Live. Eat. Workout
If you haven't read my last post (click here), let me begin by telling you that my fitness journey started during the COVID quarantine (in Honduras the first case was identified in March and the government established a national lockdown that was finally lifted in November). The first stone that began my journey was an 8-minute arm workout I found on Youtube from April Han back in April. I was a very lazy person back then but my motivation to do this workout was my self-consciousness about my arms. My body tends to store most of my body fat in the arms and thighs (my abdominal area also stores fat but the amount is less significant) so my arms and armpits were flabby and fat. The workout felt hard as a beginner but each time became easier and easier to complete without taking breaks. It made me feel really good about myself.
To continue narrating about how my fitness journey began, I want to make two sections (workout and meals) because even though I started working out in April, I take July as the starting point of my journey since I made drastic changes to improve my health on this month (though I warn you that I didn't make healthy choices at first but I am growing and making positive changes to rectify the choices I did ignorantly)
WORKOUT
Youtube algorithm started recommending me more April Han's workout videos and as a result, I checked more of her routines. Around two weeks later, I also began doing her lower belly fat workout. At this point, I was doing two workout videos: the arm routine in the morning before my work schedule and the belly routine in the night before going to sleep. Sometimes I would do both videos in the night (meaning that I would do the arm routine twice a day) if I felt motivated enough. And to make these small sessions more appealing, I would do them while watching a movie or a TV series on Netflix.
Between May and June, I was feeling more energized and motivated to exercise so I decided to make a small routine for the morning and the night:
Morning Workout Routine
Arm workout (8 minutes)
HIIT workout for beginners (12 minutes)
Night Workout Routine
HIIT workout for beginners (12 minutes)
Lower belly fat (8 minutes)
With these exercises, I started seeing weight loss but because I wasn't eating properly yet, I would constantly gain back the few pounds I lost. It frustrated me because I thought that with my increased physical activity I would finally lose the extra weight. Then one day, I learned about the huge impact food had on weight loss, maintenance, and gain. I know it sounds pretty obvious but back then I had the wrongful mindset that with a considerate amount of workout and adding more vegetables and fruits to my meals (which consisted mainly of fried food, a vast number of high carb foods, and many cookies, chips, chocolates, and bread), it would be enough to see the changes I have wished for a long time. I realized that to see results, I had to combine a calorie deficit diet and physical activity at the same time. In the meals section, I will go deeper into the changes (and mistakes) I made to my diet.
In July, I started exercising around 30 min in the morning and 25 min in the night, which would be 55 min of workout in total every day. On weekends, if I had enough time, I would exercise around 90 min for each day. I switched from being a lazy to an obsessed person for workouts. Because I am very impatient and therefore wanted to see results fast, I tried to stay active as much as I could. I am thankful I didn't injure myself during this period. There were some painful and scary moments where I thought I had genuinely injured an arm, shoulder, or leg due to the incapacitating amount of pain I felt in the affected muscle but with tender massages with arnica gel and gentle stretches I was able to recover. All things considered, July ended with me losing around 4 to 5 kg.
I was frustrated when I reached my first weight loss plateau in the middle of August. I read online that one way to overcome it was to increase exercise frequency or intensity, so I took the first option. But I was not able to keep up with this change because during this time I was on a very low-calorie intake diet and each day I would feel more exhausted than the day before. When September came along, I decided to visit a dietitian because I found out about the negative consequences of low-calorie intake diets and I didn't want to deal with those negative effects. With my dietitian's advice, I made healthier changes to my diet and I soon saw its benefits: I started losing weight again, though more slowly, and felt more energized during my workout sessions.
Fast-forward to the present, I continue working out at home. I am not going to a gym because even though they are now open and the lockdown has been lifted, the government is still strict about people leaving their homes if it's not for essential errands (groceries stores, pharmacies, banks). And I am not particularly interested in looking for a trainer online either because I like the freedom of working out whenever I want (I have set up a two-hour time frame for each workout session. For example, I do my morning routine between 5 am and 7 am). Whereas, with a trainer, I would have to work out in a specific hour.
I am glad to say I have a healthier mindset with workouts. I am not as obsessed with constant exercise as before. If I skip one or both routines in a day, I don't feel as awful and guilty as I used to. And I change my routines each month to constantly push my body and improve my stamina but I respect my limits too. I will share in later posts all the workout videos I have done so far and will include the current ones.
