Baselines Weight - 87kg, 26.1% body fat (Tanita Body Composition Monitor) Waist - 88cm, Hips - 108cm, The Plan Exercise every day - Run (Gym or outdoors) on alternate days, body strength straining at home on other days; utilise the fitnut plan from work. Eat well - Resetting the diet to same time last year - no grains, rice or gluten containing food; meat, nuts and vegetables primarily
Rude awakening from my GP visit a few days ago with my weight in the region of 90kg from the 82 I weighed at the start of the year - this represents a very comprehensive regression. The target is to return to 80kg by YE. The Plan? Whole30, starting on 2nd September. Drink 2 litres of water daily; start the day off with a litre of ice cold water and drink green tea exclusively during the day. Exercise thrice a week - 30 mins each time In tandem with the above, the plan is to wake up my various attempts at self tracking -very much against the Whole30 ethos I might add. ...
Day 26 of the Better Man in 30 days challenge - Take the Marine Corp Fitness Test --- Managed the 3 mile in 29.5 minutes (includes the very leisurely 3 minute warm up), 46 crunches in 2 minutes and a barely there 4 pull ups for a total of 95 from a maximum 300 points possible. Not great but better than I thought given how a certain HIIT youtube video kicked my ass on Day 24. ...
Day 22 - Improve your posture and Day 23 - Learn a manual skill --- I didn’t need the prompt to tell me I had terrible posture. Managed to set up my chair at work as intended - to provide better support to my lower back and at the right height. Hopefully I begin to reap the dividends of improved posture, not least a less prominent keg. On manual skills; I installed ceiling fans for fun in my undergraduate days and still know my way with a soldering iron, a legacy of my previous pastime - tinkering with the innards of dead radios. I happen to also be the go to guy when my buddy O needs to set up a new bed or move stuff around in his house… Could use a few more automobile related skills as I haven’t changed a flat tire in nearly six years. Have to but that Z4 roadster first (and win the lottery before that or something).
Day 19 of the Better Man in 30 Days Challenge - Schedule a Physical Exam --- I am required to get an offshore medical every two years which covers quite a few of the items specifically referenced on the challenge viz blood pressure, weight/BMI, vision, lung function and audiometry. ECGs, bloods and urinalysis get taken six monthly for other reasons hence I consider the challenge covered between both. The main exclusion is the probing and probing of the man parts for potential prostrate problems. ...
Getting fit and lean is one of my key deliverables for 2014. The health effects being obvious, given my borderline LVH diagnosis from 2013, and an increasing desire to ditch my keg for a veritable six pack (hello ladies :). The general consensus seemed to be that the Paleo diet was a great way to achieve the calorie restrictions required to achieve that, whilst I work on defining the exercise component to that. Over the course of the 28 days of February, I managed 20 completions, slightly improved over the January numbers for challenge #1, but still far short of the full complement. ...
From the 52 Small Changes book: An active mind cannot exist in an inactive body - General George S. Patton Last week’s change didn’t exactly go down very well - my fitbit sleep data suggests I didn’t do as well as I thought I would (averaged 6 hours 7 minutes of sleep as against 5 hours 52 minutes the week before); still shy of the 7 hour target. On a slightly more positive note, my water drinking challenge continues apace, thanks to my 600ml mug perched right next to my bed it seems. ...
Battery of tests done and dusted - ECGs, Ultrasound, a plethora of bloods, and numerous appointments with my GP and one up at ARI with the consultant Cardiologist. The news is there’s nothing majorly wrong with yours truly’s heart - bar some borderline LVH, attributable to the elevated blood pressures I have been carrying for a while. From now on it will be a steady daily diet of blood pressure meds - calcium channel blockers in the first place and then an ACE inhibitor to try to reverse the LVH… ...
From the 52 Small Changes book: Sleep is the best meditation - Dalai Lama Last week’s small change went fairly well - bar the odd day on which one coffee just didn’t sort me out. By the end of the week, I was reaching instinctively for my 600ml bottle of water to kick start my day, before anything else. The slightly harder challenge was staying off the cokes, which I did for the most part except for two days - along with a green leaf salad for Wednesday for lunch and on Friday afternoon during my monthly catch up with O. at Nandos. All told there has been noticeable improvement in the quantity of water (and green tea) I drink, which can’t be such a bad thing. ...
.. is a lot of time to spend in introspection, curled up tight into a ball (or sprawled out like an amorphous mass in my case), unable to lift my head and throat as they were being bombarded by the triune forces of a sore, swollen throat, a fever and a banging headache to boot. And think did I – when I was not obsessively googling home remedies for what turned out to be some flu strain sent from hell. ...