Alec’s Blog: Family Weight Loss Challenge Update

by Liz Hurley on March 27, 2013

Family weight loss challenge update 3/7/2013:

I’ll be honest, the first two weeks of February were tough.  With the Super Bowl, my busiest season at work, an out-of-town engagement party, and the first Carolina-Dook game, there were many reasons to both celebrate and drown my sorrows in food and beer (based on how I spelled Dook, you can deduce my reason for drinking that night).  I ate terribly.  The late night drive-thru lady at Wendy’s knew who was coming around the corner by my order (2 double stacks and a large Dr. Pepper? Oh, hey Alec!)   I only made it to the gym once or twice each week. I started missing my weekly weigh-in checkpoints.  Then, I started ignoring those check-in reminders I set in my phone altogether.

Fortunately, I was raised in the church and am all too familiar with guilt.  I started to feel guilty for not keeping my word to myself and my family.  I also could picture my brother just rolling around in my $500 if I didn’t make the June 1st weigh-in.   As Lent approached I saw it as an opportunity to get back in the swing of things.  For those unfamiliar with Lent, Christians observe Lent to commemorate the 40 days Jesus spent fasting and praying while being tempted by the Devil.  In participating in Lent, we try to give up a vice in our daily lives.  For me, my vices were easy to spot because their remnants were all over my car – fast food and Diet Sun Drop.  (Before you judge me for using Lent as a diet fad, please remember that gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins).

So, time to get back on the scale and re-assess where I was.  I had reached the 1 month-check in and had only lost 8 pounds from the initial weigh-in (6 weeks earlier). NOT GOOD.  So I started working out – A LOT. I was doing at least 2 workouts a day: a group fitness class in the morning and pick-up basketball in the afternoon; hit the treadmill in the morning and train with Liz in the evening.  This was going well until I tweaked my left knee on a 3-workout day (group fitness, treadmill, and tennis).  I couldn’t walk right.  I couldn’t go up the stairs. I couldn’t push off of it.  I was mad.  I was more than mad – I was pissed off.  I couldn’t believe how hard I was trying and then to have an injury derail me was unbelievably frustrating.

The next day, I was surfing the web when I came across a quote that UNC women’s soccer coach Anson Dorrance shares with each recruit: “I’m not telling you it’s going to be easy. I’m telling you it’s going to be worth it.”  I’m sure it’s a famous quote, but I had never heard it – and it hit me hard.  Just when I was feeling sorry for myself, this was what I needed to read.  So, knowing I couldn’t work out as much, I had to turn to my diet to keep this weight-loss train moving.  In my experience of yo-yo’ing the scale, I have found that I eat terribly when I do not know what I am going to eat that day.   My new goal became to find meals that are healthy and that I could eat every day without any guess work.  This also meant it needed to be foods that I actually enjoy. So my new daily diet features vanilla greek yogurt and Kashi for breakfast, half a turkey sandwich for snack, spinach salad with boneless skinless chicken for lunch, the other half of the sandwich for snack, and another spinach salad for dinner.  Of course, there are meals where this is not possible as life tends to get in the way occasionally.  However, as long as I know the routine, I stick with it for 90% of the week, and that’s pretty damn good if I say so myself.

In addition to the new diet, I’m still able to work out.  I’m not running on the treadmill anymore, I’m simply walking on a ridiculous incline.  I still can’t do any single leg squats, but I can do standard squats.  It has been really helpful to have the training sessions with Liz so she can adapt the things we were doing to accommodate my knee.

That said, as of today, I have lost 19 pounds.  So, I’m still a little behind my check-ins, but I am gaining ground on them after my early February setback.  That said, I have no room for error now as I have 31 pounds to lose in 3 months.  So if you see me around town pounding beers or swinging through the Bojangles, I give you the right to slap me across the face and take it away from me.

 

Alec’s blog: Checking In

by Paul on January 31, 2013

1/10/13

Three weeks in and I have successfully tracked my food and exercise in my phone’s app and been committed to working out. My phone told me I needed to weigh 258 pounds or less today and I came in at 253.5!

