How?

Figuring out the "Why?" is all well and good, but no lifestyle change is worth a damn if you don't have a plan of action.  So, after sitting down and spending several weeks researching, and combining that with things that I had already done in the past to lose weight and get in shape (believe it or not, I actually was fairly in shape at one time), I built my own health and wellness plan that I believe will bring me to the Tough Mudder and beyond.  To explain my plan to you, I will break it down into its two essential parts, Diet and Exercise, and talk about each part separately.


Diet:

Let's look at the diet side of things first.  One of the biggest contributing factors to anyone's weight-gain, my own included, is a poor diet.  Let me tell you, my diet was about as poor as they come.  I would eat fast-food at least once a day (sometimes more than that) and, while I wasn't counting, I'd bet I more than doubled my standard daily caloric intake every single day.  I'd eat what I wanted, when I wanted, and it damn well didn't matter what time of the day it was.  If, at 2am, I wanted McDonald's, then that's where I was going.  It was ridiculous, and completely out of control.

With all of this in mind, then, I needed to do several things to change my diet.  I needed to figure out just how many calories I should be consuming to be a healthy adult, and adjust my diet so I could hit that number.  In my research, I found a great Android app called MyFitnessPal that allows me to do both of those things, by calculating my "average daily calorie" level by including a bit of personal information (current height and weight, and weight-loss goals), and allowing me to track all of the food that I eat.  The app is so well designed, in fact, that it couldn't be any easier to track my food.  There is a huge database of food items in the app itself that you can search for.  Also, my personal favorite feature is the bar code scanner, where you can scan the UPC of a food item and do a remote look-up of anything you're eating.  So far, I have yet to find a food that isn't in the database.

For the first month or so, the plan is to simply eat things that will keep my caloric count right in the range of the magic number MFP gave me.  Doing this will cut down my caloric consumption in a huge way while, consequently, causing me to eat healthier things and smaller portions to keep the caloric count down.  I'm not going to be overly stressed about nutrients and specifics at this point because simply cutting the calories and getting in the swing of tracking my food, eating less, and starting to make healthier decisions is a large enough change in itself.

After the first month or so, I plan to start completely adjusting exactly what I'm eating.  Soda, diet or otherwise, will definitely have to be on the way out at this point, and I'm going to need to start looking into eating foods that will give me the right kind of nutrients that I need to help with my training.  As I said, however, this won't come into play until after the first month.

The next thing that I needed to figure out was the question of when and how often I should be eating.  Some people say to eat 6-8 small meals a day.  Other say that 3 square meals with snacks in between is the ticket. I did a decent amount of research to try and figure out what really was the best way to tackle eating, and what I found went against the grain in terms of "popular opinion."  While trolling around on www.reddit.com/r/fitness I saw a post about Martin Berkhan, the founder of something called LeanGains.  I was intrigued, so I checked out his blog, and after several hours of reading through posts and scientific studies, I was sold on his methodology.

Martin Berkhan, for those of you who haven't heard of him, is a nutritionist, fitness trainer, and blogger who founded the LeanGains approach to intermittent fasting.  Intermittent fasting is, just as the name suggests, fasting at different intervals.  There are many approaches to this in the fitness world, and I researched many of them.  The LeanGains approach seemed to make the most sense to me, however.

Let me break it down for you in the simplest of terms.  Your day consists of 24 hours.  During that period, there is a 16 hour period of fasting, and an 8 hour window in which you eat.  While this sounds ridiculous to many, the scheduling of it makes it not so outlandish.  You fast from 8PM every night, until noon the next day.  If you take into account the fact that you'll be sleeping during most of the fasting time, and that your body will eventually get used to eating between 12PM and 8PM, this system works out quite well.

The benefits of this are many.  In an interview with Tony Falaro of EliteFTS, Berkhan himself lists some of the benefits:  "There’s also a range of mental and physiological benefits unique to fasting such as improved insulin sensitivity, increased growth hormone output, and increased mental alertness as well as cardiovascular and neuro-protective benefits. The nutrient partitioning benefits of eating most of your calories in the post-workout period should also be emphasized."

The aforementioned benefits in combination with the ridiculous amount of success stories that I found on Berkhan's blog and across the web made me want to implement this methodology into my own journey.

And so, that cover's the diet end of things:  intermittent fasting while eating to hit a caloric target daily.

Exercise:

For the exercise end of things, I did an equal amount of research.  What I found, again, was many approaches from many different people, all of them similar yet different.  After much reading, I kind of took everything I found and developed my own workout regimen from it.

What I plan to do is equal parts weight training and cardiovascular exercises   Both of these things will be integral to both my weight-loss and to my Tough Mudder training.  I have read too many stories about people who can run like a mother-fucker but died during the Tough Mudder because they did no strength training, and I refuse to let that happen to me.

My workout plan is as follows:  I plan to workout five days a week.  All five days will feature cardio in an alternating form.  Each day, however, will be different in terms of the weight training aspects.  

Here's what my week will look like:

Sunday:  Cardio and Upper Body Weights

Monday:  Cardio and Lower Body Weights

Tuesday:  Off-Day

Wednesday:  Off-Day

Thursday:  Cardio and Upper Body Weights

Friday:  Cardio and Lower Body Weights

Saturday:  Cardio and Core Weights

I plan to follow this work-out pattern for a handful of months, until I reach my goal weight and can start focusing on different types of training (strength training, body recomposition, etc.)

For the cardiovascular exercises, I plan to use a combination of things, from land running, to treadmills, stationary bikes, arc trainers, and elliptical machines.  For the weight training end of things, I plan to use a combination of weight machines and free weights.

And with that, I've covered my Exercise plans.

So there you have it:  the blueprints of my lifestyle change.  With these plans, I hope to change my life and gain the bad-assery that comes with being a Tough Mudder.  

Wish me luck.