07-05-2011, 02:27 AM
Dear Hitshade,
[spoiler]There are two equally important halves to the system I've been using for the last 15 months. I'll break them into two separate pieces for the sake of information dumping, but know that they are most effective when working in tandem.
The first is the nutrition plan: it's called the Zone Diet, but it's not really a diet per se, but rather a lifestyle choice. This isn't something you do for a few months and then forget about it; the entire cornerstone of the plan is that you stick to it for as long as you want to see results and maintain them (see: the rest of your life). The hardest part for me was adjusting to eating so much food so often. "What" I was eating wasn't really my problem. I was a victim of what is commonly referred to as "the corporate diet", which is usually skipping breakfast, having a HUGE lunch at work, eating dinner kinda late, staying up late, and then getting hungry again so you eat something small, which almost always turns into something way bigger than you originally set out to eat. The idea is to eat even portions of food five times a day, which is roughly every 2.5-3.5 hours. Every food under the sun is broken up into one of three categories- proteins, carbs and fats. It's a pretty lax system. For example, cheese is considered purely a protein. Peanuts are a fat only. Milk is one of the few foods that is considered both a protein and a carb. All fruits and vegetables are also carbs. Lawler is right about the percentages. However, the nutrition plan makes it easy by bunching the physical amounts of food you eat into really easy-to-manage blocks. So for example, every meal you might need, say, 5 blocks of protein, 5 blocks of carbs, and 5 blocks of fat. It's always even like that. Almost all meats are 1 ounce = one block, so you might have 5 ounces of grilled salmon, for example. The butter, herbs, oils etc. that are used to prepare it are minute enough to be negligible. With that, you could have, say, a block of green beans, which is, I dunno, probably something like 1/2 cup for a block. So that would be 2 1/2 cups of those, and you could sprinkle in about an ounce of bacon into those for your fat (bacon is considered a fat- damn them to hell), and there's a delicious meal.
Of course, you can't always be expected to prepare dishes like that on the fly, so admittedly a lot of it becomes deli sandwiches, greek yogurt and peanuts, wraps, etc. That said, I eat a huge variety of food every week and almost never get bored. It's really not hard. The coolest part for me was working with my trainer on things to cut back on slowly over time. I didn't cold turkey it, we would pick something together to ween myself off of every month or so. One month was white bread to wheat, it took several months to go from whole milk to fat free, and the hardest one was going from 2-3 sodas a day to a couple a week, to now none at all. I swear to God I don't even miss them. Flavored water, juices, and an occasional diet pepsi are all I need now, and when I do try to drink a regular soda, it doesn't even taste good anymore. It just tastes fake and artificial and disgusting. It's scary to go back to all the old processed foods I used to eat all the time... it makes me wonder why I ever thought any of them were good in the first place. That said, the plan offers one entire day of "free eating", where you can literally gorge on M&M's and pig fetuses all damn day and your body can adjust and account for it. Alternatively you can do three free meals per week and spread them out at your discretion.
One of the hardest parts was feeling nauseous the first month or so due to the increased volume of food I was eating. Your body definitely needs some adjustment time, especially if your diet was like mine was at the outset. I called my trainer up once as I was fighting back the urge to throw up, asking him if I should still keep eating. You know what he said? "Yes, if you can do it without throwing up, you need to try." I thought he was crazy and honestly it left a sour spot in my perception of how this diet thing was going to work out, but ultimately it was a small bullet to take in order for my body to adjust the way it wanted to, just like your muscles get sore after you start working out harder than you're used to.
The other half to this is the workouts. If you're like I was, I came into this with virtually no physical activity to help kick-start my routines. I lived a very sedentary lifestyle and never so much as lifted a weight or played a sport for at least 5 years behind the start of this program. Due to that, my trainer started me off incredibly slowly. 10-15 minutes on a stationary bike, push-ups, planks, and 15 pound weights. It was mostly cardio stuff, and it was 15 minutes six nights a week. Over the months, we started building up to some full body workouts and weight training, but honestly that didn't kick in until about 7 months into the program. I was just simply too out of shape to handle that stuff. The idea is, of course, to keep pushing yourself and improving what you're doing. Staying stagnant with your workouts causes your body to grow accustomed to that workload, and adjusts itself to always be able to handle that amount and only that amount, which makes your workouts decreasingly effective over time.
