I’m John Guevara, and this is what I know. The numbers don’t lie. I’ve been steadily losing weight for over a year. I was on a four month streak of weight loss. I had made it through Thanksgiving. I only had to make it through Christmas and New Year’s Day.
I can usually tell when I’ve gained weight. My clothes fit a little tighter. My knees ache a little more. I figured I had lost about a pound since my last weigh in. Instead, I had gained back 4.
I could hear the excuses welling up in the back of my brain. I knew I had eaten more. But I had also taken far more steps during the holidays than I had in the first few weeks of December. What was the x-factor?
It turns out, in the middle of December, we welcomed a little boy into our home for fostering. He was only 10 weeks old, and had been born 8 weeks premature. He weighed less than 6 pounds when he moved in, and the poor guy needed to eat every 3 hours.
We worked like champs to make sure we could wake up in shifts, feed him, and go back to sleep. After a couple of days we started rotating, you sleep tonight, and I sleep tomorrow night, taking the guest bedroom so we could sleep.
Now, you may be asking yourself, “Is using a little baby as an excuse for gaining weight?” No.I’m not. That would be a little easy and a very horrible thing to do.
The two biggest reasons I gained weight were, 1) I was inconsistent, and 2) I did not have a plan to handle stress. Weight gain is not all bad. When we resistance train, we build muscles and lose fat. Sometimes that means we put on a little weight. In making the choice to pursue my best health, there is no silver bullet. There is only a silver lifestyle, and that lifestyle demands consistency.
Think of it like a chair. Diet is part of that lifestyle, it’s one leg of the chair. Eating the right foods at the right times gives us more energy, improves our immune system, supplies the right level of nutrients to recover from exercise. It is important for your diet to meet your training and health needs. If you are a diabetic, consuming less sugar will be important. If you are a heavier diabetic, eating more protein, and less fats and carbohydrates could be beneficial. If you are a thin diabetic, eating more fats and proteins with less carbohydrates could be the way to go.
Exercise is part of that lifestyle. It’s the second leg of the chair. As I’ll discuss further down the road, I use High Impact Training (HIT) to build muscle and burn fat. I am too heavy to do much running or other cardio. Let’s face it, before I became a foster dad, I couldn’t be bothered to go to the gym. Now it’s even harder, so elliptical trainers and stationary bikes are out. HIT means I work my muscles as hard as I can until they can’t lift anymore in one set. Done correctly, it works my heart and muscles to the max, while reducing the risk of joint or soft tissue injury most often brought about from high repetition training. I’m focused on avoiding injury because my recovery time is so much longer now than it was when I was in high school and college.
Supplementation is part of the lifestyle. It’s the third leg of the chair. We all have different health needs. Some people are low in iron or they have a Vitamin D deficiency. Some people have low testosterone or can’t possibly eat enough protein from food sources to recover properly from weight training. Knowing what your body needs is essential. Providing it is necessary to achieve your best health.
Planning is part of the lifestyle. It’s the fourth leg of the chair. We need a plan to achieve our goals. We need a way to track our progress. There isn’t any one specific way, and I’ve talked about how track my performance in earlier posts. The key is to plan each and every day. Know how much you need to train, eat, supplement each day. Know when you need to work harder and when to take your foot off the gas. Plan for holidays, birthdays, vacations. No excuses.
Falling short in any of these areas hurts your mission. And I fell short. Work was especially hectic. I had worked every day for almost 80 days straight. I stopped weight training. I stopped some of my supplements. I stopped drinking enough water. I stopped eating the right sorts of foods.
It didn’t happen all at once. But it happened. And I still managed to lose weight. I was counting my steps and calories and pushed harder on those buttons to try and offset what I knew were failures in other areas. Then the baby came, and I wasn’t sleeping. I was more stressed than ever before. And I ate comfort food to feel better.
It happens. It doesn’t mean we’ve failed. It means taking stock of the situation. How did you get here? What happened? And make a plan restore your lifestyle. That’s when you’ll start winning again, weight will come off in the right places. You’ll have more energy. You’ll be your best you.
Thanks for reading. I’m John Guevara and this is what I know.
