Number One: Your Why

You need to figure out your why. What is the motivating force behind why you want to do this. It has to be so compelling that you won’t give up like all the other times that you’ve tried to do this. My why is my family. I want to live longer so I can have more time with them.

Overarching Goals

First of all, my journey is not about losing weight. Excess weight and obesity are simply visible results of an unhealthy cycle of overeating and a sedentary lifestyle. When I started my journey, I wanted to not just lose weight, but also shed excess fat as well as be physically fit. These goals cannot be achieved by diet alone. I believe diet without exercise is simply a waste of time.

Tools

1. Suunto t3c heart rate monitor
   * Tracks calorie burn during exercise
   * Helps monitor heart rate during exercise
   * More practical than Polar heart rate monitors because the batteries are self-replaceable
2. MyFoodDiary.com
   * Food database
   * Calorie counter
   * Assists you in determining how many calories you can eat with a given amount of exercise
   * See my review of this great tool
3. Gym membership
   * LA Fitness
   * 24HR Fitness
4. Personal Trainer
   * Personal training membership at LA Fitness is a monthly financial commitment for one year
   * Personal training at 24HR Fitness is purchased in groups of sessions, no monthly commitment
   * Costco and costco.com sell a 2-year 24HR Fitness membership at a great price, equals about $12/month

Dietary Principles

To lose weight in a healthy manner, you can safely lose two pounds per week. One pound is approximately equal to 3500 calories. So if you restrict your calorie intake by 500 calories per day, you should lose at least one pound per week. With exercise, it can be more. Typically, when starting a new diet and exercise program, a person loses a large amount of weight early on, but these large amounts typically are not sustainable, so restricting your calories by more than 500 calories per day is not wise.

Determine your normal daily calorie intake (this is easily researched online) based on your age, height, weight, and then decrease that amount by 500 calories per day. As you progress in your goals and begin to exercise more, you will need to increase your calorie intake so that your body has the fuel it needs.

Extreme calorie restriction does not work, and actually causes the body to retain fluids and weight because it thinks that you are starving, so your metabolism slows down when you eat less to the extreme. Summary: Do not restrict your calories by more than 500-800 calories per day; to do so is to “starve” yourself.

Diet Ratios

Generally, your diet should have the following proportions of fats-carbs-proteins: 20:60:20. If you use MyFoodDiary.com, it gives you a running count of these percentages as you eat your meals.

Ingredients

Focus on:

• Decreasing intake of red meats
• Increasing lean protein sources like white meat chicken, turkey, lean ham
• Increasing intake of fiber
• Eliminating simple sugars like white flour, white bread, sugars

Instead eat whole grains, complex carbs like fruits and vegetables. If you need to sweeten, use stevia, a natural, unaltered chemically, plant-based sweetener (not for cooking). Decrease, but do not eliminate fats. Some good sources for fat intake are:

• Almonds
• Non-hydrogenated, natural peanut butter
• Olive oil (in moderation)
• Avocado (in moderation)

Eat at least five small meals daily. Some say six, but I can never eat that last meal in the evening, so I do five. Drink at least one-half gallon of water every day.

Breakfast

• 1 bowl cereal (not sugary) – I like Honey Bunches of Oats. Cheerios may be a good start for now. Fill the cereal bowl half way with water, the other half with nonfat milk.
• Drink your 1st 16 ounces of water – Need to hydrate early in the morning because your body has been fasting and dehydrating while you were asleep.
• Green tea (32 ounces)

Snack 1

• 12 almonds
• 1 banana
• 3 celery stalks with peanut butter
• Water

Lunch

• Lean ham, low fat cheese sandwich made on 100-calorie bread (Sara Lee)
• 7 dried prunes
• 1 apple
• 2 other fruits of your choice
• Water

Snack 2

• Low-calorie yogurt (80 calories)
• Low fat granola
• Water

Dinner (keep it to 300-400 calories)

• Lean meat (avoid red meats, once in awhile is okay)
• Vegetables
• No bread!
• Water

Exercise

My exercise routines and plans are very complex, so I’m not going to write about them here. I strongly suggest you purchase a gym membership and sessions with a personal trainer. I could not have done any of this on my own. With a trainer, you can learn how to:

• Use the equipment
• Work out correctly
• Create your own exercise routines
  After you learn more about the gym and the equipment, use Men’s Health Maximum Muscle Plan to help you create your own exercise routines:

When I needed to lose the extra fat and get fit, I devised a three-phase plan:

Phase 1: Fat Loss

• Six days a week: cardiovascular exercise for one hour – Recommend the high-intensity spin class that all gyms offer
• Three days a week: weight training for half hour (including one or two sessions a week with trainer)
• Stay in this mode until you reach about 30 – 50% of your fat loss goal

Phase 2: Strength and Conditioning

• Three days a week: cardiovascular exercise for half hour or more: You can incorporate more outdoor activities safely now with decreased weight like running, and cycling outdoors.
• Three or four days a week: strength/weight training for one hour
• I would do this phase for the rest of your life

Phase 3: Athletic Training

If you really get into fitness, you may want to incorporate athletic events and races into your life. I know I need these events to stay motivated and have goals to strive for. Depending on what events you would like to do, there are lots of training programs and coaching advice you can find online and in books.

