Time for a new me

Alright well looks like it might be time to fire this blog back up and turn it into something useful.

I have picked back up my interest in fitness with a desire to get into shape.

• I'm tired of climbing stairs and wheezing.
• I'm of being too weak to lift this or that.
• I'm sick of clothes not fitting properly.
• I want to be proud of my appearance.
• I need the energy that comes with being fit.

It's time to dial back the clock and retake my youth!

So here is how I'm starting and I will cover each detail of my plan for fitness in greater detail in future posts.

Measurement and Accountability

I'm using a site called DailyBurn.com. On the Free level it offers ways to track your workouts so you can see the progression you are making. Measurement is really key when it comes to reaching fitness goals. If you don't track it you have no idea if you program is really working. It's also easy to get caught up in the numbers and see a slide in performance as a failure. Stop that! If you see your results are sliding then it means it's time to adjust your program. Try something new. You can update your results on the site directly, using their mobile site on your phone, or by using their iOS or Android apps. Several other fitness gadgets plug in to this site which leads me to my next tool.

Withings WiFi body scale. I've been eyeing this device since it came out. What it does is use electrical impulse to measure the impedance of the current in your body and calculates your body fat % from that. Once it has those results with your weight it will upload them to their tracking website via WiFi. Pairing it was a breeze and now I can get my tracking details uploaded to Withings and DailyBurn on a daily basis as soon as I step off the scale.

I found that tracking was lacking in my last attempt and it was easy to get discouraged when I plateaued but then I didn't really have anything to compare my results. I couldn't see what was done and what I could try to change.

Progress and Motivation

So every Saturday I'm going to take a progress picture and upload it to DailyBurn. I will also take some tape measurements and submit them then as well. Last time I never moved on the scale but I felt better and clothes fit better. Again I wasn't measuring those so I never saw the results. Once I started measuring body fat I found I had started at 30% and ended around 22.5%! That was done in about 8 weeks of work. So I know it is possible if I'm just better aware of what I'm doing. Those results will help motivate me. I'm also sharing those results and my goals on Facebook and this blog. There my friends can cheer me on. Perhaps this might inspire some of them as well.

Diet and Education

Okay so I read some books on the subject of weight loss and body building. It seems like the latter was more effective on making the desired change in my body composition. Now I'm not looking to compete or anything but those guys know how to get results. The problem I ran into their plans is the heavy amount of food monitoring and cataloging. Every calorie and macro-nutrient must be logged! It became too exhausting to keep up. So I quit and my diet was the item that really drug my weight loss efforts down.

In comes the Primal or Paleo diet. There are several books and sites on this subject and I will write about each one as I go through them. The basic principle is this. Take your diet back to what our ancestors used to eat as hunters/gatherers. Avoid heavily processed food. Avoid "white" carbohydrates like grains and sugars. Eat as natural as possible. Fruit is on the fence if you can eat it in it's natural form. There are a few other items that are up for debate but we will cover those topics more detail later but here is a small example:

Let's look at peaches. A decent item to eat but you can have it in many forms.

• A whole peach picked fresh from the market.
• A diced peach in light syrup and packaged.
• A peach puree in a smoothie.

Which do you think is the best way to eat this peach in the above example? That's right our hunter/gatherer ancestors would have taken the first choice. You don't have the added sugar of the syrup. You also have all of the fruit's fiber to help consume calories to process that sugar that entered your system.

Conclusion

So this is an overview of some of what I'm trying to implement now to make this new attempt at fitness be more successful and also fun. I will cover each of these items in much more depth in future posts as well as include status updates. The time for Bryan 2.0 is here, are you ready for it?