Well, 60 days ago I decided to drop $100 and get the RushFit program. RushFit is designed by the trainer of World Champion UFC fighter George St. Pierre. So I plugged in the DVD’s, started working out, watched my diet very carefully and today I’m down to 198.5 pounds! Yeah baby!

I’ve written about fitness a lot on this blog because I honestly feel that being fat and out of shape is a crime. Not a literal crime, but it’s just a shame because it’s not necessary. When I’ve been at my heaviest, I know in my heart it’s not because of anything but laziness and consumption. Or in terms of the 7 Deadly Sins; sloth and gluttony. Man those are tough words aren’t they? But America in general has a real problem with sloth and gluttony.

Anyway, I’ve kind of done the up and down rollercaoster ride of fitness but every time I reach a peak, I realize what I did wrong during the last cycle and this time I realized that even being on a “cycle” is wrong. The key to staying fit is not getting fat in the first place. And what it takes not to get fat is consistency in eating and working out.

This time around, I worked out every single day except for Sunday. I did this religiously and it really paid off because it’s not really what workout you do that matters, it just matters that you work out. You have to raise that heart rate for 30 minutes to an hour and give it your all. Every. Day.

I also use MyFitnessPal.com to both track my calories and get support and accountability from others. The calorie tracker is great because I guarantee if you try and count your calories yourself, you will always take in way more than you think you do. One meal at a restaurant is a guaranteed full day or even two days of calories. And when you consider most people eat out several times a week or even several times a day, it’s no wonder we’re all fat. Count your calories religiously. What it comes down to is this: You must burn more than you eat to lose weight. Simple.

The last major change I did was cut out alcohol. I drank zero alcohol during the week and kept it to one or two drinks on the weekends if I was hanging with friends or something. I won’t lie, I’m a heavy drinker, and what I found was that alcohol is a huge stumbling block if you’re trying to get fit, because it’s basically a poison so your body will work to get it out of your system instead of burning your food calories. If you’re not burning calories, they get stored as fat. So cutting out alcohol really made a huge difference in both how I feel and how much weight I lost. It was a discipline exercise for me as well. I had to really focus in order not to have my evening glass of wine or whiskey, and when out with friends it took a lot of willpower to stop at two. I wasn’t perfect every time, but I proved to myself that I could exert control over this part of my life if I wanted to.

So I’m pretty happy with the results. The key for me is going to be keeping up the consistency. I have a few more pounds I want to lose to get my stomach as flat as I can, but then it will be about maintenance. That doesn’t make it any easier really, I will still need to workout every day but I’ll be able to take in a more calories a day.

Well, I hope this gives a little insight into losing weight. Sign up for MyFitnessPal.com and add me as a friend (username: danapellerin) so we can all push each other on!

But I can’t let that happen. So it’s time for my annual Post Christmas Detox. I looked up my blog post from last year and at this time I was 209.5. This year I’m at a grotesque 213. I have my work cut out for me for sure.

So why am I so much heavier this year? Well, I think it’s because I made a mistake in November with my workouts. I listened too much to young guys who work out twice a day and started using a high calorie protein shake thinking I could build more muscle. And I could have built more muscle if I worked out twice as much as I normally do. But that’s simply not possible without giving up the rest of my life, so basically I gained weight and never turned it into muscle. Add on the usual holiday feasts, a week spent in Nashville eating my mom’s home cooked meals three times a day, and a week of being sick, and well…. here I am.

So enough excuses. What’s the recovery plan? Well starting yesterday I go back to healthy clean foods. Vegetables, fruit, rice, and whole grains. Secondly, I’m going to get back to working out. An hour a day at least 5 days a week. I’m also going to try and ride my bicycle one day a week depending on the weather. Lastly, I’m cutting back on the alcohol. No beer. Period. I’ll allow one small glass of red wine in the evening with dinner.

So, today I’m at 213, I plan to be back to 200 in 30 days. Let’s do this!

Today though I got some bad news from the doc which is going to make this season even suckier, and it’s bumming me out. All my blood levels are out of whack again, and at over 200lbs I’ve put on quite a bit of weight from being in the 190′s a year or so ago. *sigh*.

I’m telling you man, maintaining my fitness has proven to be a ridiculously hard endeavor. It shouldn’t be because all it takes in 60 lousy minutes of jumping or running a day and not putting garbage into my mouth, but never the less, the discipline escapes me. It probably hurts me too that I don’t look fat, and nobody would call me overweight, so that makes it easier for me to justify skipping a workout or having an few extra beers here and there. But my bloodwork says I’m not as healthy as I need to be, and so to get there I need a sustained focus and work ethic.

