State of My Arts

Today is the 4th day of my 6-day diet.  I just had my protein shake with 3/4 of a cup of black berries.  The following is how my weight has progressed over the course of the diet:

Day 1: 200.8 17.3% (Before starting the diet)
Day 2: 199.0 17.3%
Day 3: 196.8 17.9%
Day 4: 194.6 17.6% 

I weight myself first thing in the morning for consistency.  At the start, I was a little higher than the 198-ish I had seemed to stabilize at after the first time I did this diet, due to a weekend of overindulgence.

As I’ve mentioned before, the fat percentages are always a bit iffy.  The scale is only so accurate.  So I normally pay more attention to trends than day-by-day values.

6 pounds down in 3 days is great.  I was pretty darn hungry yesterday.  One of these days I’ll figure out what how many calories I really am eating.  I had been thinking 1500, but it might be closer to 1200.

I’m hoping that after this diet run that once my body restabilizes, it’ll be somewhere in the 195 range.

Fitness

Wow, it has been a while since my last post.  This one is more or less to let you know that I’m still around and still training.

This past weekend was one of food indulgence.  So now I have some weight to lose.  I’m going back on my 6-day diet, and I just finished my grocery shopping for that.

Training has been on a bit of a hiatus; between family obligations and a long weekend, I only trained Monday and Tuesday of last week.  Last night was a back-to-basics class, which was good.  Tonight I’ll be running a similar type of class for the beginners.  We’ll be running a promotion exam in 10 days, so we’ll be making sure everyone is up-to-date on their requirements.

The dojang roles have now been more clearly defined.  My late instructor’s most senior TKD student (5th dan) is officially in charge of the TKD program.  He ran that basics class last night during the black belt class last night, and he’s the final word on how we do things in that art.  Our 7th dan Hapkido instructor is officially leading the Hapkido program, no surprise.  And one of our other master instructors is in charge of the Kali program.

Our schedule will be changing slightly in three weeks.  The changes are mostly to push the kids classes a little later in the day.  4:30 was a struggle for parents and instructors.  Well, instructors who aren’t me, anyway, since I don’t help out with those classes.  I’ll still be leading the Tuesday beginner adult class as well as the Wednesday intermediate class.  A kali class will be replacing the Monday night Hapkido class, which had fallen off the map anyway as it immediately followed a high energy black belt TKD class.  People just ran out of gas and weren’t staying for that Hapkido class.

Now I’m off to do a cardio workout prior to teaching my class tonight.

Fitness, TKD, Training

I felt progressively worse yesterday, and finally took my temperature: 103.8.  I took two more Tylenol (I’d been taking them a bit irregularly), and this time they really worked.  I eventually started feeling warmer and broke a little bit of a sweat.  I went to sleep, but woke up two hours later, soaked;  I sweated so much I turned the flannel sheets into a puddle.  I spent the rest of the night on the couch.  Parts of the sheets are still damp 11 hours later.

I won’t work out today, and we’ll see about tomorrow, since I don’t want to overstress my system.  I’m feeling a whole lot better now, so hopefully I’m on the mend.

Fitness

Yesterday was the final day of my six-day diet, and the results are in.  I weighed in today at 195.6 with 16.4% body fat, a drop of 6.4 pounds and 1.6% body fat.  Multiplying that out results in a 4.3 pound loss in fat alone.

But there are definitely caveats: the fat reading on the scale is highly dependent on water percentage, and wacky things going on with your body can skew it in odd ways.  And there are wacky things going on with my body this week — I’m home sick today from work.  I’m feverish, and I have a cough.  The symptoms started Tuesday night, and that caused me not to work out Weds or Thurs, and I can’t imagine I’ll work out today.  The whole “feed a cold, starve a fever” doesn’t appear to be good advice.  Quite possibly I’m in worse shape with illness because I didn’t have the bodily reserves to deal with it.

But back to the diet, I think it is a winner.  If I ever do it again (motivation is tough), I might make some substitutions.  I can survive tuna steak and shrimp, but I wasn’t thrilled with them.  Not into bok choy or brussels sprouts.  But if I want another round of kick-starting a weight-loss program, this is something I’ll definitely consider.