MEALS
Before July, my meals were not the healthiest. I have always enjoyed eating fruits and vegetables but due to the lack of time, I would find it easier to eat instant teriyaki noodles that would be ready in 3 minutes with minimal effort from my part than to wash some tomatoes and cucumber, cut them, and add them into a bowl for salad preparation. And apart from the lack of time, cooking wasn't a favorite activity either. And to top it all off, I suffer from constant stress eating so in the afternoons (which is the time I get strong cravings) I would eat many cookies, chocolate, and/or chips.
When I began working from home in March, my breakfast usually consisted of natural yogurt, with fruit and granola (sometimes with peanut butter as well), or milk with oatmeal cookies. I began cooking more and added more vegetables for lunch, but I would use too much oil (Honduran cuisine uses oil in many dishes) and would add many carbohydrates together (like rice and potatoes, rice and plantain, potatoes and plantain). And for dinner, I would finish my lunch leftovers or eat granola cookies that I thought were healthy.
Below you will see two examples of what a typical Honduran lunch (or dinner) looks like. Very delicious and tasty but not that healthy. The tortilla (a carbohydrate usually eaten by Hondurans on each meal) is missing in the second picture.
If you look closely at both pictures, the amount of vegetables is very low. In fact, the meal in the second picture doesn't have any. Now let me show you some pictures of the meals I cooked before beginning my fitness journey: many carbohydrates, greasy meat, dressings, and some vegetables (I only added cucumber, carrots, and spinach and there is a huge variety that I was missing out on).
When I started working out, I became a little more conscious of how I cooked my meals and eliminated the oil but continued eating chips and cookies every day. July was the month where I finally made drastic changes to my diet and eliminated many things from my diet: chips, cookies, low cacao chocolates, salt, high sodium seasonings, commercial dressings, and the list continues. I changed to a plant-based diet, adding many vegetables and seeds to my diet while lowering significantly the amount of rice and pasta. I began counting calories and measuring everything I ate and would record it in the Lifesum app. Sadly I admit that I began a very low-calorie diet. Yes, I was one of those people that made this huge mistake. There was even a day when I only ate 500 calories. I tried to suppress my hunger by drinking plenty of water. It didn't help much but surprisingly I had the self-control to continue like this for weeks. This is surprising because when it comes to food, my self-control was nonexistent, I love eating! I guess what kept me motivated to keep this diet was the rapid weight loss I saw by the end of July and I expected to lose the same amount in August.
By the middle of August, I felt tired when working out and tried to do my best to make them properly despite the pain in my limbs (apart from the pain due to exercise I was dealing with my fibromyalgia). It was here that I googled the consequences of reduced calorie intake and I didn't like what I found. I also learned about the importance of focusing more on macronutrients than on calories. I decided to increase my calorie intake to 1,000 and look for a dietitian to get advice.
I found a dietitian that I absolutely love because she focuses on teaching her patients to have a balanced diet with all food groups and to find healthier alternatives to unhealthy foods instead of eliminating foods (like bread or pasta) from diets. I was honest with her and told her everything: extremely low-calorie diet, overexercising, reduced to nonexistent menstruation, fatigue, and obsession over my weight (there were days where I would weigh myself twice!! What the heck?!). As one would expect, my dietitian was concerned with all of this. She was very sweet and educated me about weight loss, weight gain, calorie intake, macronutrients, and more. I requested to slowly increase my calorie intake because I was afraid I would gain fat again as I was on a weight loss plateau. She agreed and we began to slowly increase my calorie intake.
She gave me a meal parameters plan to follow. This plan tells me how much I can eat for each food group on each meal to meet my macronutrients and I can decide what to eat for each group. I went to dietitians before and each one of them gave me meal plans to follow which I absolutely hated so this is very refreshing and it's a plan I know I will be able to follow until I die. I am the type of person who likes to do what I want and not what other people tell me to do, in general. I continue counting my calories but I focus more on meeting my macronutrients and I am currently on a 1,500 calorie diet. My dietitian says I should be eating more though especially because I want to gain muscle.
It's quite scary for me to be in a calorie surplus because I don't want to gain fat. I know that I exercise every day, usually an hour and I rarely skip a workout session completely but I have reached a point where even though I look in the mirror and I like what I see and I am happy with everything I have accomplished so far, I still don't have the body I want.
Anyway, I don't want to make this post any longer so I say goodbye for now. In later posts, I will share how I eat and the recipes I do as well as the YouTubers I follow for my exercise routines. If you would like to connect and share your fitness journey story with me, you can find my social media here. See you in my next post!
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