The Doc says to lower my carb intake and cut the alcohol. That sucks because I really, really, really love my beer. A lot. And I suppose I could try just cutting back, but that never really works for me. If I cut something completely out of my life, it’s much easier to know when I’m cheating.

The bad part of all this is not that I’m a few pounds heavier, it’s that it’s a continual area of failure in my life. This is one of the few things that I really have a hard time making permanent. And I really, really hate sucking at stuff.

So here’s to a renewed focus on fitness. Again.

This is a picture of me back when I was 30′ish. I was closing in on 230 pounds. I was a fat ass, let’s just call it what it is. I ate whatever I wanted, I did not exercise one bit. And my body showed it. I don’t think I could have done any of the things I do today such as hiking or bicycling, but then again I never tried so I really don’t know.

My dad and I had a conversation a while back about healthy eating. I had mentioned a book called What the Bible Says About Healthy Living to my mom and since she loves anything that discusses God’s word, she said she wanted to read it. My dad immediately started ribbing me because he’s 70 and eats whatever he wants and the author of the book died in his 60′s. And it struck me that that’s how people view life in today’s society. It’s all about staying alive, not really about living our lives in the way God designed us.

When I first decided to get in shape, I had no idea about God’s design or whatever. I was just done with being fat and tired. I wasn’t really ready to exercise, but I knew I could control my diet, so I just cut out fast food. Period. Cold turkey. I lost 20lbs from that one single act because even the worst food you make at home is still not as bad as fast food.

After that, I decided to start working out. And it’s funny because it doesn’t really take that much time, just 1 hour a day. I love when people say they don’t have time to workout, yet they never miss an episode of their favorite TV show. At first I did weight lifting and ran a treadmill. And it worked great. I got really thin and very fit. Eventually though I decided I wanted a more rounded, more interesting workout program, so I started P90X to get a good combination of flexibility, strength and cardio capacity. I also started riding bicycles and hiking to mix it up a bit and get outside more.

However, I finally realized that I had to focus even more on my diet. While my appearance was what I wanted, I wasn’t getting enough quality nutrition and my blood test results at the doctor showed that. You see, most of the food we eat today is garbage. It’s full of preservatives and has been processed and stripped of most of it’s God given nutrients in the name of shelf life and profits. So earlier this year I decided to go full on and really focus on eating in the most pure way (God’s designed way) possible in a modern world. We eat almost nothing out of a package. We eat lots of vegetables and fruits, nuts and beans. And what little bread or pasta we have is whole wheat. It’s made a HUGE difference in how I feel. Our next step will be to switch to grass fed beef, organic dairy and free range chicken and I’ll be posting on that subject tomorrow.

This is a picture of me my wife took two days ago. I’m 43 and currently 194lbs. All my blood tests are ideal with the exception of high cholesterol which runs in my family. Darn genetics! But the difference between me now and me 15 years ago is not just in appearance, it’s in quality of life. There’s almost nothing I can’t experience because I’m physically ill-equipped. That’s freedom.

The bottom line in all of this is that I believe God designed this world specifically for us with everything we need to be healthy and happy. I believe He created us to do and be more than simple food receptacles sitting on cushions while bombarding our eyes and ears with imaginary imagery projected from an electric box. Like anything else in life, it just takes a small bit of discipline, and faith that God’s design for us is better than our design for ourselves.

I’ve also been doing a lot of reading lately on nutrition and things though and while I thought I was always eating pretty well, I’m finding that it’s really hard to eat the way God intended for us to eat in America. Most of the food on the grocery store shelves has been processes (altered) to improve shelf life (and therefore corporate profits), yet these processes also strip out the nutritious parts of the foods. The result is that we’re no longer eating food the way God created it and as a result, we’re getting fat and unhealthy.

What really crystallized this for me was when I began to read Tony Horton’s book called “Bring It!“. Tony is the next Jack LaLanne and has a lot to say about food and exercise in his book. He talks a lot about eating food the way it comes out of the ground. So I started doing some research for myself. That’s when I found the information on wheat and how white flour is basically wheat with all the good parts removed to increase shelf life. I also discovered a lot about how we raise beef in this country and how we feed cows food they weren’t designed to eat and pump them full of unnatural hormones and anti-biotics in order to increase yield.

And so I started thinking about why we do this. It’s not because we have to increase yield to feed the masses. There are people starving all over the world. The real reason is to increase profits. Corporations are feeding us junk because it’s more profitable, plain and simple.

All this brought up two questions in my mind. The first is “What would God think of the way our society approaches food?”. The second is “Would God approve of how we’re taking care of our bodies?”.

The first question is a larger question and I don’t have space to get into it here. But the fact is, we’re producing MASSIVE amounts of food. It’s being created to stuff the stomachs of Americans while people elsewhere go hungry. And the result is that our gluttony is making us extremely unhealthy. I’ve been listening to Proverbs on my iPhone and there’s a lot of warnings in there about the rich getting fat while ignoring the needs of the poor. If ever I saw a reflection of modern America in scripture, it’s in the early Proverbs.

