A personal training & food journal. Read about our weight loss progress at Train With Ron in Chicago, our nutritional habits and the life changes we're making to get in shape and stay healthy!

Hi Gang,

Monika and I started this blog about 14 months ago.  So much has changed since then – physically, mentally, and spiritually.  We’ve made a lot of friends at the gym including – especially – Ron, Matt, and DB.  We’ve settled into a routine of being at TWR regularly, taking that long climb up the steps, and sweating it out for an hour. We are glad to see new people coming all the time and we love seeing our friends and also the familiar faces of those we may not know as well – but who are on the same difficult path of working out hard and eating healthfully.

It’s gotten very comfortable – very comfortable, indeed… and that, for me, is a red flag.

Getting “too comfortable” was what got me into trouble physically in the first place.  I stopped eating well and exercising because I was comfortable – comfortable in my relationship, comfortable with bad eating habits, comfortable with a sedentary lifestyle… and slowly but surely I got very UNcomfortable.  Right now, I think that comfort level is manifesting itself in the lack of continual process of “body sculpting”… I’m working out twice as much and twice as hard as when I first got to TWR but have been stuck at around 225 lbs., the same waist size, and same body fat percentage for at least two or three months.  When we first started I was eating very carefully at every meal – I’m still eating pretty carefully for breakfast and lunches, but with some dinners and certainly after dinner/before bed, I have gotten lackadaisical.  As a result, I’m figuratively “running to stand still”.

Considering all that, I’ve decided it’s time to get serious about ridding myself of that last bit of extra body fat – and it couldn’t have come at a better time, because the next Train With Ron “Biggest Loser” competition is starting on January 10th, 2011.

Notice I didn’t say “ridding myself of that last twenty-five pounds”.  What is more important to focus on for me is to be leaner, not necessarily to lose weight.  I’ll probably lose some weight in the process but my focus will be on losing size, particularly around my waistline.  I think I can carve off another four inches or so over the first quarter of 2011, and that will be my goal.  I’d like to see my body fat percentage below 20% (it’s about 24% right now), so that’s goal number two.

Let's take it down a notch for once!

I have a three-pronged plan of attack – simple but rigorous.  I need to change three behaviors, and the level of success I attain in this approach will be directly proportionate to my ability to make these changes:

1) Train 6 days a week, whether that is at TWR or on my own. I am usually at TWR 4 or 5 days a week, so I just need to add one or two “Train with Dan” days to my regimen.  This was advice DB gave me when I wrote the blog a few months ago about being stuck on a plateau.  I just added a Sunday workout last week and am going to do it again today.  One trick I have up my sleeve is that I am planning to play hockey on Sundays starting in February and there are few more demanding sports than hockey for burning calories, especially if you play with high intensity.

2) Track my caloric intake / calories burned on a meal-by-meal / workout-by-workout basis.  Managing this helped me break through the last barrier and although it’s a pain in the butt to do regularly, it works.  When I pay more attention to my food intake, the quality and quantity of it improves, and I gain increased consciousness of my food goals on a daily basis, resulting in a higher percentage of days where I meet or exceed those goals.

3) While working out, increase my intensity and work at 100% for the full hour. I know I can improve in this area.  I need to mentally prepare myself before my workouts to go full bore for the full hour and not let up.  Lately I have been letting my mind tell me I can’t do things, I need rest, or I am too tired – and I need to recapture control of the mental aspect of training hard.  I successfully did just that today, and I had an excellent workout… I need to do that every time.

I believe I can do this.  A year ago, I wasn’t sure – but successfully navigating this for the last year has given me the confidence I need to see this through and now I KNOW I can accomplish this – with Monika’s help, of course!