Get A LIFEstyle!

Today, we’re visiting what this blog is really about.  I want to talk about what all of these pointers and guides I’ve posted is truly meant to improve.  My (ImFAT) LAZYfitness plan is not about losing 15lbs for that wedding or for that trip to Jamaica.  The plan is not even a plan, it’s a lifestyle guide.  Everything that I’ve shared up to now has been about adjusting your lifestyle in a more gradual, natural fashion.  Whether you’re trying to get incredibly muscular or incredibly lean, my plan is just a starter kit for getting you in shape, period. 

If you are already wise to getting around the gym, eating right, yada-yada then this is nothing new.  But for the guy who views a treadmill as tough math homework or the girl who eats a pint of ice cream after a salad (because she did “good” that day), this is for you.  It’s getting you familiar with yourself and how best to treat yourself while still, treating yourself.  With my plan, you still PIG OUT for the Superbowl (stay tuned for that post), you still DIG IN for the holidays, and you still GRUB ON some cookies n’ sh!t while looking and feeling great.

UNlearning

From the looks of our current health statistics, Americans seem to have learned the wrong way to eat.  We have been conditioned to put ourselves last and industry first.  I DO NOT serve industry and neither should you if you want a healthier lifestyle.  I’m talking about the demands of your job, commercial industry, healthcare industry, pharmaceutical industry; all of which have a vested interest in you being committed to their agenda, feeding off of your hard work and energy until you have nothing left.  I don’t have to point out the term that represents the type of person subject to this treatment, but what I will say is free yourself.

Unlearn what’s not working for you so that you can have a clearer picture of what will.  Realizing how and where you’re screwing up is just as essential as reading advice articles and the like.  Get educated about new ways and things to eat, learning HOW to eat, keeping an open mind.  And of course, make time.  Make time to work out by cutting time from things that aren’t helping.  Staying in front of the television even when there’s obviously nothing on has to strike you as a major red flag.  Keeping computer time to a minimum will show you just how much time you have in a day.  (Keep in mind, my posts will remain at a twice per week maximum, believe that) Leave your email alone, try not to be a tweetfreak, and see someone about that facebook addiction.  These things are NOT as important as having more of a “real” life.  I should know.

Adjust with style

Getting more of a real life doesn’t mean your current one is boring, it just means you need more genuine experiences; in this case, concerning your health.  So start with something small, like making fresh sandwiches.  You can really get why guys from the NYC delis get passionate about their work.  There’s nothin’ better than slappin down two soft slices of multigrain love dough, fresh maple turkey or honey ham topped with romaine lettuce, ripe slices of tomato, a slick’a mayo and some spicy brown mustard-rrohh-ho-ho (Toolman Taylor grunt).  

 Get familiar with locally grown foods and brands.  FIND OUT WHERE your food is coming from and make it known that you’re doing so.  It’s contagious once you start.  Keep an eye out for fresh farming, cooking and health food locations, and please, visit the produce section more often.  I just ate a Pomegranate for the first time.  To be honest, I didn’t know how to eat one and now it’s one of my favorites.

All I’m saying is pay closer attention to you and dodge the distractions.  Listen to your body and make sure you give it what it needs while getting what you want.  The closer those two align, the better in-shape your lifestyle will be. 

You’ll look good too! AND you’ll look good.

 Next Week: The last part of the 6 part ImFAT series. "Finally, Sweat It Off"

One Small Step...

[Part II of the ImFAT breakdown]

I originally began working out last November (2009), but the real change started about six months before that.  Though they were small, incremental steps, I slowly but surely began changing my eating habits and sorting out the science behind why things were the way they were concerning my health and what I could do about it.  It took me six months because of the tiny effort I put in then, but really it could’ve and should’ve only taken one.

Anyone who knows me knows that I really like mixing drinks.  Though I’m no bartender, I have a knack for knowing what liquors, and other beverages, mix well together.  For now, I’ll skip details on alcohol and just say certain things need some experimentation, even if it’s breakfast.  I then approached how and what I ate with the same attitude and decided to make sense of meals in general from a basic starting point.

Look It Up

In the beginning, I thought about what the body DEFINITELY needs in order to function normally.  A few articles, blogs, and books later –simply put- the body’s basic five needs are water, proteins, healthy fats, carbs, and rest.  I could be leaving something out but if you’re the expert, please, feel free to add.  Of course, hardly anyone goes around shopping for protein and carbs on purpose and neither did I so I sought out the items that would most likely fill in the blanks.  Seeing that the Four Basic Food Groups were more than a little outdated, I searched for a more realistic list of essentials.  After looking through a few lists and diagrams, University of Michigan’s Food Pyramid seemed like the most elaborate yet clear depiction of what the body needs from most important to least from the bottom-up.  One consistent trend amongst all of the lists, they all started with WATER; a nice way to confirm my 1^st point and first tip of the week last week.  

