It´s not only a matter of exercise

In previous posts I mentioned that one of the keys to realising about your own physical condition is starting to do some sport. I wanted to sign up for historical fencing, in Prague is quite popular, but the schedule was not good for me, so I decided to join taekwondo. What I remember from the first class is one thing, the master told us to do 50 sit-ups, I did around 15 and I was already dead and had lost the count. Horrible, few times I have felt so useless. The idea was that by doing some sport I would slowly get in shape. Yes, slowly, very, very slowly. After two months and seeing that did not lose weight, although I was feeling better, I decided to return to my old diet. It was June and the season of taekwondo classes was getting into an end so I talked to my master, who is also a personal trainer and we decided to start going to the gym a couple days a week with him. But he insisted a lot on the diet, that's where there was the key to everything. What I can say is that is true, in the first two weeks of the diet, when my sport was still three hours of taekwondo, I lost about 5 kilos. Before, my physical activity had increased but I was still eating too much, the diet is what really changed the trend.

Well, two weeks after I started the diet, I began my gym sessions with WarriorFitness Prague. The first day was "just" the assessment day. Like school exams (1 minute of squats, 1 minute of push ups, 1 minute of sit-ups ...). I ended up half dead. In words of my trainer I looked stoned. This feeling has not changed too much. Really, every time I train in the gym I feel that way, the difference is that the exercises are becoming more demanding. The progress is undeniable. In the chart below you can see the evolution.

Progress after 5 months

And a little story for you to see how far my fitness level has changed beyond what is visible. A few days ago I had surgery. The next day there was a complication and I needed a second surgery. The story is that when I was already in the operating room, a nurse asked me if I was a low frequency, I asked what she meant and she said she was also with me the day before and saw that my heart rate was very low, so she assumed I was a sportive person. The truth is that it is a good confirmation that I'm on the right track.

The gift for today is the breakfasts and snacks that I usually take. Guess which one is my favourite snack.

Breakfasts (1 to choose):

1 glass of juice, milk or coffee. 2 slices of bread. 1 slice of low-fat cheese.

1 glass of juice, milk or coffee. 2 slices of bread. 1 slice of ham.

1 glass of juice, milk or coffee. 2 slices of bread. 1 slice of turkey breast.

1 glass of juice, milk or coffee. 2 slices of bread. 1 slice of chicken breast.

1 glass of juice, milk or coffee. 2 slices of bread with a tablespoon of olive oil.


Small snack:

20 grams of nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts).

Snacks (1 to choose)

1 yogurt

1 banana

2 oranges

4 tangerines

1 apple

2 peaches

1 slice of bread with 2 ounces of chocolate

Advising is free so...

First, if you can’t cook, you should learn. In my opinion the best way to control what you eat is cooking yourself.

Buy a good scale, and ideally one that tells the percentage of body fat. Also one meter seam to take measurements of your chest, waist and, for the girls, also hips. It's good to weigh yourself and take the measurements on the same day of the week. I usually do that the morning of the day off.

Look for a motivation to get started. It can be serious, like having had a health problem or as silly as mine, the biggest pants I had, started to not fit and did not want to go buy new clothes, well, okay now I have to buy clothes just because I have lost 3 sizes, but that’s not the point. Motivation is very important at first at that time your brain is kind of cheating telling you that you want to eat more even not being hungry. That feeling is what we have at the beginning and is in those moments where the motivation comes. Gradually the feeling goes away because your mind got used to the new portions.

Related to this, aesthetics is not a good motivation, and I say this because this issue is too dependent on people’s opinion. Yes, many people will tell you that you look better, but some people will not notice the change at all and that can frustrate a lot if that’s your motivation. Felling leaner, more energetic, or needing to use smaller clothes, are more objective indicators and much more motivating.

Set reasonable goals for short terms. Start with something like "lose 5 kilos," "reach [insert here the nearest] kilos, thinking in small amounts makes more difficult to see how long the way will be and lose motivation.

When cooking, do it without being hungry. If you wait until you’re hungry to prepare food, it's much easier to start saying "nothing happens if I do it once" and cook fries as side dish instead of the boiled potatoes that were planned.

Prepare (see first tip) just your portion. From personal experience, cooking for several people and trying to calculate your portion at a guess does not work, plain and simple. And this extends to trying to go to restaurants because you don’t want to bring food from home, and pretend it to be the same. Well, you don’t control the portions, the sauces, the salt, so it does not work.

Do not sacrifice more than you can bear. You need to slowly get used to the diet. Feeling it as an obligation is very bad. That's what the two free meals per week are about. As I explained I usually do in one day, but that’s just my way, you can do it differently. And if you want a Tuesday dinner out and get you a plate of pork ribs, go ahead. Yes, well, you just have a free meal less for the rest of the week.

In another post I will give some advices about sports and work outs. But you can imagine that the first one is about starting to exercise, walk, dance classes, anything that makes you get up of the couch.

Tomato and tuna salad

New Recipe.
This one is very easy, it’s a simple salad. I really think this one is more appropriate for dinner, it’s probably lighter recipe I prepare.

Recipe 2: Tomato, cucumber and tuna
Ingredients:
- 1 can of tuna
- 1 cucumber
- 250 grams of tomato

Preparation:
Wash and chop the tomatoes. Peel and slice the cucumber. Add the tuna and mix everything in a bowl and season as you want.
Serve it with a slice of bread and 2 kiwis.

The diet. A quick explanation

The idea is to eat in a controlled way during 6 days and have a day off. This day off is when you can eat whatever you want and as much you want. The explanation is similar to the same idea that of drinking a lot of water (I drink between 2 and 3 liters a day), to avoid the body to retain more than necessary. Especially at the beginning, the body "realizes" that you are taking fewer calories than usual, so it tries to keep as much as possible, and that would cause weight and fat loss much slower. This day of we cheat our body to it doesn't keep anything that is not needed. This “cheat” day can be adjusted, the idea is to make at maximum 2 or 3 "uncontrolled" meals per week. I usually do it in one day, it helps me to have everything under control.

The portions, for the controlled meals, usually are around 60 grams raw rice or pasta, around 100 grams of meat and/or fish, plus another part of vegetables and/or fruit. Throughout the blog I'll show the different recipes (you saw the first one already), there´s Spanish omelet, spaghetti ala carbonara, Cuban rice, rice with cod, rice with chicken, pasta salad, and some other recipes that I “created” by myself. But as you see, all these recipes are quite usual (at least in Spain). But the portions are what they are.

I have eliminated fried foods, refined sugar and refined flour products. So, I don´t eat sweets, cakes or sugary drinks, and always whole-grain bread. The latter helps to make the digestion slower, so it takes longer to feel hungry. So breakfast is no longer based cakes, cereals and now consists of a chicken, or turkey, breast sandwich. In brief I’ll talk about the possible breakfast.

Between meals I take a handful, 20 units if you don’t know how much is a handful, of toasted almonds. They are very easy to prepare, but it can be also raw almonds or some nuts, or a yogurt. The idea is to eat, just a little, every two or three hours. So that the stomach is constantly working (burning calories), and we’ll never feel hungry, the great enemy.

Extracted from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Almendras_tostadas_sin_piel.jpg

And finally, it is good to always carry the same schedule. This is easier when you are working, at university for example it was a bit more complicated, because every day I had a different schedule. As an example, here is my schedule:

•     8am - 9am Breakfast
•     12h            Lunch
•     15h            Portion of almonds
•     17h-18h     1 yogurt
•     20h-21h     Dinner

In short, the second recipe or the breakfasts, we'll see.