HealthyFitGuy.com

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.

A very busy day.  Nothing to report besides my stats for today.

So here are my stats:

Cardio: Treadmill - 30 Minutes - 1.55 Miles Ran
Strength Training: Shoulder Press - 25lbs/side - 25 Reps

Breakfast:
Nothing

Lunch:
Large Salad - Greens, Red Cabbage, Avacado, Pumpkin Seeds, Pine Nuts, Sundried Cranberries

Dinner:
Large Salad - Greens, Red Cabbage, Avacado, Pumpkin Seeds, Pine Nuts, Sundried Cranberries
Organic Tomatoe Soup

Snacks:
2 Bananas

Well, today’s workout was fairly uneventful.  My triceps feel like jello, but that’s about it.  Nothing else much to say about it.

So here are my stats:

Cardio: Treadmill - 32 Minutes - 2.01 Miles Ran
Strength Training: Tricep Curls - 20lbs/side - To Failure

Breakfast:
Nothing

Lunch:
Veggie Sandwich on Whole Wheat Bread - Cucumbers, Sprouts, Lettuce, Tomato
Small Greek Salad

Dinner:
Large Greek Salad
Spinach Pie

Snacks:
Banana
Half a Cantaloupe
Grapefruit

Well, it’s day 8 since I started my diet and I’ve lost 7.4lbs so far. I’m really excited about this. It’s good to see progress when you’re working hard.

Although I’ll go into more detail as to what my diet is later on, I’ll share a few points to the philosophy I’m following.

It is basically based on not allowing foods that are “crap” to pass my lips, and instead focusing on eating foods that nourish my body. As long as a food is good and nutritious, I can eat however much of it I want. I do not count calories or try to portion my food. If I’m hungry I eat. Anytime I want. I just eat nutritious food, that’s all.

For example. Here are some foods that are on my “crap” list that I haven’t eaten for the last 8 days:

Crap Foods:
- No Pop of any kind, I used to be addicted to drinking 2-3 Coca-Cola cans every day
- No Concentrated Fruit Juices (I only drank 2 glasses of Tropicana Orange Juice in the last week)
- No White Sugar
- No White Rice
- No White Flour Products (Pasta, Breads, etc.)
- No Beef, No Chicken, No Pork, Fish Once or Twice a Week is OK
- No Eggs
- No Milk (I used VERY small amount of Ranch Dressing I have left-over two or three times this week)
- No Other Dairy Products (ie. No Sour Cream, No Cheese, etc.)

The basic premise is to eat at least 80-90% water rich, alkalizing vegetables at my meals, either raw or steamed/stir-fried, with 10-20% denser foods such as beans, legumes, nuts, sprouted grain flatbread, etc.

Nutritious Foods:
- All Kinds of Alkaline Veggies (Green Lettuce, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Green and Red Peppers, etc.)
- Some Starchy Veggies in small quantities, such as potatoe’s
- Some Fruits, the less Acidic the fruit the more I can eat of it. For example Cantaloupe, Melon, Grapefruit and Apples are better than Banana’s, Oranges, etc. The lower the Glycemic Index the better.
- All Nuts are OK except for Peanuts.  Pumpkin Seeds, Sesame Seeds, Pine Nuts, Almonds etc. are good. Still trying to find real RAW Almonds, not the fake RAW ones form California.
- Drinking 6-8 Glasses of Alkaline Water / day (I put pH drops in my water as well as Lemon)

Supplements:
- I’ve taken a few Kre-Alkalyn Creatine Pill Supplements
- I’ve taken a few Innerlight Supergreen’s Capsules
- Both of which, plus some Innerlight Multivitamin and Minerals I want to start taking every day.

That’s the basics of what I’m doing.

This morning I was sneezing like crazy on my way to work. I am pretty sure that flu is in me. However, I am fighting that sucker. I felt some more stomach cramps after lunch today for the majority of the afternoon but then they subsided. I don’t feel too bad right now. I had a pretty good workout.

I reduced my weight for the shoulder exercises as I felt last time I wasn’t doing them to proper form due to picking a weight that’s a bit too big. I reduced my seated lat row and real deltoid row to 80lbs (from 100lbs) and my dumbbell shoulder press to 25lbs (from 40lbs). I felt a lot better with those weights.

Here’s what the workout looked like:

Cardio:
Treadmill Run for 30 minutes -1.77 miles - 271 calories burned.

Strength Training:

Seated Lat Rows:
Set #1 - 80 lbs x 8 reps
Set #2 - 80 lbs x 8 reps
Set #3 - 80 lbs x 8 reps

Rear Deltoid Rows:
Set #1 - 80 lbs x 8 reps
Set #2 - 80 lbs x 8 reps
Set #3 - 80 lbs x 8 reps

Dumbbell Shoulder Presses:
Set #1 - 25 lbs/side x 8 reps
Set #2 - 25 lbs/side x 8 reps
Set #3 - 25 lbs/side x 8 reps

Big Rubber Ball Sit-ups: 25 reps

As for diet, here’s what I had:

Breakfast:
Nothing

Lunch:
Stir-fry leftover from yesterday. However, I only ate about half of what I brought with me as my stomach wasn’t feeling well.

Snacks:
One Organic Grapefruit

Dinner:

Pita Wrap with saute’d green peppers, onions, zucchini and refried beans. It was an experiment I did, wasn’t very good.
Big Salad - Lettuce, carrots, red cabbage, radishes, pumpkin seeds, flax seeds, pine nuts, dried cranberries, and a tiny bit of dressing.