UofM Food Pyramid

UofM Food Pyramid

Since I did all of this, all YOU have to do at this point is READ WHAT WORKS.   Generally speaking, these essentials include Grains, Vegetables, Fruits, Oils, Dairy, Meats, Legumes, and Water. 

Even so, I basically decided that I still wasn’t going to eat rice cakes, carrots and tofu all day just so I could “look the part.”  I wanted to still eat cake, pizza and whatever else smelled delicious and so I had to find a way to make this work, for my lazy ass, and potentially yours. 

Drink It Up

For weeks, I had read about eating right through blogs and magazines and used my mother’s nutrition books/business (nurse) as a cross-reference to my own experiments.  I started by asking questions like, “How could I gain more energy,” or  “…get better sleep,” and so on; everything that I found that constituted unhealthy results, I would prick at.  My 1^st experiment was whether I needed more energy or if I was doing something that was causing me to lose energy.  At the time, I chose to start with drinks.  Soda, juice, shakes, and others were in the line-up but I decided to focus on soda, my most frequent drink of choice at the time.  First, I went three weeks without any Pepsi at all and replaced it with water. 

Immediately, I witnessed myself waking up earlier, no longer feeling like I needed a mid-day nap between classes and also breathing better.  Since I was a Pepsi fiend, this was far from easy.  Then, to make sure I isolated the right substance, I went back to Pepsi, hard-body, and luckily I was right; I began feeling drained and fatigued all over again.  I did the same for coffee and frappacinos and kept applying it to other beverages.  Not only did I find that I had an adverse reaction to caffeine, I also realized just how much drinks were contributing to my weight gain.

Burn It Up

Soon after, looked up information on water and learned that water helps you burn calories before and after meals and help distribute oxygen to those hard-to-reach places in the body more effectively.  If your muscles can stretch and breathe organically, the workouts you attempt will show quicker, more positive results.  Evidently, without lifting a finger, I had lost 5lbs in less than a month, just by replacing most of my drinks with water, daily.  Now let’s think about that for a second.  Without lifting one weight, or running one mile, I lost an average of 8lbs a month.  That’s potentially over 40lbs LOST after 6 months!  If you were to start doing this, let’s say beginning with Thanksgiving dinner, you could possibly be ready for that early summer trip you’ve been looking forward to just by drinking water more often and less soda/juice packed with sugar and calories.  Not to mention, if you’re one of those people who tell themselves that they don’t like water, that’s in your mind and in REALITY, your body is just fine with water.  ‘You follow my steps, and you’ll begin to notice just how much your body craves water, especially when you drink it as soon as you wake up in the morning, as you should.

This brings me to my larger focus point which is breakfast.  If you want to start losing weight, you have to communicate with your body and give it what it needs, when it needs it; it will figure out the rest.  Over a decade ago, one of my school teachers told the class that in preparation for an exam, that we should drink water as soon as we wake up.  She said it would awaken our senses and make you sharper for the day, especially when with a full breakfast.  Now, if you were like me, the day started at noon at the quads and consisted of a donut, leftover pizza, a nutrigrain bar -to make you feel better about yourself- or just plain non-existent.  One week, I decided to eat breakfast consistently, everyday, and I watched my grades rise per assignment, meaning I actually stayed awake at Jerome Library while studying and remembered stuff (classic student tone).  In the morning, your system is at its most active and ready to burn calories, so giving it a granola bar is the equivalent of charging your cell phone’s battery for five minutes… Did you really DO something just now? Probably not. 

Change It Up

Drinking water and eating a full breakfast within one hour of waking up, alone, helps speed up your metabolism and tune your body into expecting that same type of activity as the day before.  You train your body naturally first, then you see the results.  This is especially important for the really big folks out there.  Don’t catch a heart attack trying to keep up with the skinnys working out at a race horse pace; make sure your “phone” can “pick up the charge” before giving it the juice.  Make it all count with nutrition first, then exercise.  I know I have a workout portion to my fitness plan, but none of that matters if you don’t take part in the most important piece of that plan, the EATING PART.  The sacrifice here is deciding what to eat for breakfast.  My choices include eggs, bacon and toast with orange juice on one day and healthy cereal with a bagel the next day.  Waffles, sausage, pancakes, home fries, and oatmeal are good places to start. 

Whatever you do, change it up, add a fruit and make sure all food included is fresh.  You do this and you’ll be ¼ the way there.  Breakfast is key to doing it like me. I’m still FAT when it comes to that part, oh yes!!

Contributors to my overall fitness plan

¼ = Water and Breakfast

½ = …….

¾ = …….

1  = …….

