Male Weight Loss Now

The results are in from the Weekend Warrior Challenge. This challenge is about achieving specific fitness and health goals during the time of the week that are usually the weakest for me – the Weekend. This is usually when the baddest habits show themselves as a sort of reward for the best habits of the week. Odd isn’t it?

Here were my goals and the results:

• Walk 20 miles during the week – completed the 20th mile by 10:30 am on a sunny Saturday morning. I walk 4 miles either outside (my preferred method) or on the treadmill depending on the weather. Last week I walked 12 miles outside and 8 miles inside. The legs are strong!

• 5 Strength Workouts during the week - completed all 5. This consists of 2 alternating routines that I have been doing for many years.

• Eat less than 2,000 Calories Per Day – done.  This was the biggie for me. I usually stay pretty close to the refrigerator on the weekend -  looking for a little calorie-lovin’  on the weekends. But I stuck to the plan. Being hungry a lot sucks and I am getting tired of the look of the  baby carrot bag.

Here are all the other people from around the world that have also done the Challenge for the weekend. I am thinking that we need to do this every weekend. Thanks to all of these people for making this as much as fun as I could have by not enjoying myself.

• Brandon from So Long Fat Ass
• Carla from The Right Fit
• Lynne from Losing Lynne
• Steve from 265 and Falling
• Kat from Kat’s Adventures in Dietland
• Sean from Learn Fitness
• Mac from Get Fit Slowly
• Andrew from Andrew is Getting Fit
• Karyn from Fitness Road Trip
• Josie from 35 and Shrinking
• Marissa from Fatty Slims Down
• Jeremy from Stellar Path
• Mike from SUB6
• Andrew from 100 Pounds in a Year
• Erin from Erin Takes Control
• Alissa from Gluten Free Pumpkins
• Craig from My Life, Take Eight
• Ryan from No More Bacon
• Chad from Reconstructing 30
• beej from Journey to Satisfaction

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If you think that you eat and drink  too much or exercise too little on the weekend, you aren’t the only one. Worldwide, there are many fat men (and women) hanging their heads at the end of the weekend, after marathon eating bouts. This is especially apt for those of us living in the frozen north where snow still covers the ground. We frequently eat for sport here. Some guys even know in advance, despite their quixotic weight-reduced vision for themselves, that they will be heavier at the end of the weekend.

Here is a chance to kick that lame habit. This coming weekend, I am participating in a world wide event called the “Weekend Warrior Challenge.” The weekend is the time of the week, when habits soften and discipline wains. The goal of the challenge is to band together and encourage each other to maintain strong habits.

As part of this event, each of us are creating 2 or 3 measurable and specific fitness or health goals that we will adhere to this weekend. For example, here are mine:

1. Maintain calorie intake below 2,000 calories on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
2. Complete 5 complete gym work outs this week (already at 1 on Monday)
3. Walk a total of 20 miles this week

Since I keep my daily calories well  below 2,000 calories during the week, I am just extending that practice to the weekend. Since I am an active male, my calorie requirements are between 2,400 and 2,600 calories per day. So you can see the above food intake keeps me at a calorie deficit. So my goals this weekend are to complete a week long goal of exercise, and maintain low food intake that I had already started earlier in the week – actually Sunday.

The details for the event are at Weekend Warrior Challenge . This event is just a bunch of nice people helping each other out and having some fun. Check it out and see if this works for you.  Everyone is welcomed.

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The Problem

One of the biggest questions that guys have about weight loss,  is how to get rid of belly fat.  Belly fat is a nuisance. I know that the only thing you want to do with belly fat is to kill it. You  don’t want to talk about, or complain about it or even exercise it. You just want to point a laser gun at the blob, and zap it into vapor.

Belly fat is what being fat is all about. The love handles are sort of Baja-fat – it is just belly fat that hangs over your hips and bulges out of your shirt. In this article I am going to tell you how to lose belly fat. Let me tell you a few things first.

The health risks associated with belly fat are huge. Because of all of the six pack ab adverts out there on the net and TV, the advertisers  give you the definite belief, that you need to exercise your belly fat away. Well, they are at least a little correct, but mostly wrong. They want you to buy their products. Don’t be fooled into buying their crap.

Don’t Get Fooled

Doing intensive ab work – crunches, tightening muscles, hundreds of push-ups is not going to make your belly fat go away. Most likely, it may actually increase your abdomen size. This is because, without removing belly fat, your ab work WILL build muscle below the established fat layers. This increased muscle will bulge your belly out further.

