Wednesday May 5th, 2010 - New routine

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I was frustrated. My diet and exercise was not giving the results I was looking for. For days I would struggle to lose a few pounds and then have one bad day and end up worse than I was before. I didn't write because I wasn't losing weight and I was just eating too much. Too much of everything. I even ate some meat and one night a little cheese. Maybe the worse thing was drinking beer and mixed drinks when we went out and even while I painted. I was very discouraged. I knew that it was going to take a severely strict diet and miles upon miles of bike riding and hours upon hours in the gym to get the same results as last year.

I think what happened last Fall was that my body started compensating for the heavy endurance exercise by reserving fat for future use. Just in case I kept torturing the body. In addition, my cravings went through the roof. In October 2009 I was 313. I took my picture and labeled it 310 because I thought I was still losing, but I never got there. During the winter I gained ten pounds even though I went through stages of good diet and exercise. I got discouraged and gained another 7 pounds during March and April. On May 1st, 2010 I weighed 332.

So I read about this routine that centered on intense resistance training with the theory that your body would need fat to repair your muscles. It works like this; instead of 4 sets of 10 with moderately heavy weights and 35 minute intense "virtual" bike four to five times a week, you workout only three times a week with just 5 minutes of cardio and max lifts for 1 or 2 sets of ten with no more than 30 seconds between lifts. I takes less time and it really made me sore for the first time in a very long while.

According to the online metabolic calculator, I should not eat more than 2600 calories in a day. I've been real good about my eating this month and today I weighed in at 327.6. Hope.