Well, on January 31st I completed the first 31 days of my new health and fitness plan. I just wanted to go over some of the highlights.
Firstly, lets start with the stats.
The very first goal I set for myself was to run for 30 minutes per day on the treadmill starting on January 2nd. I succeeded in accomplishing this goal, and ran every day without missing a single day. I ran a total of 81.16km during that time, and burned 7,676 calories according to my Nike+ tracker.
Secondly, I implemented my new diet plan on the 5th day and stuck with it for the rest of the month. Some of the basics of the diet I followed are:
- try to eat at least 80% alkalizing foods
- don’t drink any pop, coffee, tea, etc.
- I only drank water with lemon in it, and real orange juice
- I tried to eat as much vegetables with every meal as I could
- no chocolate, no chocolate bars, no doughnuts, no refined sugar foods, no “treats”
- for snacks I ate fruits. A lot of grapefruits and apples, as well as some oranges and bananas
- I ate a lot of salads and oven baked veggies
- no beef, no pork, no chicken. The only meat I ate was fish (salmon mostly).
- I had almost no dairy at all, with the exception of a little bit of ranch dressing on some of my salads and a bit of cheese in the Quizznos veggie sandwiches.
By January 31st, my weight dropped by 11.3lbs from 203.5lbs to 192.2lbs, and my body fat index dropped by 2% from 28.5 to 26.5%.
I still have a while to go before I reach the ideal weight that I’d like to reach, however I am very happy with the results of losing 11.3lbs in less than a month. Also, the daily habit of working out, running on the treadmill and eating healthy has been fairly established now so it’s really easy to keep going. Today is the 3rd of February and I’m still running, still working out etc. almost effortlessly now.
Well, I shouldn’t say effortlessly. I still sit there every day and my ego thinks up another excuse why we don’t want to do our run today or why we should go and have some ice-cream or some chocolate cake, but it’s a lot easier to just ignore it now. I do want to experiment with doing my workout earlier, however, because there were a few times in the last month where I didn’t end up doing my run until like 1am in the morning or even later and I didn’t really enjoy that so much. I’m glad my dedication to stick to the plan made me stick to it and do the run even at 1am in the morning, but it’s not something I’d like to develop a habit of doing.
First thing in the morning running just doesn’t appeal to me, but perhaps I can get my runs done right after coming home from work. We’ll see.
Also, now that I’ve finished off the month of January, I’m not going to post daily listings of what I ate and what I did, but I will update the View Progress page with just the basic stats. Instead, on the blog I plan on writing more in-depth articles relating to my theories on dieting and healthy eating and exercising etc. instead of just reporting what I did each day.