In more exciting news, Empower kicked off its group fitness classes with Casino night tonight.  It was a great event – gambling is always fun when you don’t lose any actual money.  More importantly, I’m stoked to see what all these group fitness class names mean (Tabata? TRX? Vinyasa? HIIT? Nia?…..WTF?).

1/14/13

Group Fitness Class Review
Class: Empower Circuit
Time: Monday, 6:00 AM
Instructor: Angelo

It was a miracle that I made it to a 6 a.m. class on a Monday.  I have clearly come a long way from my college self whom rarely made appearances at 8 a.m. classes.  Empower Circuit was quite literally a wake-up call.  Angelo started us off with a short warm-up before he set up the six stations for our circuit.

Station 1: Sit up with medicine ball slam

Lying on the floor, holding a medicine ball over my head with my body fully extended, I did a sit-up. When I reached the top of the sit up, I bounced the ball, caught it, and lied back down.  The difficultly is to not slam your own balls.

Station 2: Three-way TRX rows

Not that kind of three-way.  We changed our grip for each row – overhand, hands facing each other, and underhand.  My favorite part of working with the TRX cords is how easily and quickly I can step my feet in or out to make it harder or easier depending on how fatigued my muscles are.

Station 3: VIPR twist squats

This one made me feel like I was awkwardly swing-dancing with an unattractive partner. I squatted with the VIPR between my legs, brought it up over my head, twisted it around, and put it back through my legs. I was sweaty, tired, and not good at it – it was like prom all over again!

Station 4: Sand bag slide in plank position

This was a real man’s exercise.  In plank position, I had to hold myself up with one arm and reach underneath and across my body with the other arm to pull a large sandbag over.  I alternated arms and kept sliding the sandbag back and forth.

Station 5: Bicycles crunches with weighted ball

This exercise was meant for someone with better hand-eye coordination than me.  I already struggle with bicycle crunches (perhaps due to the extra fat on my gut that gets in the way of such motions).  Now, Angelo threw in a weighted ball that was to be tossed between hands underneath each leg, back and forth while bicycling.  Go ahead, picture that.  Are you dizzy yet?

Station 6: Plank jacks

These are a killer for me. Holding myself in a plank position, I did a jumping-jack type motion with my legs.  By the time I got to station 6 each round, I was on the back seat of the        struggle-bus, so I did not complete as many as I would have liked – but the ones I did were certainly difficult.

We cycled through these stations 5 times: 40 seconds the 1st round, 50 seconds the 2nd round, 60 seconds the 3rd round, 50 seconds the 4th round, and 40 seconds the 5th round.  I was drenched in sweat and panting from the 1st round on.  Angelo is very encouraging though. During the later rounds, he kept saying, “Now is when you are changing yourself.”  That stuck with me and motivated me to keep powering through the last reps when I normally would have just waited out the last 5 seconds.

Needless to say, it was a great way to kick start my day and I look forward to taking some more classes with Angelo.

 

Alec’s Update: 1/5/13

by Paul on January 16, 2013

Family Weight-Loss Competition:

The decorations are back in the attic, the ball has dropped, and 2013 is upon us.  What does this mean?  It means we are only six months away from lying by the pool, sunbathing at the beach, and going to weddings every other weekend.  In other words, we are six months away from needing to look our absolute best.  Over the holidays, in fact, I was asked to be the best man at a friend’s wedding in July.  As he listed the other groomsmen off to me, I thought to myself, “Those guys are about as big around as my wrist. Well, I’ll be damned if I’m going to look bad in wedding pictures.”  Ah, vanity – the all-time greatest workout motivator.  So, I set a goal to lose 60 pounds by the wedding (7 months away).  Upon sharing my goal with my family over Christmas, they too decided to set weight loss goals.  And being that my family is hyper-competitive and has a history of gambling addiction (kidding…maybe), it wasn’t long before we were betting money on it.  The result?  If I don’t lose 50 pounds by June 1st, I lose $500. My oldest brother, mother, and father all set their own personal weight loss goals as well, and they have the same $500 consequence if they do not meet them.  If I lose my 50 pounds, I get to keep my $500, and further, I will split any money from people who do not reach their goal.

