Lose Weight or Change Shape | JohnBarban.com

There are health benefits to losing weight of course, but for most people the "change shape" part of it IS more important.

I would guess that more people are motivated to change their lifestyle by seeing a photo of themselves (or just the mirror) than hitting a certain number on the scale.

Here's what John Barban has to say on the subject:

Lose Weight or Change Shape | JohnBarban.com

Drink Yourself Thin

When I was in high school I worked at McDonald's.  Say what you want about the quality and/or healthfulness of the food there, I still say it's a great job for a young person.  One thing I often noticed when taking orders was the people (often overweight) who would order a huge super-sized meal....with a diet Coke!  My thought back then was "As if you're on a diet!"

Of course now I am the guy ordering the low cal beverage with my value meals (I much prefer Coke Zero to diet though).

If you are looking to lose fat, one very easy change you can make is to stop drinking your calories!  This is one of the first things I did when I decided to eat less and move more.

Here's a quick look at why this works so well.  Taking my own situation:  Between the three main meals of the day I used to drink some kind of juice, or milk, with each of them.  Let's say I averaged one per meal; so three glasses a day.  Three glasses of those beverages will total about 300 calories (or more). 

Now for some math:

300 calories a day x 30 days a month x 10 months (Oct-Jul) = 90,000 calories!

90,000 / 3500 (The number of calories in a pound of fat) = 25.7

As you can see, making just this one dietary change resulted in over 25 pounds of fat lost for me over the past ten months!  That is nearly half of the 56 that I have now dropped since September '09.  I still have cream (and occasionally sugar) in my coffees, but other than that I don't regularly drink any beverages that contain a significant amount of calories.  I most often choose water, sometimes adding Crystal Light for flavor.

Try making this change if you haven't already, and see what it does for you over the course of a month or more.  Stop drinking yourself fat - drink yourself thin!

Fat Loss - Calories and You

It seems pretty apparent that nobody really likes counting calories.  Actually weighing out your food and then adding things up can get pretty tedious pretty quickly.  I don't think actually accounting for each and every calorie that goes into you is necessary for weight loss.

That being said, however, the only thing that determines how much fat you lose (or gain) is the difference between the amount of calories you eat and those that you burn.  So, you need to at least be aware of calories.

Generally, when we think about calories we generally don't do a very good job at estimating with them.  People will consistently underestimate how many calories they eat, while also overestimating the amount of calories they are burning with exercise.

For example, today at work I played basketball for about an hour.  I was breathing pretty hard and considered it quite a workout.  At my current weight this probably burned about 630 calories.  Not too shabby!  But it can very easily be undone by unaware eating.

Coming home from work, I noticed that groceries had been purchased in my house and there was a new bag of cookies in the cupboard.  Most of the time in the evening I have some light popcorn as a snack (about 160 cals worth) but today I got an extra workout in, so I deserve something extra, right?  That is a very easy mindset to get into whenever we are presented with an opportunity to eat shortly before or after working out.

Looking at the back of the cookie bag, the calorie count is 160 cals for 2 cookies.  I know myself, and realize that there's no way I'm only going to have two, four would be much more likely.  That's 320 calories, and isn't an ice cold glass of milk the perfect accompaniment?  That'll be another 160 cals or so added on.  Total so far is 480 calories, and all of a sudden a very large portion of my workout has been undone.

There's nothing wrong with having an evening snack, even cookies sometimes, but always be aware of how quickly those calories can add up on you. Having a ballpark idea of what the calorie count of certain types of food as well as what an exercise session can burn is very helpful.  I like to use the website FatSecret to reference these facts.  They even have a mobile app that works quite well.

How much attention do you pay to calories in vs calories out?

Training when you don't feel like it

Today I didn't feel much like getting a workout in.  I was feeling a bit tired, it was hot out, and also Sunday (which I almost always make an off day).  Oh yeah, and my training partner was nearly electrocuted at work the other night and thus wouldn't be able to make the session.  I felt a bit silly having texted him to ask if he was coming over - I was off work yesterday and thus hadn't heard of his situation.

I realize most of these excuses are pretty lame, and anyone who wants to get into the habit of training regularly needs to be able to overcome.

Because of my work schedule, I knew that if I didn't get a workout in today, I would be out of sync for the next 3 days.  I reheated and drank a half cup of coffee left over from the morning, then filled my water bottle up with cold water, grabbed my ipod and headed out to the backyard.

Ended up having an excellent Heavy day RoP workout in.  On some of the sets of Clean and Presses I seriously felt as though I had my 16kg kettlebell in my hand instead of the 20!  I was quite tired but not totally spent at the end of it all.

What are some of the things that tempt you to skip a training day?  If you do end up getting to the gym (or wherever you train) do you find the workout to be better than usual?

Pull Up Update

My progress with pull ups is slow but steady.  I am quite confident in my ability to do "almost one" pull up.  The reason I say "almost" is because I do most of my pull up practice on the kid's play structure in the backyard.  The monkey bar support arms are relatively low, maybe a bit less than 7 feet off the ground.  This means I have developed a strong finish to each pull up - getting my chin over the bar, but I am weak at starting from a full hang (since initially I never did).

 In addition the support arms are rectangular and even the slightly rounded corners dig into my hands pretty good which limits how long I am able to hold on - which is not good if I'm trying to do a flexed arm hang after a couple sets of one pull up.

Travel to a local park and just use the monkey bars there, you might suggest?  Not a bad idea, but that's inconvenient compared to just heading to the backyard as I leave home or return.  Also, have you looked at kid's playground equipment lately?  It seems quite rare to find straight, flat monkey bars anymore.  They are all either circular, arched, wavy, or something else; I guess this makes them more fun somehow to use for the kids?