The other question though has to deal with personal responsibility. And so to look into what God has to say about that, I bought a book called “What the Bible Says About Healthy Living”. In it the author, who is a Christian doctor, talks about what God has created for us and what His commands are with regards to taking care of ourselves. To me it’s absolutely fascinating because now that science is discovering how badly we’re screwing up our food supply, it becomes clear that God already told us how to eat and live thousands of years ago and he’s already provided us with everything we need. We have simply been too arrogant to listen, and that’s why we’re facing an epidemic of obesity and the conditions that go along with it in this country.

I would just suggest that everyone read the two books I listed here, especially Christians because we are called to set the example. “Bring it!” will tell you what to do to be healthy. “What the Bible Says About Healthy Living” will tell you why you should do those things from both a scientific and spiritual perspective.

It’s odd because it’s a MUCH harder workout than anything we’ve done before. So what’s the difference? Well, I think being able to do it in our own home is the biggest thing. Just pop in the DVD, move the coffee table and go for it. I think doing it together is really key as well. There’s definitely a feeling of letting each other down if one of us flakes. Lastly, it’s just a really good production. I love the way the workouts are structured. There’s a lot of variety so it doesn’t really get old. During the workouts they also have this info bar on screen so you can see the name of the exercise, how long you have left in this exercise and how long you have left for the full workout. This is brilliant and makes it much easier to push through.

So the big question is; Does it work? Well, that depends on how you measure success. First off, I’ve learned from past experience that you have to do something for at least 6 weeks to be able to look back and see a noticeable difference. This seems to be a rule for just about anything in life, but especially when working out. So I did not expect massive changes to come quickly. I also did not expect my weight to change much. The workout we’re doing is geared for muscle gain as well as fat loss, so the number on the scale is pretty much useless. That said, I am starting to see a difference. I am definitely losing some of my midsection fat and Michelle has noticed that her pants are no longer tight right out of the dryer. Ha! Not very scientific, but definitely progress! Having your clothes actually fit well feels so good. I feel stronger and I am not as discouraged when I see myself in the mirror. Slowly but surely we’re leaning out and building muscle, which improves the shape of your body. So we’re going to continue, and I think 30 days from now, the results compared to 30 days ago will be very noticeable.

More importantly though is that we are going to be more healthy in the long run. I think more than looking like a gymnast, just being fit and healthy is really what this is all about. It’s already affecting our daily lives in that we’re not as lazy. Activities are more fun because we have more energy and tire less quickly.

So in conclusion, I highly recommend P90X. Getting fit is tough, but honestly, anything worth having in life is worth working hard for. P90X is a great tool to help achieve fitness. Check back in another 28 days to see how Phase 2 turns out!

P90X consists of 13 DVD’s. Each DVD is one workout and they run from 60 to 90 minutes each. The whole set is broken up into phases, and each phase is broken up into weeks where the exercises change every so often. These workouts include strength training, but also some great cardio workouts and even some yoga. This does several things; It keeps the body guessing utilizing a concept called muscle confusion. The theory goes that if you do anything over and over again, the body will adapt, so by mixing it up, you keep the body working harder. I think this also gives you a more well rounded physique and keeps you from getting strong arms and skinny legs. Lastly, it makes the program more interesting.

The workouts themselves are dynamite. I had been going to the gym three times a week for the past few years and really had not seen any improvement. I wasn’t really getting fatter, but not really getting any more fit. I think when you are a slave to workout machines, you kind of get used to doing certain things and so you go on cruise control after a while. The P90X workout really made me realize how little effort I’d been putting in. These workouts are strenuous! But the good thing is that you can tailor them to meet your fitness level, and they give you something to shoot for. The day that I can follow the DVD to the letter without an extra break or a altered movement is the day I’ll know I’ve accomplished my goals.

One of the great things about this workout too is that you don’t need a lot of gear. I bought a chin up bar and some weight bands from a local sporting goods store and that’s all I’ve needed. Most of the exercises use your own weight against you and honestly I think that gives you a better perspective on your fitness level. It’s easy to put a certain weight on a machine and feel good about pushing it around, but try and do a pull up or 20 push ups, and suddenly you realize how out of shape you are. If there’s one thing we should all be able to do is carry our own weight right? So I think the industry has made a lot of money off of gym memberships and whatnot, but Jack Lalaine was right. All we really need is a chair, a few hand weights and some motivation.