In order to have six pack abs, you need to remove the layers of subcutaneous fat that lies over whatever muscle is there. While you are doing that, you need to slowly build the underlying muscle. The truth is that you can only get six pack abs by reducing belly fat. In order to reduce belly fat, you will also be reducing your overall body fat. Makes sense, right?

Here’s What To Do

Here are the two things that you need to do:

• Eat Within Limits – you need to eat less calories than your body needs.  Your body is like an inbox for food. Only, in this case,  when the inbox is overflowing, the body stores the food as fat. There is too much food going into your body, than is getting used. In this case you get fatter because your body is over-fed. You need to find out how much food your body needs and eat less than that. It is that simple.

• Exercise Daily – the male human being is an animal. All animals are physical beings that are designed to use their bodies regularly. We are not designed to sit and watch TV, play video games or eat for sport.  Create an exercise program that suits you. Many guys hate working out. I know how they feel. I have been in the situation also and it is the reason I am writing you now. But most guys think that exercising needs to hurt. It doesn’t. It does not need to hurt, but you need to get moving.  You need to get both cardio exercise (exercising using your lungs and heart) and strength training. Cardio burns fat now. Strength training builds lean body mass that increases your metabolism rate, which burns calories all day long on your behalf.  Metabolism is like a flywheel on your car – get that thing turning and it keeps burning and burning calories. Just do it.

Steps 1 and 2 must become a habit.  You have a problem with food and exercise. You need new habits. That means, you must know a day before what you will eat (and not eat) and you need to know at what time you will  exercise the next day.  This does not happen naturally. When you plan a specific time to exercise, only then will you do it.

What Will Likely Go Wrong

Now here is what is going to happen. You will start your “habit” for one day and you will feel good about it. The next day, maybe you will do it again, but the thrill of having achieved your food and exercise goal will be gone. Even worse, you will still see yourself as a fat man. This is the critical point. Stay with me here. This is where your breakthrough will occur.

Whether you can see it or not, even one day of exercising and eating within bounds will have an effect. It will reverse weight gain. In a week’s time, you will be able to measure weight loss. Within your new habits, you are not wasting any effort. It is an investment and it is paying off. Give it time and effort.

Be easy but firm with yourself.   If you have finally decided to lose the gut, you will see that the two steps above are  really a simple recipe.  It is like knowing the recipe for a ham and cheese sandwich. The recipe is bread, ham and cheese. There is not much thinking required….you just need to do it.

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It is the weekend now, where I live. Many people use the weekend to relax and take it easy after a busy week. It is nice to get up at 9 or 10 am and have a slow day. You probably get even less activity on the weekend than during the weekdays. You know what I mean….football games, movies, TV, and elbows on the table (know what I mean?). Weight loss is a 7 day per week event and you need to watch what you do on the weekend also. You may not be surprised to hear the fact that in 2002, 25 percent of adult Americans did not participate in any leisure time physical activities in the past month (see source below).

Normally, I get in about 4 trips to the gymn per week. While I am at the gymn, my routine consists of three unique types of activities:

1. Mild stretching (touch the toes, calf stretch)
2. 1 hour walk on treadmill at 3.7 mph (with cool down period of 5 minutes, a total of 4 miles walking)
3. 35 minutes of weights.

I am pretty happy with this routine. I have been doing this routine since my arthroscopic surgey in September 2009. Prior to that, I used to run 4 miles instead of walking. For now, the running is out of the question, because of the damage it has done to me left knee. But I am OK with walking.

I used to be a pretty intense individual and ran 5 miles per day, 5 times a week from 1978 until about 1995. I used to run with colleagues at work at lunch. After I started doing weights again in 1995 regularly, I dropped back to 4 miles in addition to the weight program. Walking on the treadmill is not as exciting or spirited as running with the guys, but I don’t mind.

For weights, I alternate two separate routines so that I am not working the same muscle groups day upon day. Here are my two routines. I work these exercises in a circuit – meaning, I do one of each of these exercises on the list and then go back and do two more sets (a total of 3 sets):

Weight Routine #1 - Triceps, Back, Forearms & Core (3 Sets)

Exercise	Reps	Weight
Crunches on Exercise Ball	30	NA
Lat Pulldown - machine	15	130 lbs
Tricep Pulldown - machine	15	70 to 80 lbs
Seated Row - machine	15	95
Forearm Curls - barbells	15	90
Torso Rotation - machine	15	110
Side Crunches - back hyperextension thingy	15	NA