 New water-filter-bottle

EXTRA LAZYfitness Tip of the Week:  You can also use fruit as a substitute to drinking water as soon as you wake up.  Fruit on an empty stomach gets the stomach ready to burn and acts as a great way to speed up metabolism and improve your appetite

The Catalyst

The Scare
Have you ever suddenly been awakened by a rapid surge of burning hot acid shooting up to what feels like the base of your brain?  Cutting to the bone of this situation, this was most likely the main catalyst for causing someone- too lazy to get up and change the channel when they can’t find the remote- to lose 70 lbs w/i 9 months.  That someone is me. Though 9 months is normally no big feat for such weight-loss, for all those 30-day tough shit workout programs out there to compete with, in this case-IT IS.  For someone like me who doesn’t or hasn’t played any real sports, hates to work out and uses dumbbells as door stops, creating a home-made workout program that actually works is not just out of the ordinary, it’s completely insane. But before I share what I’ve been doing for the past year, here’s why…

The FALL

A few years back, maybe 2006-2007, I had noticed that certain characteristics about me had changed for the worst, dramatically.  My level of participation in BGSU campus organizations & outside activities, my classroom performance as a business major, and my overall image had been caving into a slump and I didn’t understand why… I couldn’t!  

My relationships with friends and family hit coarse terrain with dwindling efforts of communication and my business savvy also took a sharp nose dive.  The thing about all of these problems is they can all be either hidden, ignored, or more importantly manipulated by excuses to create a false sense of normalcy, but one problem in particular arose that could not be set aside; serious health problems.

All over campus, this had been the center of huge debate but there hadn’t been a national outcry yet.  This was an issue boiling just below the surface.  Even with the bullshit health plan we were forcibly given by university administrators, no one could figure out what was truly wrong with me.  No matter how much money I did throw at it, doctors in the surrounding area seemed a lot less competent than one would ever suspect.  Now I know I was somewhat of a grown-ass man at this point but this quickly became a “MAMAAA” situation.  A recently retired nurse with lost faith in medical doctors, luckily, my mother had been studying nutrition for a couple of years.  Though she tried to reach out to me multiple times before, I wasn’t tryin to hear that shit.  I was more concerned about NOT letting this Brownie Batter Blizzard go to waste, ‘cuz you know- there are starving children in Africa… right.

The Signs

Days turn to weeks later and before I knew it, I was struggling to get up flights of stairs; my clothes became so tight-fitting that I had to buy a whole new wardrobe entirely, and was catching every cold and allergy known to man. For the bulk of my adolescence, I was solid, so to suddenly have all these allergies to the elements that had always been present was ridiculous.  “Conveniently,” the pharmacies had pills to combat symptoms but nothing to eliminate the cause.  Tums, Pepcid, Benadryl, Tylenol, and plenty others were nothing but a waste of time and money.  It soon dawned on me that this was exactly what my mother spoke of; what my father and other friends and family members were going through; becoming a damn meal ticket to the health “care” system by (you) NOT caring for you.

Like a gluttonous pig, I thought “I’m gonna eat what I want, when I want and who the hell’s gonna stop me?”  But is that 69cent burger REALLY that cheap when you receive $1000 medical bills months later?  One trip to the doctor can cost you that trip to Vegas (I’m still hurting from that one), or Miami; and not only that, you would also feel self-conscious about how you would look once you got there.  I hated how I looked and more importantly I hated how I felt and wanted to do something about it.

The Change

In no way did I just get up to get down and start doing crunches and push-ups so I could make it to the beach.  Instead, I attentively sat down and thought critically thought about my health and how expensive “cheap” food can really be.  Incidentally, my niece and I had stumbled across a White Castle-like shop that sells miniature burgers made with your choice of premium turkey, sausage, beef, or bison meat for a rather affordable price.  At some point you have to realize the true value you gain from consuming fresh, quality product, even if it costs and extra 1-3 dollars on average.  Fresh food beats out a fresh doctor’s bill any day.

Ordinarily like all fat folks, my food came first, then, the workout had been engineered.  I tend to believe the quality of fuel determines the quality of performance and proper preparation ensures that.  Though I’m still in self-rehab, I have rendered all allergy medicine useless and unnecessary for the most part, completely eliminated my serious acid reflux problem, beat the Flu with no flu shot or doctor’s visit and lost over 60lbs of excess weight whilst eating pizza and burgers (shout out to Shake Shack)…  

I’m NOT telling you to give up everything; I’m just saying give up on anything that will cost you, everything.

Gotta hit the beach now so stay tuned for the next post with a DETAILED breakdown of my home-made LAZYfitness plan. {UP NEXT: "One Small Step..."}

ImFATfitness 
where it ALL started.

Well, if you REALLY wanna know....

ImFAT series moves on to be the ImFATfitness blog

Recovering from a shoulder injury, I'm finally back on the web to share my home-made fitness plan.  In coming weeks (starting Wednesday) I will be posting:

• The Catalyst

• One Small Step

• Now FLUSH

• Exercise? #&@! that, Let's EAT!

• Gettin there...

•  Finally, Sweat It Off!

And more...

SoggyBricks will still be the comedy lifestyle blog, I'm just venturing away from tumblr with this one.

-JP