For more info about my fitness challenge:
Fitness Challenge Starting Post
Welcome to my week 16 results!
That’s it folks. I’m done my Fitness Challenge. 16 weeks of food, fun and working out (sometimes). LOL. I was 205 lbs last week and had to lose 5 lbs to reach my 200 lb goal. Overall, I ate better, did the exercise bike 3 times, but unfortunately only lost 1 lb?! So my final weigh-in is 204 lbs. I started this challenge at 217 lbs back in the middle of March, so I lost 13 lbs total.
I’m going to keep going and will chime in with monthly fitness updates. I’ll do one beginning of August.
Some things I learned…
- Indoor electric grilling sucks 75% of the time
- BBQing food is awesome. Tastes great and you don’t need much seasoning (if any)
- Veggies great to BBQ are peppers, zucchini and potato slices
- Chicken (w/ skin) is a pain in the ass to BBQ
- To make homemade burgers more fully cooked, make them with a dime sized hole in the middle
- It’s easy to cut back on carbs (just do it for one meal each day)
- Drinking more water and diet pop instead of reg. pop and juice is tough at the beginning, but gets easier
- But don’t drink too much water like some say. Will just make you feel bloated and crappy at work
- Frozen fruit and yogurt smoothies are yum
- Don’t put bananas in a smoothie. Makes them disgustingly warm, bland and pasty
- Fibre One bars are great. Nature Valley ones are meh
- Do workouts you can do, over ones you can’t or hate. I prefer doing exercise biking for double the time over running a track. I bet a track is better, but boring as hell
- Weigh yourself the same way. I did it in the morning after I went to the bathroom
- Don’t listen to others saying weigh yourself only once a week. Weigh yourself everyday if you want. You want to keep track don’t you?
- Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012 tracks your calories wrong. You can work out for 20 minutes and it will say you lost 4 calories. Confirmed bug. UBI too lazy to fix it
- Don’t go cold turkey eating healthy and working out 5 days a week. Unless you have the willpower of Jesus, it won’t work. Do it slowly at your own pace. I only dropped 13 lbs in 3.5 months, but I did it satisfyingly. I still ate junk, Las Vegas buffets and only worked out 1-2 times a week. And those workouts weren’t exactly hardcore
- Some people say breakfast or lunch should be your biggest meal of the day. Screw that. Eat how you want. Dinner is typically my biggest meal and I almost never eat breakfast. Do as your body feels like. I grew up not eating breakfast, so when I eat something before 10 am, I feel like shit. Don’t force an eating style because Joe Blow says so
At the end of the day, if you don’t want to listen to anyone’s advice and want to lose weight, just have fun, do it slowly and just cut back food a bit (quantity, calories, or both). You don’t even have to work out. I wouldn’t call my work out sessions really contributing to my weight loss. I bet it was 95% food adjustment and 5% exercising. Go at your own pace!
Weight & Body
I did an exercise bike a bunch of times and ate very little the last few days. Ended at 204 lbs.
During a baseball game I went to on Friday, I strained my back, so I didn’t work out the last few days. Must have been those damn metal seats! Can still feel it a bit when I twist my body.
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Food
Hit and miss, but overall ok I think. I can think of a few times I ate bad like a few plates of carb heavy pad thai from an office meeting as well as a small handful of chocolate snacks at my desk at work. Aside from that, I did a bunch of strawberry yogurt smoothie shakes and Fibre One bars. BBQed a few times too. I did a big salad Friday with no dressing, except lemon juice.
The last two days (Friday and Saturday) I actually only ate the salad, water, smoothies and fibre bars.
Friday was especially tough as I went to a baseball game downtown with some ex-coworkers. We all get half day Fridays, so they came to my place after lunch. I gave them snacks and beer, while I drank water. At the game, they drank beer, ate peanuts and had burgers at a pub before the game. I had water and a salad (no dressing). It was painful!
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Workout 1 (exercise bike)
All sessions were 30 minutes.
Did Speed Intervals. Increased the Level from 7 to 8. Wasn’t too bad.
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Workout 2 (exercise bike)
A day or two later (I forget), I tried another program called Plateau. Easily the hardest session I did. It doesn’t have any huge spikes, but increases gradually and sticks to a decent incline for 50-60% of the session.
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Workout 3 (exercise bike)
There are no more pre-programmed routines in the bike, so I did Speed Intervals again, but pumped up the level to 10. Tiring, but I still think Plateau is harder. Next time I do Speed Intervals I’ll increase it to 12-13.
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