So far I haven’t binged on food today.  My fever woke me up at 3:15, but it wasn’t until 4:30 or so that I could drag myself out of bed to put on sweats because I was freezing under the covers with a mattress heating pad turned on full blast.  Around 5:15 I was ravenous and had some leftover deli turkey, swiss cheese, and dijon mustard.  Then later on I had a big bowl of oatmeal.  I’m figuring I’ll put a couple pounds right back, but if I can re-stabilize around 198, then that’d be a 4-pound drop for 6 days of dieting, and that’s a success.

Fitness

I’ve been not very happy with my weight since, oh, last Thanksgiving.  My minimum sustainable weight seems to be 190, though even that does take a bit of effort.  With my surgery and my toe injury, I haven’t worked out like I’ve wanted to.  And I’ve been lazy with dieting.  I like to eat.

So, that all culminated in ordering a bunch of DVD’s from BeachBody: Power90 and P90 were the main ones.  In our big expensive package, we also got 4 other DVD sets, some stretchy bands, weighted gloves, a squishy ball, some overpriced supplements, and hopefully a lot of motivation.  Wife of State and I both started the Power90, though the “sculpt” workout is probably a little more than I should be doing with my shoulder.  One of the items in this overabundance of stuff was a “Fat Burning Express” exercise DVD and a 6-day diet.  I’m on the six-day diet, and this is in fact Day 5.  I think the daily calories are in the 1500 range, and it is heavily skewed towards the protein side of things.  I think the diet is pretty decent, and I’m trying to follow it without substitutions.  That’s a bit tough when there are things I don’t like, but hey, it might hopefully expand my food list.  This week I had (among other things) chicken, tuna fish, shrimp, tuna steak, steak, deli turkey, roast beef, Swiss cheese, cottage cheese, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, protein shakes, omelets, almonds, salads, bok choy, swiss chard, asparagus, and brussels sprouts.  Okay, that was probably just about everything I’ve eaten.

So far I’ve been (not surprisingly) hungry, but I haven’t had sugar level issues (yay for low carb).  I started on Saturday at 202 and 18.0% body fat (according to our Tanita scale), and today I was 196.8 with 17.3%.  I’m aiming for 190 (eventually), with not much over 15% fat.  Tough for me to get there, and my motivation also wanes the closer I get to my goal.

I signed up as a “coach” to get this big bundle of stuff, which means that if anyone is interested in buying any of this stuff, let me know and I’ll figure out how to send you a link so that I can get 25% of whatever you buy.  (Not sure what your motivition is, other than a desire to be nice).  Somehow, with my limited readership, that’s not something I expect to happen. 

Of course, I threw the exercise portion off track today because I’m feverish.  I got home last night after running a hard TKD class (lots of jump kicks) that I participated alongside the greens and blues I was working with, started making dinner, and started feeling sick.  I thought I was just tired, so I went to sleep early.  I woke up this morning feeling better, but as I went through the day I started feeling colder and colder.  We raised the heat and I put on my jacket.  When I got home, I curled up under 2 heavy down comforters and watched 3 episodes of Season 2 of Angel.  I went in to teach the intermediate class tonight (I just couldn’t call in sick the first week back after losing our instructor) and felt better for a while after throwing some kicks.  But I’ve crashed again.  If I feel like this tomorrow, I’m staying home from work.

Fitness

Right now, my fitness is frankly lousy.  In the last month, we’ve had the Christmas/New Year’s Day holidays, which are going to add a few pounds right there.  But, of course, my shoulder has been all wonky (eliminating much of any weight lifting), and my broken toe has all but stopped me from exercising over the last 3 weeks.

Before these injuries, I was floating around 190-195 pounds, and my fat percentage (according to the scale) was around 16.5-17%.  Today I was at 201.6 and 18.5%.  Since we got this scale, I’ve never seen a percentage that high.  Yesterday it was 17.8%, so hopefully that 18.5 is an outlying data point.  In my 190-195 range, my cardio fitness is pretty good.  I don’t have nearly the strength that most of the guys in BJJ have, as most of them are regular weight lifters.

Fitness will be tough over the next few months.  I’m planning on trying to use the stationary bike nearly every day.  If my foot allows, I’ll be trying to do lunges and squats, as well as abdominal work.  But fitness and weight will really be a struggle for me until I can start using my arm again.

Fitness