• Cycling: I completed my first 100-mile ride (Century ride) last October 2008, the Tour de Poway.
• Running: Never having been a runner before, I completed my first half marathon in under two hours last January 2009.
• Triathlons: I’ve started swimming. My first tri is in May 2009.

Results Summary:
I started using MyFoodDiary.com (MFD) on March 31, 2008 and reached my goal of 175 pounds and under 10% body fat on August 6, 2008.

What is it?:
MyFoodDiary.com is a web-based calorie counter and exercise log designed to be used as part of a weight management program. Most users of this online service use it to assist with weight loss. The site tracks calorie intake (diet) and calorie expenditure (exercise). Then based on the user’s physical statistics and goals, it calculates how many calories must be consumed and/or burned to either lose one to two pounds per week, maintain weight, or gain weight. Users can monitor on a daily basis two factors involved in weight management: food intake vs exercise. MyFoodDiary.com supports the basic weight loss premise that one must consume less calories than the calories expended. For example, in order to lose one pound per week, one should create a calorie deficit of 500 calories/day. Over the course of seven days, the deficit would be 3,500 calories, which is approximately equal to one pound of weight loss. You can watch a video overview here.

Target audience (Who is it for?):
MyFoodDiary.com is best suited for the disciplined person. Ideal users are those who are willing to record what they eat on a daily basis (using the site’s online database of over 50,000 food items), record nutritional information for the foods not in the database, and record calories burned through activity and exercise. Users should be goal-oriented, motivated, determined, and persistent. The service is best applied by those who want to change to a healthy, active lifestyle. I would not recommend this service to people looking for a quick fix to their weight problems or those who just want to change their diet without exercise because losing weight in a healthy way is not just about food or “starving yourself”. Additionally, I believe the service works best in conjunction with the use of a heart rate monitor during exercise to monitor the exact number of calories burned.

Overview of how it works:

1. Set goals.
2. Record food intake daily.
3. Record exercise activities daily.
4. Generate daily summary and/or reports on personal progress.
5. Adjust food intake and/or exercise activity levels to reach goals.

Setting goals

Within the My Account tab there are three steps to establishing goals.

1. Enter personal information into the My Body section. MFD needs to know your gender and age so that it can calculate your daily allowance of calories.
   

   My Body >> Stats, Measurements & Age

2. Enter information about the activity level in your current lifestyle into the Lifestyle section. Agai, MFD uses this to calculate your daily calorie allowance, using information about your activity level to predict your allowable intake.
   

   Lifestyle >> Activity Level & Habits

3. Set your weight goal and optional water consumption goal into the My Goals section. MFD allows you to choose from a list of weekly weight change targets from a convenient drop-down menu.
   

   My Goals >> Set Personal Targets

Recording daily food intake

The main tab, Food Diary, contains three ways to enter information about your food consumption plus a searchable, online food database of over 50,000 food items. You can also search for foods that you have entered yourself.

Food Diary >> The Fridge, Manual Food Entry, Recipe Builder

First, you search for your food item in the database. It’s fairly extensive, and a pretty powerful search engine in its own right. So you should just use a few key words when searching. For example, suppose you’re looking for Niblets Corn & Butter Sauce by Green Giant. If you search for green giant, the result will return all the food items in the database containing Green Giant, which produces an unwieldy list of 25 items, four pages long. But if you narrow the search to just the keyword niblets, the search result returns only two items.

Searchable food database

After the search, you can:

• Add the food item to your e-fridge
• Specify the quantity of the food
• Specify for which meal of the day you ate the food item

If the food item is not contained in the database, you can enter the item manually, using Manual Food Entry. All you need is the nutritional information to store the food in your own database and/or e-fridge.

Manual Food Entry >> Add NewFood

Finally, you can also add your own recipes to your own database and/or e-fridge with the built-in RecipeBuilder. The recipe builder allows you to create custom meals and specify the meal by how many servings you consume. It calculates how many calories the serving is worth based on caloric value of all the ingredients in the recipe.

Recipe Builder

**** Read the Conclusion of this review. ****

In the summer of 2007 I decided to step on a scale just for the heck of it. The number I saw shocked me out of my sedentary life of obesity that was leading me down the road of cardiovascular disease and an early death. On August 30, 2007 I purchased a personal training membership at LA|FITNESS and have never looked back.