What is my solution to these dilemmas?  A little DIY of course!  Tomorrow I plan to head over to the local hardware store and grab some lumber and fasteners, a steel pipe, and see what happens.  I don't have super-elaborate plans, what I plan to do is add on to my kids' play structure.  I have assured my wife that I am 99% positive I won't structurally affect the climber.

I will keep you posted and hopefully have some pics if it ends up being functional.  On a handiness scale of 1-10 I would rate myself a 6.5, so I think this will go ok, wish me luck.

Fat Loss - What I used to lose 48lbs since September

In September of '09, I made a decision to start losing weight and in general become more healthy.  This is a decision I had made before in my life, but this time I planned to make it stick.  So far this is going pretty well, and while I have had a few plateaus in the months since, as the title of this post indicates, I am still down nearly 50 pounds 10 months later.  Having certainly gained some muscle in this time as well, I am confident that I have lost at least 60 pounds of fat.
The catalyst for this particular session of weight loss was a competition.  Inspired by programs like The Biggest Loser, several of the members of the poker chip enthusiast website chiptalk.net decided to have a weight loss challenge.  I had participated in events like this before, and have always found them to be a very good motivation to keep me disciplined.  I knew already what my exercise program would be - kettlebells of course!  But the question I had was what to do about my diet.  In the past I have done low carb Atkins-type diets and been successful - for a while.  I know several people who were fans of point-counting strategy weight loss plans and briefly considered trying that out myself.  In the end I ended up going with the one strategy I was absolutely sure would work.  I called it "Eat Less and Exercise More".  I cut down on portion sizes - no more seconds on anything - and cut out desserts as well.  Additionally, no more drinking of calories.  Other than my coffees, nearly everything I drink is low cal or calorie free.
These changes produced weight loss, and no doubt they would for anyone in need of dropping some fat.  However, it is actually pretty difficult to never have a second helping or overeat in any way.  Especially when there is lots of food available, like at a party or even at my job, the urge to head back to the food table and have "just one more slice" is quite tempting, at least for me.  After a few weeks on the "just eat less" diet, I  found a book that revolutionized my relationship with food and my pattern of eating.
The book is called Eat Stop Eat, by Brad Pilon, and is based on the idea of flexible intermittent fasting.  Essentially you eat normally (which should be as healthily as possible) and once or twice a week you take a break from eating and fast for 24 hours.  That really is the whole plan.  You could take that one sentence and go with it and never actually read the book!  I did buy it however and thoroughly enjoyed it.  Fasting has many health benefits, losing fat is just one of them.  Having read the book really helps when people try to tell me that "fasting is going to slow your metabolism" or "that's bad for you, you HAVE to eat breakfast" or something like that.  I plan to cover some of the myths about eating in future blog posts, actually.  Eat Stop Eat works because by cutting out 48 hours worth of eating from your week (four meals total, plus all snacks you would have eaten during your fasts), you are eating less.  After all, that is the reason why any diet works, whatever the method used, the effective diets have you eating less than you ate before.  By using the Eat Stop Eat method, I didn't have to feel like I was denying myself every single day.  Also, the discipline of fasting helped me to recognize all the reasons I ate, whether it was because I was hungry, bored, or just because it was "time to".  This may not be true for everyone, but after following Eat Stop Eat for nine months, I find not eating at all to be much easier than trying to stop myself from eating too much.  Later posts will cover more about this, including what to eat on the days when you're not fasting, but I definitely recommend you check out Eat Stop Eat if you find yourself stuck on your fat loss journey.

Exercise on vacation.

First off, as I mentioned last post this is something I rarely have ever done before.  While I was away at a cottage on the Bruce Peninsula, I took my 20kg kettlebell with me.  My goal, if you remember, was to complete 5 workouts while I was up there.  Funny thing about vacation workouts:  the book I took to read was the excellent The Purposeful Primitive by Marty Gallagher.  In it, he actually mentions the notion of working out while on vacation, and recommends against it!  Luckily for me I was already 4/5 of the way done.

Actually, he probably wouldn't have a problem with my goal.  His point about not working out while on vacation is valid because a vacation is a great time for someone who is a regular exerciser to take a week off of weight training and give their body a rest (knowing that there is still plenty of walking, hiking, swimming on most vacations).  In my case, I was approaching the vacation workout schedule as a chance to challenge myself to be more regular about working out in an environment free from so many of the excuses I use to avoid it generally.  This past week I haven't been able to mentally claim I was "too tired from work" or "too busy" or "I had to watch the kids".  So I was able to set a goal and achieve it, and I have to say it feels great.  On a related note I was able to lose 1.5 pounds for the week, not bad considering I didn't fast at all and there was lots of great food served every meal.  I probably would have done even better than that had my stepmom not brought a milkshake machine......

Anyway, here's what my week of cottage workouts looked like:

Sunday -Clean and Press, Kettlebell Swings (100)
Monday - A bit of variety, I did a mix of one and two handed swings for 100 total reps.  Also high pulls, goblet squats and some burpees.
Tuesday - Clean and Press, rows, more goblet squats and 100 swings (seeing a pattern there yet?)
Wednesday - Some push ups, a couple waiter presses and a hundred swings of course.
Friday - Clean and Presses and Swings.  Guess how many swings?  I actually set my alarm to get up by 6:45 to make this fit in before we had to pack up and leave.  My original intention had been to do 5 days in a row but on Thursday I was feeling a bit run down (actually had a 3 hour nap in the afternoon!) and so I felt an early start Friday was a much better idea.

So overall 500 swings for the week and quite a few presses done too, with some other exercises thrown in for practice and variety.  Maybe not the hardest-core workout week ever but I am pretty satisfied with it.