Monday, July 23, 2012

But I Can't Afford to Eat Healthy

Everyone in the paleo community can attest to this, they have heard someone come up with an excuse that they can't eat a healthy diet because they cannot afford to. It's one of the oldest excuses for eating the way they do, and it's not true. Now the Paleo diet does focus on better sources of meats and produce, but if you cannot afford to buy those things, it shouldn't deter you from eating better choices or even a fully paleofied diet.

What I am going to do for the next few blog post is post what I am eating and the average cost per person per meal, then compare that to the price of other things like fast food and other restaurants.

Tonight I made a fancy looking dinner for hardly any of the cost. I am just sad that no one took a picture of it lol. It was a dinner for my Mom before she went back to Lubbock. Here is how it breaks down.

2 packages of Thin sliced chicken breast $7 (approx)
1/3 of a can of parmesan cheese $1.30 (approx)
1 Spaghetti Squash $3.54
1 small bottle of pine nut less pesto $1.99
2 organic tomatoes $1.50
1/2 onion $.80
1 TBL of garlic powder $.08
1 TBL of onion powder $.08
Salt & pepper

Total:  $16.25
Servings: 5 
Cost per serving: $3.25

I made a paleo version of chicken parmesan with spaghetti squash tossed with the pesto and more parmesan cheese. This fed my mother, wife, my daughter and I, and left 1 serving to be eaten for breakfast or lunch (or a snack lol). This was a very nutrient dense versin of chicken parmesan and could've even been better had I added some sauteed squash and zuchinni which would've added .40 per serving.

Lets look at some other means of food.

Mcdonald's Big mac value meal: $4.37
Burger King Whopper Meal: $4.32


Now this is just two examples, but you could buy some less nutrient dense food for more price. You could even have saved more money by making a butter sauce for the spaghetti squash or a simple marinara sauce with a can or organic tomato sauce.

Tomorrow I will be cooking some paleo chocolate chili!

Friday, July 20, 2012

Be Careful When You Eat out!

Oh it's been nice, I took a couple of days off to rest a bit. I only did some walking yesterday and the day before. My back had been twinged so I gave it a rest. Today I am going to hit the gym  and do the dreaded leg day (dun dun dun)! My mother flew into town (her arms must be tired!) yesterday and so it has been nice having her around.

So naturally we went out to eat for dinner. We went to a cajun place so this meant LOTS of seafood. I decided on a parmesan encrusted flounder with steamed broccoli. In my mind, when you encrust something in parmesan, that's pretty much all you use. I know when I do it, I use the parmesan powder and grated cheese, just a foreshadow here. The usual comes out bread, and cornbread, I passed of course. I get my fish and it looks magnificent, a giant piece of fish covered in parmesan cheese. I start eating it and it was as awesome as it looked. I get just about done with it and notice what it's encrusted with. I look at it and it looks a batter of some sort. I thought to myself "no way there is flour on this, it says parmesan encrusted!" So I finish it and leave some of the coating. Well I ask the waiter and he comes back with "Oh it has parmesan cheese, italian bread crumbs, eggs and milk" DAMNIT. Well lesson learned! What you cook and have in your mind isn't always what a restaurant has in mind. It's better to be that annoying customer asking questions, than to be sorry about what you ate. Luckily this wasn't too bad of a thing and I just took it as a treat.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Day 24 - Results are in!

Well today is weigh in and measurements day and I am pretty pleased with the results. Could they have been better? Of course, but did I live my life and still manage to lose weight and inches? Yep. My main goal of this whole challenge was to prove to everyone out there that you do not need a supplement to lose weight. You especially do not need the Advocare 24 day challenge gimmick either. When you get down to it, you still are eating better and you still are getting off of your ass. This will equal weight loss to anyone who is trying to lose weight. Now maybe it's a different story if you're in great shape and have hit a plateau, but anyone who is like me and trying to shed pounds, you don't need a damn thing.




