So, I've been reading over at The Great Fitness Experiment. I love how Charlotte takes a different fitness concept and tests it with her buddies. I saw the post about about Rachel Cosgrove's new book at the beginning of November and thought it looked interesting. Well after Charlotte's postive post on the results, I went to Books a Jillion and picked up a copy. (I couldn't wait for Amazon even thought it was $10 cheaper. Must learn patience.)
The beginning is a little too "girl power"-ry for me, so I skimmed the rules and the inspiration sections. I've just gotten into the meat of it, and I have to say, a lot of it makes sense to me on the anti-cardio stance. Everyone's felt like the hamster on the wheel before. Which made me think that maybe running (my "running" is a jog - 10 minute miles) is not effective. You know our ancient ancestors didn't get this kind of exercise. They carried, held, lifted, wrestled and sprinted. Probably as much as they could but only as long as absolutely necessary. So I think I'm going to give Cosgrove's program a try (hereinafter referred to as FBB).
So no more running for now. I will pick it back up because I do enjoy it, but I think I'd enjoy it a lot more come spring/outside only and didn't get shin splints. I've always enjoyed lifting and had already decided pink girly weights were not doing me any good. I want to feel the burn. I love being sore the next day. I'm fairly familiar with a lot of the excercises, but this is going to take a little research and studying on my end. I need to be able to remember how to do all the exercises when I go into the gym (I know it's silly, but I cannot bring the book in with me. An insecurity for another time.) So that's this weekend.
The second half is nutrition. I have cleaned up my diet a good bit over the last few months. It's been slipping a little lately, but still way ahead of where I was. I'd like to tighten that back up, so this is a ggod vehicle. But there are a few things that are going to be major challenges for me.
First, eating within 15 minutes of getting up. Ugh. I'm not usually hungry right away, but I guess I can give it a try. I've noticed that the breakfast meals she suggests are pretty large, so I'm going to need to do some prep for that. Second, the post-work out shake. I'm a little hesitant on protein powder and how on earth would I make one? I'll train at the office after work, so can I make it ahead of time? Or use a pre-packaged shake? Or just use chocolate milk? Lastly, according to the plan, you should have six meals a day every three or four hours. That's going to be hard to do, especially trying to have dinner with the family at six. Need to do a little planning and thinking there too.
The second time (of three - does that make me a yo-yoer?) that I lost a good bit of weight, I was running and doing a little weight training, but my eating was really strict about 90% of the time. I was doing Sugarbusters, which focused almost entirely on removing white processed foods from your diet. White table sugar and its evil twins, white flour and white rice. It also focused on the "unseen sugars" - fructose, surcrose, corn syrup added unnecessarily to things; I think they were anti-HFCS 10 years ago. Looking back, I still think it had valuable lessons and was almost the pre-cursor to clean eating.
Anyway, on that I avoided all white stuff (sugar, white bread, rice, potatoes) and products with added sugar in them. I dropped probably 20 pounds without realizing it. (Seriously, one day I put my bra on and couldn't figure out why it was so roomy. For someone who is pretty book smart, I can be really dumb sometimes.) So, while I think that RC recommends that you avoid all pasta and breads, I'm going to eat them in minimal amounts, but only if they are whole grain (whole wheat pasta, 100% whole wheat/grain bread w/o sugars). But really, I think that's the only nutrition "cheat" that I'm planning on making.
So, Monday I will be kicking of my own FBB experiement. I'm planning on using the blog to track exactly what I'm doing. So I'll report back on Monday.
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