That said, these days I work out 5 nights a week at 35 minutes per workout. I'll probably never go over 45 minutes, according to my trainer. I only do two cardio workouts now (20 minutes on my stationary bike at max resistance, chopped up into two halves with a 60 second plank and 15 squat thrusts to break up the monotomy), and the other three are full body. The best part is that all of my workouts are done AT HOME, not at a gym, with nothing but free weights, a riser, and a chair. I guess now's the part where I throw in my stats into the routine war that's going on.[/spoiler]
Full Body Workouts: 35 minutes, circuit-based, endurance-focused
I have a list of four to choose from. The hardest one is probably this one:
19 push ups, 19 squats, 19 rows using 30 pound weights, 1 squat thrust= 1 circuit. Then you do 18 of everything and 2 squats, then 17 and 3, etc, all the way down to 1 and 19. It ends up being roughly 200 of everything over a 35 minute period. This one is pretty cardio-intensive. A more lift-focused one would be:
riser cross push ups, squats, rows (30lbs), butterfly sit up (15 lbs), curls (25 lbs), and shoulder press (25 lbs) x25. That's a circuit. Then it's x20, x15, x10, x5. Once you complete 5x of everything, you go all the way back up to 25 again. I know the weights and the exercises probably aren't as crazy impressive as some of the numbers you people are tossing around, but the cardio resistance and endurance needed for these workouts is pretty intense.
Anyway, Hitshade,
[spoiler]I have been using these two strategies while maintaining a ~50 hour a week job and social life, hobbies etc, all with almost no impact on my day to day life. Once you have a working knowledge of the nutrition plan, eating out with friends and family, going to fast food places etc becomes manageable and easy. The workouts suck and sometimes it can be hard to make time for five meals a day, but you learn little tricks along the way, and the entire thing has just become a natural part of my life at this point. Sometimes people will ask me about my "diet" and I'll look at them funny. It really doesn't feel like a diet because I feel unrestricted in almost all circumstances. It may not be as hard-hitting or technically effective in terms of raw results and numbers, but it is extremely low-impact on a person's life and the comparative results are drastically better than a fast-burning binge diet or crazy intense short-term regiment. 150 pounds later, 30+ pounds of muscle later, it's been one of the greatest decisions of my life. Some months I was losing 20+ pounds, and it was all done completely naturally and at my body's own pace. My skin tightened along the way, my figure sculpted and shaped itself into the inklings of an athlete, and I've never had more energy in my life. Overall, to be blunt, if you're fat, sloth-like and lazy, overeat and eat poorly, and have never done a physical activity in your life, the steps I took to get where I am now were all right on the money.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]There are two equally important halves to the system I've been using for the last 15 months. I'll break them into two separate pieces for the sake of information dumping, but know that they are most effective when working in tandem.
The first is the nutrition plan: it's called the Zone Diet, but it's not really a diet per se, but rather a lifestyle choice. This isn't something you do for a few months and then forget about it; the entire cornerstone of the plan is that you stick to it for as long as you want to see results and maintain them (see: the rest of your life). The hardest part for me was adjusting to eating so much food so often. "What" I was eating wasn't really my problem. I was a victim of what is commonly referred to as "the corporate diet", which is usually skipping breakfast, having a HUGE lunch at work, eating dinner kinda late, staying up late, and then getting hungry again so you eat something small, which almost always turns into something way bigger than you originally set out to eat. The idea is to eat even portions of food five times a day, which is roughly every 2.5-3.5 hours. Every food under the sun is broken up into one of three categories- proteins, carbs and fats. It's a pretty lax system. For example, cheese is considered purely a protein. Peanuts are a fat only. Milk is one of the few foods that is considered both a protein and a carb. All fruits and vegetables are also carbs. Lawler is right about the percentages. However, the nutrition plan makes it easy by bunching the physical amounts of food you eat into really easy-to-manage blocks. So for example, every meal you might need, say, 5 blocks of protein, 5 blocks of carbs, and 5 blocks of fat. It's always even like that. Almost all meats are 1 ounce = one block, so you might have 5 ounces of grilled salmon, for example. The butter, herbs, oils etc. that are used to prepare it are minute enough to be negligible. With that, you could have, say, a block of green beans, which is, I dunno, probably something like 1/2 cup for a block. So that would be 2 1/2 cups of those, and you could sprinkle in about an ounce of bacon into those for your fat (bacon is considered a fat- damn them to hell), and there's a delicious meal.