So without further adieu here are my numbers:

Day 0 Numbers:

Chest (nipple line) 46 inches
Waist (above belly button, which i have no idea why they'd call it waist....) 43.5 inches
Thighs: 27 inches
 Arms: 16 inches
Hips (around the butt) 44 inches
Weight: 254.2

Day 24 numbers
Chest (nipple line): 45 inches (Loss of 1 inch)
Waist (above belly button, which i have no idea why they'd call it waist....) : 39.5 inches (Loss of 4 inches!!)
 Thighs: 26 inches (Same)
Arms: 16 inches (Same)
Hips (around the butt) 43 inches( loss of 1 inch)
Weight 246.4 (Loss of 7.8 pounds)


The weight loss wasn't very good. This is still the lightest that I have been since the 7th grade! However, there are a ton of attributing factors to this. For one, I deviated slightly on the diet a couple of times and this could've slowed me up a bit. Another thing is with weight training you can start to gain muscle over fat, and another factor could be that my body is slowing on the weight loss because well geez, I just dropped 40 LBs before this challenge. No excuses here, I like that number and am not discouraged by that at all. If anything it shows that you can live life 20% of the time and the 80% you work hard and you'll get to where you're going.

The waist measurement is absolutely correct. I couldn't believe this number. My wife has been telling me I am shrinking and I look great, heck I didn't believe her. One of my co-workers said I was melting the other day and I didn't believe him, but holy cow! 4 inches in the waist GONE. I had her re-measure 3 or 4 times because I didn't believe it myself and every time it was 39.5 inches.

As for the rest of the number, I wasn't too concerned about it. I am a genuine fat ass and most of my issues were in my stomach.  The other places look and feel better. You can definitely tell in my pictures that my back looks hell of a lot better and this is only 24 days. I will continue to progress until my ultimate goal of 220-230.







So what's next on this blog? Well I will keep going and focus on different aspects. So many questions about the paleo diet as I have been doing this. The first one I want to cover is food costs and how much each meal costs compared to others. I may also do a post on the 24 day challenge pack by Advocare that everyone is jumping on the band wagon about. I am also going to stop posting my food log. I have to admit, this made me bat Sh#@ crazy. I will also be working on my strength and workouts as I go along. Thanks for to everyone who supported me, I look forward to seeing what kind of body I can achieve!




Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Day 23 - Calories!

I have been eating  too little lately, so I tried to figure out a way to get some in today. My wife made me a different breakfast with the same things that I usually do, and added some cheese to it. It was not only delicious but upped my calories a little bit. For lunch, well I kind of failed at that point. Tried to eat as much as I could but just didn't have the time to do so.

So for dinner, I found this paleo type of sausage called Aidell's Andouille sausage. Here is what's in this sausage: INGREDIENTS: PORK, WATER, SALT, SPICES (INCLUDING RED,WHITE AND BLACK PEPPER), GARLIC, SUGAR, PAPRIKA, CELERY POWDER AND DEHYDRATED ONION. Winner!

So I made a whole bunch of vegetables and roasted it with the sausage. This turned out great! The only problem is, with 1 serving of this, I was only at 1700 calories again. So I did what anyone would do. Eat another serving 2 hours later. :) I rocked my calories today, as it was right around the mark it should.

This was day 2 without coffee. I have to admit, I am in a better mood, but today I wasn't as energized. I did have some energy from the Tea I drank, but other than that, I was a little flat. I still managed to get in a sprinting workout at the park, and took Natalie back to the same park at night. I ended up doing around 2.50 miles.

Tomorrow is weigh-in and measurement day and marks the end of the 24-day challenge. I feel like I did as well as I could have with the cheats and things that got in the way, and if I am in the 240s, I 'll be happy.

So what's after the 24 day challenge? Well  I don't really know fitness wise. I know my wife's birthday is coming up and I'll have family in town this weekend, so I may let loose just a little bit, but I am sticking to it. I will continue to blog about it and next week, I plan on starting a food cost series. My main question that I get is "Is this diet expensive?" Well I'll blog about it. I am going to take the total's from each meal and add that up and compare with things from restaurants and fast food places.

Here is my food log for the day:

Day 22 - Feeling Like A Million Bucks

Today (well yesterday) I felt like a million bucks. I started to notice a pattern when drinking coffee. The stuff would make me ragey and irritable. Everything seemed to piss me off. So cutting out coffee for 1 day and drinking tea for my caffeine made a world of difference. I had a ton of energy and felt like I could take on the world. I was also in a good mood which is different than the passed couple of days. The thing with this diet (and any sort of diet or lifestyle change) is that you have to find out what's right for you. My friend can drink 4 cups of coffee, and lay down at night to sleep perfectly fine, and not be ragey or jittery. I can drink two and feel like I have been cracked out on cocaine for a month. So for my caffeine intake I did a green tea in the morning, green tea extract after breakfast and then a black tea before workout. This seemed to work.

