would be some form of automatic portion control in place when we did reach for some of the snacks. We tried to buy more fruits and vegetables (which I’m still not a huge fan of). I know that even some of these choices don’t look all that healthy (as the ideal would be to cut junk out altogether), but coming from our where our eating habits were in 2008, this was a major step in the right direction.
Well, I was able to stick it out with the treadmill in January, successfully doing Weight Loss program 1 five times a week. I marked my completion of the routine everyday on the calendar in front of the machine. Come February, I moved up to program 2 which increased the calorie burn to 220 and brought the incline up to 6%. Come March though a funny thing happened. When I looked at and completed program 3, it turned out to be easier than either program 1 or 2, dipping back to 155 calories burned. I was a little bummed out about this as I thought the programs were to be my guideline. I guess they were just pre-made for different abilities. At this point, the pace on the treadmill was just slow enough that I would basically speed-walk the routines. My knee had given me trouble in the past and so I thought running anything would be out of the question. Well, keeping in-line with this thinking, I decided to do program 3 everyday BUT in addition to these 20 min. I would add 10 min. at the end my own customized program of speed walking up the highest incline available on the treadmill (12%). This basically bought the calorie burn to about 300 for 30 min. of work.
In retrospect, this little hitch in following the pre-set treadmill programs was probably the best thing that could have happened to my fitness goals. It forced me to improvise and start coming up with my own ways to increase the difficulty of what I did on the treadmill. Sure enough, I forgot about trying to stick with the preprogrammed routines on the treadmill and just decided to improvise and add extra time and incline to whatever it was I was doing so that the distance and caloric burn increased every month. I duly recorded my achievements on the calendar and weighed myself just once at the very start of every month.
By May 1st, I had gotten down 148 lbs. My goal was 135 by the end of May. Seeing as how I thought this was impossible without going on a major diet, I decided to add other exercises to my treadmill routine. At first, it was just some basic crunches, dips, pushups and curls with a couple of dumbbells I had found lying around at my mom’s place. I would finish work on the treadmill for about 30 min. then do a very brief 15 min. circuit of these basic exercises. Also, I had started to mix up the pacing of my treadmill work. Where as before I would stay at one speed and vary the incline of the routine, I soon started increasing and decreasing the pace as well. I actually began jogging for several minutes followed by speed walking for several minutes.
By June 1st I was down to 141.5 lbs and was doing runs of 2.621 miles 6 times a week followed by my light weight training routine. July 1st had me at 137.5 but then I faced another unexpected change in plans. About mid-July my treadmill broke! Seems that the house got hit with an electric surge somehow while I was on the treadmill and it screwed up the onboard computer. I was heartbroken to say the least as I kept thinking “How the hell am I going to keep track of running now?” Well, my sister-in-law who had also gone through her own unbelievable weight loss / fitness journey had the answer. She had been training for a half-marathon and suggested I go to the local high school track to run. I was a little hesitant as I knew there was a world of difference between running indoors on a treadmill and facing the great wild outdoors of running on the street (what with all that crazy wind blowing in my face and having other people out there to contend with [and ogle at]). But then I figured, what the hell? I have nothing to lose as the repair people told me that I wouldn’t be having it fixed until at least August 20th as they had the parts on back order. I wasn’t going to wait till mid August to start running again. So I started going to the track and my mom’s place where my brother’s place where his treadmill was being stored. Between these two places, I was able to keep up my schedule of running. However, I made two changes to my schedule. Rather than running six days a week, I decided to start dedicating more time to weight training. I dug up a bunch of weights from my mom’s basement and brought them to my place. More importantly, my brother lent me his adjustable weight bench and his set of 50 lb. powerblocks.
[Just an aside: Powerblocks are probably the greatest weight training invention ever. They’re basically adjustable dumbbells comprised of several basket like weights nestled inside of one another. In the space of a couple of seconds you can have a dumbbell weighing 5lbs or 50 bls and the whole thing only takes the space of two large phone books stacked on top of each other].
So I switched over to a day 1 and day 2 system. Day 1 would be for weight training while day 2 would be for cardio (running). It was at this point, I also decided to revamp my miniature circuit which I had been using for the past few months. Looking through an old Men’s Health booklet lying in my mom’s basement, along with the Men’s Health website and weight training books at Chapter’s, I put together a beginner’s total body workout that hit all the major muscles in the body.
Come August, I had hit my all time low of 136.5, having lost almost 40 lbs. It was at this time I decided to start seriously thinking about supplementing the amount of protein I was putting in my diet as I wanted to slowly build some muscle. I got a membership at GNC and bought some whey protein isolate. I chose a non-flavored, “all-natural” brand as I was hoping it would just dissolve in water and I could drink it straight up without gagging. NO SUCH LUCK! The stuff tastes horrible. In retrospect I should have gotten a chocolate flavored variety. I experimented over the course of a couple of weeks, adding it to frozen fruit smoothies and what not in order to blunt the taste. I’ve finally settled on just mixing it into a tall glass of chocolate milk. I mix the milk then add a full scoop of whey (that’s 30g of protein), then mix it even more thoroughly. I let it sit for about ½ an hour to let all the whey dissolve completely and mix it again. I drink half the milk prior to a workout along with a big glass of water. Then after the work out, I repeat the ritual and drink the rest of the milk with some more water. Just recently, my brother has been kind enough to pass along a half full jug of chocolate whey which he has had to stop using as it causes his acne break out. Once I finish this current jug of “non-flavored” protein powder, I’ll move on to the chocolate stuff.
Where was I?
Ah yes… my treadmill eventually got repaired and I was back to using that. However, I found a real love for running outside and so, on nights when it is clear and not too cold, I decide to run home from work (it’s approximately 7.8 km from work to the top of my street). Moreover, I’ve gained a real appreciation for interval training as that’s what I focused on when using the track. Now I do sprints on the treadmill with 1 min. at 7.5 mph then 1 min. at 3.5 mph, spending 4 min. at each incline from 12% down to 5% with a 5 min. warm up and cool down period at the beginning of the routine. The custom program I use is 40 min. long with a set distance of 3.3 miles and about 650 calories burned according to the digital tracker (it’s probably less than this in real life as I’ve read the fitter you get, the easier it is to exercise and so the fewer the calories you burn for the same amount of work / time spent… or something like that). As for the weights, I have three separate routines that I rotate over the course of the week so that I’m attempting different exercises on each weight training day.
Which brings me to where I am today…