That motivation comes from a guy named Tony Horton. Horton is annoying as heck at first and comes off as some genetically perfect psychopath bent on turning you into a pile of mush. However, after doing two weeks of P90X I’m actually starting to admire the guy. He was in his mid 40′s at the time of the making of P90X and he’s in dynamite shape. I also get the feeling that he’s a genuinely nice guy. He motivates without sounding like a drill sergeant and constantly reminds you to go ahead and take a break if you need it. “Do your best and forget the rest” is repeated constantly during the workouts which gives me the urge to push, but doesn’t make me feel like a total loser in these early weeks.

So I give the P90X workout 5 stars. It’s a great workout and you can do it in your own home without buying a bunch of gear. It’s still too early in my plan to say what the results are going to be, but I do feel much stronger already. I’m able to get further into the ab workout without taking a break, and I’ve noticed my coordination and balance have improved a lot in the Yoga and Kenpo workouts in just these two weeks. I expect to start seeing noticeable fat loss and muscle growth in the coming 2 to 4 weeks. I’ll be sure to post here as the program continues.

Check out the P90X workout at the following website. The workout alone is around $100 which compared to a gym membership is pretty affordable. They also sell packages if you need a chin up bar, etc., but I found that you can get the equipment for much cheaper by shopping around.

http://www.Beachbody.com/P90X

See the thing is, I have this bicycle ride planned. Just a little one. Oh, a hundred miles or so. And several miles of that is some wicked hill climbing. Standing over 6 feet and weighing in at around 210 pounds, means I’m just too freaking large to push myself up those hills. I gotta lose weight. About 15 pounds I figure at least. That combined with weight training and a ton of cardio should give me what I need to do this ride without my heart and lungs exploding.

Now that the holidays are over I’ve been lifting and watching my diet and stuff, but I’m approaching 42 years old and let’s face it, the body just does not burn fat like it used to. So I need some extra oomph. So I’m taking on P90X in addition to my cycling. I’ve got 6 months to get in the best shape I’ve ever been in.

I’m determined to succeed!

DON’T.

Last night we went out for my birthday and I had a combo pizza, a few beers and some chocolate cake when I got home. I swear my body is experiencing toxic shock this morning. I actually feel like I’ve been poisoned. I’m shaky. I’m tired. I had nightmares all last night and couldn’t sleep. I have the worst heartburn and my gut feels like a band of raving jungle savages are in there doing a war chant, and dancing over hot coals. Michelle was also complaining about an upset stomach last night. Unbelievable.

This really goes to show what certain foods will do to a body. I honestly thought that a lot of the stuff in the diet about wheat being bad for digestion, etc, etc was bull and just put in there for encouragement to stay on the diet, but I’m a believer now. I have felt so good for the past three weeks and I feel completely trashed today.

So today it’s back on the diet… for good.

Link: Dax Moy’s Elimination Diet

Now, you’re probably thinking I’m just not a “team player”, but that’s not it. The fact is, I’ve been though many team building exercises and they simply do not work. What happens is that people will adapt for the exercise so they don’t look bad and then they go back to being themselves as soon as the class is over. You just can’t force people to feel a certain way on cue. Teams are built by starting with strong leadership and growing the team over time. You just can’t build a solid team in a few hours by doing lame “role-playing” exercises or “trust falls”.

The only team building exercise I ever enjoyed was one I did when I worked at FMC corp. What we did was take a long psychological test, and then interview with a psychologist. Out of this we got a complete report on what kind of personality each of us possessed. We also got a summary that we could share with the group. The rest of the seminar was spent learning how to understand and work with people who posses the different personality types. So it was just really cool because you start to understand why people behave the way they do and you learn to deal with them THE WAY THEY ARE, rather than try and force people to act against their nature. Very informative.

But anyway, it really doesn’t matter because honestly, I think we have a solid group of people with their hearts in the right place and I don’t think there’s anyone on the team I can’t beat into submission…. um, I mean, totally get along with. LOL. Just playing. Seriously, I think we’re going to do just fine.

Ok so…. I ran 21 miles this week! We started a Holiday Fit Club at work to help all of us desk jockeys stay fit through the holidays. I think I’m off to a good start. And this is really perfect timing. I want to be as fit as possible when we go to the Big A, so this little competition couldn’t have come at a better time. I also have been cooking nothing but vegetarian dishes this week and plan to continue that through January. This is partly to try and shave 5 pounds off that’s still holding onto me from last Christmas, but also to just try and get more in “Africa mode”. The last thing I want is to be in Africa having pepperoni pizza withdrawals with the closest Domino’s being 9000 miles away!

Another thing I think is great timing is Michelle’s trip she’s on right now. This is the longest time I’ve been alone in nearly 10 years, so this is a great little exercise. I never cease to be amazed at how God will time things just perfectly in order to prepare us for what’s ahead.

Have a great Friday!