For my workout I went to the gym and did chest. I know, I skipped legs, but the end of the challenge is the middle of this week and after that's finish, I am going to try a different style of workout by putting legs in between my arm days as I am going to step it up a bit.

As I mentioned in the paragraph above this one, I went to the gym. I didn't make it until 5pm and it reminded my why I had quit going at that time. There is just too many damn people at the gym at this time. I could not get on anything I wanted, so my workout is completely different. Maybe this is a good thing, but I hate the gym at 5pm. Some of it is my inferiority complex to see all of these big ass dude throwing up weight like I used to, and some of it, is having to wait in line to do bench press. Stupid.

Anywho, here is what my workout looked like:

Incline dumbbells 3 sets of 10 with 70 lbs each arm
Pec Flies machine: 150 x 10, 190 x 6, 190 x5
Bench Press 135 x 8 135 x 8
Skull Crushers 10 x 70, 8 x 70, 6 x 70
tricep pushups 2 sets of 8

One thing I've noticed is my stamina isn't on par with my brain. In my mind I should be doing way more than this, but a lot of these sets were to failure. I think I need to up my carbs a bit to be more consistent in the 75-100 range, and also just effing eat more. I have been under 2000 calories for several days.

Yesterday's food was much better. I was able to get some more calories in by adding a little bit of cheese and avocado. I also felt that I had went overboard on carbs because of the sweet potato but didn't even make it close.

Today is day 23 and tomorrow is the finale. Should be interesting to see where he and I are at. 








Sunday, July 15, 2012

Day 20 & 21 - Tough Weekend

It started out very well. I woke up on Saturday morning. Got to spend time with my daughter and got to do some sprints at the park. At the park I ended up doing my usual 5 30 second all out sprints but I added 3 sets of 10 of plyometric jumps on the park benches. This kicked my butt.

My food intake is crazy low. I don't know how I am not hungry all of the time. Looks like this weekend I averaged around 1600 calories.  This is very bad for me.

As for why the weekend was tough, my wife got sick as can be. She had some sort of crazy food poisoning that just leveled her. I tried to take care of her the best I could but there wasn't much that I could do. She is doing much better now and is able to hold down food, so that is always a plus. Sometie you have to step back and support the one who needs it the most regardless of a challenge.



Friday, July 13, 2012

Day 19 - Last Stretch

Today starts the final stretch of this 24 day challenge, and it has been a fun one. This challenge gave me a new sense of goals and kind of revitalized my passion for working out and nutrition. I think a lot of the people who read this blog can also see that. I ,like everyone else, have my ups and downs, but I keep going and that's what everyone needs to learn when embarking on a fitness goal.

I have to speak up on being a little bit flattered. This passed week, I have had several inquiries to me about what Paleo is and how they can get started. They see that I have lost 40+ pounds thus far and want to do the same things. This is very exciting to me as I get help others do what I have been doing.


My wife has even jumped on the fitness wagon. She starts her journey to get six pack abs. She is going to change her diet and work out toward that goal, and I love that. Ultimately I hope that we can go to the gym together and do active things as a family.


Today I had the same breakfast. I actually ate 1 less egg, because my daughter stole one lol. I had a post workout meal of grilled chicken breast and half of a sweet potato. For dinner we decided to do something a bit different. I baked some hot wings with the wing sauce that had hardly any added garbage, and my wife roasted some veggies.




I hit right about where I wanted to on my calories and carbs and everything. Today's workout was back and bi's here is how that went:

Lat Pulldowns: 13 x 120lbs 6 x 140 lbs, 4 x 170lbs
T Bar Row: 10 x 45 lbs, 8 x 90 lbs, 8 x 90 lbs
One arm dumbbell rows 8 x 55 lbs each side 2 sets
Standing Curls 5 x 70 lbs, 6 x 60 lbs, 6 x 50 lbs
Seated preacher curls 6 x 55, 6 x 55

Not too bad, went a little heavier but felt as though my biceps still aren't catching up with my back. I feel great though, lots of energy during the day and ready to tackle tomorrow!