Weight Routine #2 - Chest, biceps, shoulders, core and traps (3 sets)

Exercise	Reps	Weight
Chest Press - machine	15	130lbs
Bicep Curl - machine	15	95 to 105 lbs
Shoulder Press - machine	15	65 lbs
Incline Press - dumbells at 45 degrees	15	45 lbs
Shoulder Shrugs - dumbbells	15	95 lbs/arm
Chest Flies - dumbbells	15	50 lbs/arm
Roman Chair	20 raises	NA

Just now, after I began writing this article, I got excited about working out, and so I went to the gymn, did my schtick and just got home.  I like the feeling of having the power and peace in my bones and muscles after I workout. I did routine #1. I realized while I was there, that there are few other details that I always follow with the above routines.

My rules for myself:

1. Before each exercise, I take 10 DEEP breaths. These are not the kind of breaths that your brain tells you about. These are the deep breaths that your lungs and body need. If while taking one of these breaths, I feel a little faint or winded, I am breathing way too fast. Let your lungs tell you how long your breaths need to be. Turn your brain off.  Be nice to yourself – you only get one body per person.
2. After doing each exercize, I immediately walk to the next station on the circuit. There, I take the above breaths before the next thing I do.
3. If I need to stop in the middle of a set of weights for any reason, that means I add one extra repetition to that set of weights, for each hesitation.  No exceptions. You need to have firm, but supporting  rules for yourself.

I am feeling good now. How about you? Are you getting any exercise? As a reminder, I am not talking about making any changes. I have some weight to lose also.  The above routines are what I really do, at least four times per week. Take a look at what you do. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in their publication “Dietary Guidelines for Americans -2005″, recommends that you need at least 30 minutes of exercise daily (that means 7 days),  beyond what is part of your normal daily routines (driving, walking around at work,  housework, brushing your teeth, etc..).

Don’t change anything yet. Why? Because, when you start making daily changes based upon things you hear or read or listen to (including this and my other articles in this series), you make half-hearted changes that don’t last.  New Years resolutions are the perfect example of empty promises.  Listen to the whole story and make small and lasting changes. Next time I will talk to you about making changes.

Source – Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, Surveillance for Certain Health Behaviors Among Selected Local Areas—United States, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2002, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), 53, No SS-05. http://www.cdc.gov/brfss/.

Get your free E-Book on how to lose belly fat now – Click the book image to your left – provide your name and e-mail address and you will be reading this book in minutes – FREE.

As time goes by, I am becoming increasingly skeptical of PURE physical fitness programs for male weight loss. You may think that this is pure lunacity. Maybe it  is equally valid for both the male and female, but most easily overlooked for us guys. Honestly, beating yourself to death at the gymn needs to be balanced by your powerful inner conditions.  I recently saw a useful article by Jody Page of  Pacific Weight Loss “Male Fitness – Effective or Not.”

In this piece, Jody mentions the need for fitness, and being fit, is naturally an important part of living a longer life. But you already knew that. But perhaps what you do not know, is that your health, in general, is determined heavily by your inner strength.  By inner strength, I refer to the quality of your emotional state. In other words, are you emotionally feeling good? Can you easily correct bad moods? Are you more likely to be optimistic than pessimistic? Can you keep you mind from wondering into worry, anger or fear? Over a lifetime, negative feelings will drain you of energy that your body needs to live a longer life.

This same type of thinking can improve your fitness incredibly. When you are doing any type of fitness, clear your mind of any negative feelings. ANY amount of negative emotional energy you carry into your fitness program, the less you can focus on looking and feeling better physically. Believe it. Keep your emotional house clean and your progress will explode.

Jody mentions using yoga or meditation to manage your personal state. My experience says that one of the side benefits of exercising is better emotion control. Many years ago, I used to work as a field engineer at a construction site for a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. This was in the post-Three Mile Island-era when the nuclear industry was in a “melt-down.” There was always a lot of pressure in maintaining the construction schedule and maintaining quality. To manage my attitude, I used to exercise before I got to the job site each morning.  I was smooth all day as a result of my fitness regime. So it works, as long as you do it.

So, long story short,  you can see that it is sort of a “Catch 22″ situation: more exercise lowers stress, but you need to lower your stress to have enough energy to make fitness effective.  But the only thing you need to remember from this, is just do a little bit every day in managing your emotion and fitness. Every little bit not only helps, but works.

Get your free E-Book on how to lose belly fat now – Click the book image to your left – provide your name and e-mail address and you will be reading this book in minutes – FREE.