About 14 months into fitness

Before - circa June 2006

My name is Gerry, and I have been overweight most of my life, except for maybe 16 years (ages 0-6, 14-24). Those years were when I was a young child and when I was a competitive tennis player. But even during those lean years, food and overeating, as well as a yo-yo pattern of gaining and losing weight, were the physical issues that plagued me for as far back as I can remember.

At the age of 34 in May of 2000, I was denied a lower premium on my life insurance policy so I decided to get a physical to find out why. The routine physical showed no sign of disease; however, the blood work forecasted a grim future:

• Glucose = 92 {normal 70-110}
• Triglycerides = 1084 {normal < 200}
• Cholesterol = 257 {normal 100-200}
• HDL = 21 {normal = 35-60}
• Other cholesterol ratios were too high to be calculated.

My doctor said:

Gerry, if you don’t make a change in your life, you will contract Type II diabetes, and will most likely have to be on high blood pressure medication for the rest of your life. This will lead to cardiovascular disease and wide array of medications. You will die of either a heart attack, stroke, or complications from diabetes.

The fear of that conversation produced a change in my diet and exercise for about a month. My subsequent blood work improved over the next five months. But eventually the fear wore off, and I went back to my old habits of overeating and not being active. My doctor suggested follow up blood work and regular physicals, and had scheduled another round of blood tests for me, but after seven years, I still had not gone back for those tests or physicals.

Before - circa July 2007

In July of 2007 at the age of 41, my father-in-law underwent heart surgery. While we were visiting him in the hospital I noticed that the other cardiac patients were of varying ages. One in particular was in his 30s and extremely obese. Upon my return from that visit, I vowed never to end up in the cardiac ward. I was tired of that nagging pain in my knees as I walked up the stairs. I was weary of the pain in my ankles as I walked the short distance from my bed to the bathroom every morning.

So that’s when I decided to weigh myself.

My stats that summer were:

• Weight = 250+ pounds
• BMI = 37
• Body fat = 33.4%
• Waist = 44 inches
• Pants = size 44 (tight)

The brand new LA|FITNESS gym in my neighborhood was having its Grand Opening event. I wanted to get a free t-shirt, which was the only reason I planned on going on August 30, 2007. But during the evening ofAugust 29th, I had a very vivid dream that I was working with a personal trainer, and I was really fit and buff. I took the dream to be an omen, and the next day I listened to a sales pitch about the benefits of personal training. I bought a membership because I knew I needed to lose almost 80 pounds… and yes, I did get my free XL t-shirt, which barely fit.

I met with my trainer, Evan, for the first time on September 10, 2007. I was kind of nervous and scared, but also very determined and excited to change my life. I could barely lift any weight, was only able to do five “girl” push-ups, and was out of breath all the time at the gym.

I started out lifting weights just once or twice a week, but I also attended an intense spin class about 4-6 times per week where I usually burned about 800 kcal per hour. I cut my caloric intake down to about 1600-1800 calories per day. Over time, I dropped weight, decreased body fat, and built muscle.

After six months in April of 2008, I decided to take up cycling on the road, and purchased my first road bike. After a couple of months of riding, I wanted to train for a 100-mile ride during the Tour de Poway in October with a goal of finishing the race in under six hours. I thought that would be a great goal for someone who had only ridden a bike for a couple of months.

These used to fit snugly on me

In July of 2008, I reached my fitness goals. Now, at the age of 43, I’m in better shape than most 20-yearolds with the fitness level of an athlete. Oh yeah, I finally did get a physical and see the doctor. He was ecstatic.

In July 2008 my stats were:

• Weight = 175 pounds
• BMI = 26
• Body fat = 7.1%
• Waist = 31 inches
• Pants = size 32 (loose)

My last blood test in 2008 yielded:

• Glucose = 92 {normal 70-110}
• Triglycerides = 90 {normal < 200}
• Cholesterol = 144 {normal 100-200}
• HDL = 44 {normal = 35-60}

I lift weights in the gym three days a week. And although I don’t do spin class as much anymore, when I’m training for long rides, I typically ride my bike anywhere from 60 – 150 miles per week. I finished my first Century at the Tour de Poway in 5 hours, 56 minutes, riding through the pain of muscle cramps in my right quad the last 10 miles.

Representing the Bruins in spin class

[Updated May 26, 2009] Having been encouraged by my new trainer, Murray, and inspired by Joe Thorn, I started running in October 2008. I’m training for the “Triple Crown” in San Diego, which is special designation given to someone who completes three half-marathons in one calendar year: the Carlsbad Half (January 2009), the La Jolla Half (April 2009), and the America’s Finest City Half (August 2009). You get a medal for completing each one,and then a special commemorative medal for doing the Triple Crown. As part of my training, I’ve raced in several 5ks and 10ks. I added swimming to my workout regimen in February 2009 and decided to train for triathlons.

Striking a pose

It just goes to show you that it’s never too late. Take control of your life. Hit the road on a bike, get on yourfeet, or pump iron in the gym. If I can do it, so can you.