Weight loss.

May 31st, 2008

So during the times when I’m in a play and such, I don’t get much time to work out or even eat healthy. By the time I get out of rehearsals it’s usually around 10 and the only things open at that point are McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and their ilk. Not so conducive to eating healthy. However, after I finished my last show, Rumors, I decided it’s time to change my lifestyle. Really make a big change, especially because I hated the way I felt and looked. The show ended in April, and since then I’ve committed hardcore to eating right. Sure I have a ‘bad meal’ about once a week or so (bring on the queso and burgers!), but mostly it’s meal replacement shakes, steamed Chinese, and whatever I can buy that’s under 300-400 calories per meal.

I also decided to join a gym and work with a personal trainer. Now I made a small mistake in that I didn’t check my weight before the eating healthy began, but considering my waist size was around 38, I’d say I was about 225lbs or so, and 5′11″. Overweight? Yes. But even by the time I started at the gym, I had dropped down to 215lbs.

My usual day now consists of a Slim-Fast (or a shake of that sort) in the morning, a healthy lunch, another shake right after I work out so that my body can use the protein in it to build muscle, and then at night something light– steamed veggies and grilled chicken or something.

The REALLY interesting thing I learned from Trevor (my hilarious and often pushy trainer) is that the cardio I was doing was fruitless. This is what I WAS doing:

Run for 20 minutes.
Weight lifting.
Leave.

He told me that in the first 20-30 minutes of your heart rate being up, the body is burning glycogen, not fat. It’s only after the 30 minutes that your body starts burning fat as its secondary storage of energy. So instead he recommended the following:

10 minutes of cardio to warm up.
20+ minutes of weights (the more weight you use the more glycogen is burned off and the faster the body gets to burning fat)
25-30 minutes of cardio.
Leave.

HUGE difference. In about a week or so I noticed a difference in how I felt and today I checked the scale to see my weight was down to 205lbs. I’m teetering around that 200 range, and I’d say my goal is to be around 180-190. Not bad.

Then on top of that we did a type of training today that absolutely fatigued the shit out of me and even got me a bit dehydrated. (Whenever I have a trainer I tend to give much more to a workout than when I go alone.) Basically the idea is to trick the brain into thinking that fat needs to be burned off first. But how do that when glycogen is still stored? Well, by basically not stopping between exercises. So this is what I did today:

3 sets of bridges, 1 min each
2 sets of crunches (15 reps)
1 set of leg raises (15 reps)
20 pushups (I have zero chest strength so after doing 5 I had to resort to doing ‘girl-pushups’.)
1 minute punching bag
1 minute of another exercise I cant remember the name of– kinda like squats
1 min punching bag
1 min squats
1 min of pushing a 15lb medicine ball above my shoulders, while squatting up and down from an exercise ball
1 min punching bag

Now at this point I had to stop. I felt like I was going to throw up, I could FEEL my heart bulging my eyeballs out, and I was sweating buckets. After a stop of about 3-4 minutes, I kept going. I got this far; I had to keep fighting. Besides, Trevor was playing Eye of the Tiger in the background– how do you NOT work out with that?

1 min bicep curls, with 50lbs.
1 min military press, 20lbs.
1 min stepping up and down a raised box, with 15lb dumbbells in each hand
1 min punching bag
1 min lateral raises with 8lb weights in each hand
1 min rear lateral raises
1 min punching bag

And then I had to stop– fully. I collapsed onto the ground, panting like a dog in heat, tongue out. I saw stars, I saw the universe– I saw my life flashing before me. But here’s what I didn’t finish–

Carry a punching bag 50 feet to the other side of the room
Do bear crawls 50 feet back
3 more sets of bridges
2 more crunch sets

Anyway, from what I understand that type of circuit training keeps your heart rate up AND rips through your glycogen deposit so that you’re burning fat (almost) the entire time. It’s also so intense that it’s not something that the body can handle more than once a week. I hope I can do it before I leave for New York on Friday. Until then, I’ll keep with the other stuff I’ve learned thus far.

And with that I’m out. This was a VERY long post, but I hope you learned maybe a little somethin. Peas.

Posted by: Vinoj

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