Initial weigh-in:

Okay, the moment of truth.  We decided to weigh-in the day after Christmas to kick-start things the week before the New Year.  For many people this is a scary realization of how much they have let go during the holidays.  Because my weight has fluctuated between 190 and 280 during my adult life (my closet is practically a Men’s Wearhouse), no number really ever scares me – except maybe 281 and higher. Nonetheless, I stepped on the scale and it displayed 263.5 pounds.  So the goal is set – I must weigh 213.5 pounds or less on June 1st.

Strategy:

Being a numbers person (I write standardized math tests for a living), I took a mathematical approach to my weight loss goal.

  • 3,500 calories per pound x 50 pounds to lose = 175,000 calories to lose
  • 175,000 calories to lose ÷ 157 days = 1,115 calories to lose per day

So, I need to create a 1,115 calorie deficit each day to reach my goal.  I found some online calculators to determine my basal metabolic rate (BMR) which tells me how many calories my body burns each day simply to function. After checking a few, each one averaged to about 2,400 calories. But let’s get real; this is really about how much food I get to eat and how much I have to exercise.  To give myself a target number of calories to eat and to burn each day, I used some basic algebra (shout-out to Mrs. McRae, my 6th grade math teacher!) and solved for “Food” – mmmm, food.

Food – BMR  – exercise = -1,115

Food – 2,400 – exercise = -1,115

Food – exercise = 1,285

Food = 1,285 + exercise

In English, this means that I get to eat about 1,300 calories plus however many calories I burn through exercise.  The nice thing about having a target number that you get to balance with food and exercise is that it allows my life to fluctuate day-to-day.  If I don’t have time to exercise one day, I know I have to be pretty restrictive on my food intake.  If I know I’m going out with friends for dinner and drinks later, I hop on the treadmill in the morning for an hour.  Clearly, these are all rough estimates, but it’s generally in the right ballpark and it works for me.  I have found the MyFitnessPal app available for iPhones and Droids to be extremely helpful to keep track of my calories and to keep me honest.

Breaking a Big Goal Into Smaller Goals:

Anytime I have a large goal in mind (like losing 50 pounds by June 1st), I find it helpful to break it down into smaller mini-goals along the way.  This keeps me on the wagon.  Based on my goal, I need to lose a little over 2 pounds each week.  So, I bought a scale and put it in the bathroom at work.  I then set alarms on my phone’s calendar for weekly weigh-ins right before lunch from January all the way to June. For example, on January 22nd at 11:15 am, my calendar will sound off loudly and the screen will read “Must weigh 254 or less.”

I need as much help as I can get, so having my phone and my co-workers remind me about weighing in on the scale is helpful (annoying, but mostly helpful).

Alec’s Story: Catching up

by Paul on October 31, 2012

So here it goes again – work hit overdrive and Alec hit the fast food window more times than you can count on your fingers and toes.  With a colleague out on vacation during our busiest time of year, I had to pull all-nighters and work 70-80 hours per week.  With that said, working out and eating well took a backseat.  Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on how much you care about my health), Liz’s schedule was going a bit crazy as well as she prepared for her upcoming marathon. So two weeks went by with only one session for which I was late and exhausted.  It did not go well. Let’s just say due to my tardiness, Liz had to leave me with the 3rd round of a circuit to do by myself.  I pretended to look motivated, but I just did squats until I saw her car leave the parking lot, and then I left immediately afterward (hopefully, she does not read this and punish me).

Finally, work has died down normal hours again, so I can refocus.  The beginning of that process was meeting up with Liz on Monday.  I had been at a wedding all weekend, so I was pounding water during the workday for the impending beat-down I was about to receive.  That said, I really was determined to have a great workout because I needed to get back in the swing of things and knew this was the first step.  I actually was feeling pretty good about myself through two rounds of Liz’s circuit – my tricep push-ups were money, I was getting some serious air on my reverse lunge/knee-ups, and I was just generally feeling like a boss.  Paul, my good friend and another trainer at Empower, even came by to snap a couple of pictures – most likely for the blog, but perhaps to show other clients what badass form looks like?  We’ve been working on my squat form as my lower back tends to curve slightly if I go too low.  Liz told me to get my butt out and keep my back arched.  I told her she was just trying to “check up on it” (Beyonce’ reference in blog: check).