Of course, you can't always be expected to prepare dishes like that on the fly, so admittedly a lot of it becomes deli sandwiches, greek yogurt and peanuts, wraps, etc. That said, I eat a huge variety of food every week and almost never get bored. It's really not hard. The coolest part for me was working with my trainer on things to cut back on slowly over time. I didn't cold turkey it, we would pick something together to ween myself off of every month or so. One month was white bread to wheat, it took several months to go from whole milk to fat free, and the hardest one was going from 2-3 sodas a day to a couple a week, to now none at all. I swear to God I don't even miss them. Flavored water, juices, and an occasional diet pepsi are all I need now, and when I do try to drink a regular soda, it doesn't even taste good anymore. It just tastes fake and artificial and disgusting. It's scary to go back to all the old processed foods I used to eat all the time... it makes me wonder why I ever thought any of them were good in the first place. That said, the plan offers one entire day of "free eating", where you can literally gorge on M&M's and pig fetuses all damn day and your body can adjust and account for it. Alternatively you can do three free meals per week and spread them out at your discretion.
One of the hardest parts was feeling nauseous the first month or so due to the increased volume of food I was eating. Your body definitely needs some adjustment time, especially if your diet was like mine was at the outset. I called my trainer up once as I was fighting back the urge to throw up, asking him if I should still keep eating. You know what he said? "Yes, if you can do it without throwing up, you need to try." I thought he was crazy and honestly it left a sour spot in my perception of how this diet thing was going to work out, but ultimately it was a small bullet to take in order for my body to adjust the way it wanted to, just like your muscles get sore after you start working out harder than you're used to.
The other half to this is the workouts. If you're like I was, I came into this with virtually no physical activity to help kick-start my routines. I lived a very sedentary lifestyle and never so much as lifted a weight or played a sport for at least 5 years behind the start of this program. Due to that, my trainer started me off incredibly slowly. 10-15 minutes on a stationary bike, push-ups, planks, and 15 pound weights. It was mostly cardio stuff, and it was 15 minutes six nights a week. Over the months, we started building up to some full body workouts and weight training, but honestly that didn't kick in until about 7 months into the program. I was just simply too out of shape to handle that stuff. The idea is, of course, to keep pushing yourself and improving what you're doing. Staying stagnant with your workouts causes your body to grow accustomed to that workload, and adjusts itself to always be able to handle that amount and only that amount, which makes your workouts decreasingly effective over time.
That said, these days I work out 5 nights a week at 35 minutes per workout. I'll probably never go over 45 minutes, according to my trainer. I only do two cardio workouts now (20 minutes on my stationary bike at max resistance, chopped up into two halves with a 60 second plank and 15 squat thrusts to break up the monotomy), and the other three are full body. The best part is that all of my workouts are done AT HOME, not at a gym, with nothing but free weights, a riser, and a chair. I guess now's the part where I throw in my stats into the routine war that's going on.[/spoiler]
Full Body Workouts: 35 minutes, circuit-based, endurance-focused
I have a list of four to choose from. The hardest one is probably this one:
19 push ups, 19 squats, 19 rows using 30 pound weights, 1 squat thrust= 1 circuit. Then you do 18 of everything and 2 squats, then 17 and 3, etc, all the way down to 1 and 19. It ends up being roughly 200 of everything over a 35 minute period. This one is pretty cardio-intensive. A more lift-focused one would be:
riser cross push ups, squats, rows (30lbs), butterfly sit up (15 lbs), curls (25 lbs), and shoulder press (25 lbs) x25. That's a circuit. Then it's x20, x15, x10, x5. Once you complete 5x of everything, you go all the way back up to 25 again. I know the weights and the exercises probably aren't as crazy impressive as some of the numbers you people are tossing around, but the cardio resistance and endurance needed for these workouts is pretty intense.
Anyway, Hitshade,
[spoiler]I have been using these two strategies while maintaining a ~50 hour a week job and social life, hobbies etc, all with almost no impact on my day to day life. Once you have a working knowledge of the nutrition plan, eating out with friends and family, going to fast food places etc becomes manageable and easy. The workouts suck and sometimes it can be hard to make time for five meals a day, but you learn little tricks along the way, and the entire thing has just become a natural part of my life at this point. Sometimes people will ask me about my "diet" and I'll look at them funny. It really doesn't feel like a diet because I feel unrestricted in almost all circumstances. It may not be as hard-hitting or technically effective in terms of raw results and numbers, but it is extremely low-impact on a person's life and the comparative results are drastically better than a fast-burning binge diet or crazy intense short-term regiment. 150 pounds later, 30+ pounds of muscle later, it's been one of the greatest decisions of my life. Some months I was losing 20+ pounds, and it was all done completely naturally and at my body's own pace. My skin tightened along the way, my figure sculpted and shaped itself into the inklings of an athlete, and I've never had more energy in my life. Overall, to be blunt, if you're fat, sloth-like and lazy, overeat and eat poorly, and have never done a physical activity in your life, the steps I took to get where I am now were all right on the money.[/spoiler]