*Watch him while he check up on it*

Anyway, the third round of the circuit about killed me.  I got to a point where my tongue was so dry, I could not help but have a lisp when I talked.  As I was panting and complaining on the floor after our ab workout was complete, another trainer came up to Liz and asked how her marathon went (side note: Liz went into beast mode apparently, finishing in 5th, qualifying for the Boston marathon, and averaging about a 7:30 mile for over 26 miles!!!).  It is at this point that I felt like a wimp.  I can barely catch my breath after an hour workout.  Liz trucked it for over 3 hours.  I can’t run 1 mile in under 8 minutes. Liz can do that over 26 times…consecutively.  Knowing someone that much more physically able than you is quite a motivating factor.  From now on, my goal is to stop complaining and start progressing because there is clearly a LONG way to go.

My Life as Liz’s Guinnea Pig Part 2: “The Rip”

by Paul on September 26, 2012

THIRD SESSION:

So this past week was my birthday, the opening weekend of college football, and I took a trip to New York City to see a bit of the U.S. Open to see my athletic hero , Serena Williams (don’t  you judge me).  Needless to say, exercise and eating healthy weren’t exactly priorities.  I came into my workout with Liz this Friday hoping to get back into the swing of things after an awesome week of derailing.  My body, however, had other plans.  As we got going my head started feeling lighter, my body started feeling heavier, and I was short of breath a lot.  I think I dropped the F-bomb like 8 times on the first 8 exercises (I also think Liz keeps track of which exercises I drop the F-bomb during, because they seem to be coming back each week).  I could see the concern on Liz’s face.  She said, “maybe you should take a break. It’s going to look really bad for me if you pass out as my first client ever.   Oh, and also, we want you to be okay.”  While taking that break, I tried to think back as to why I was so exhausted.  Liz asked, “How much water have you had today?”  I looked up into my brain to try and recall, and responded, “Today? None.  Yesterday…um…you know what? I can’t remember the last glass of water I’ve had this week.”  End of workout.

Lesson learned: DRINK LOTS OF WATER ALL THE TIME.

FOURTH SESSION:

Freshly hydrated from an embarrassing Friday workout, I was ready for Monday’s session.  I literally chugged 2 gallons of water at work beforehand so that I would be fully prepared to be an all-star for today’s workout.  We always start with a warm-up, which concludes with one of my F-bomb inducing exercises called the “Inch Worm”.  Basically, you bend over with your butt in the air, walk your hands out into a push up position, and then walk your feet back up to your hands to the bent over position.    And you do this across the gym.  Clearly, you look really cool when you’re doing this.  Nonetheless, I was powering through and avoided profanity in hopes that Liz would not make a note of my disdain for it and thus let it slide next time (doubtful).  After the warm-up, we went over to do some squats.  My squat form has been improving, and so Liz asked me to try and get a bit lower.  Because I was feeling like a champ at this point and wanted to prove that Friday was a fluke, I got lower.  I got so low, that I audibly ripped a gaping hole in the crotch of my shorts.  Liz about fell over because she thought it was so funny.  Meanwhile, I’ve still got 15 more squats to do and with each squat comes another rip.  So, one would think that a personal trainer would target the rest of the workout so as not to expose my green boxer-briefs. Unfortunately, such was not the case, as Liz pulled out a new TRX move, the pike.  Yes, the same pike you saw the Olympic divers do off the platform.  But for me, my toes are strapped in the TRX handles, my hands are on the ground, and the goal is to get my butt as high in the air for everyone to see the giant hole in my shorts.  At this point, I’ve gotten over any embarrassment at the gym, so it really was not a big deal.  However, those pikes were a big deal on my abs.  I felt those for the next couple days.  Beyond the PG-wardrobe malfunction, I really felt like I killed it at the gym today.

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