Staying in Shape

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the things I'm concerned will fall by the wayside if I pick WoW back up is my recent dedication to getting/staying in shape. Thanks to some great information provided by reddit.com/r/fitness, I am in the best shape of my life. I've lost 19 lbs over the past 4 months, as well as trained for a marathon and gotten much stronger. I have tried in the past to get in better shape, but never with the success I had this time. What was the difference? There were two big things, in my mind:


1) Realizing that calories were what was important for weight loss, not whether something was "healthy" or not

I feel like this is the biggest misconception that I've always had. In the past when I tried to lose weight I always went with the approach of "eat healthy food!" This invariably led to a diet that was somewhat effective at first, but eventually saw stalled progress and led to me having intense cravings for junk food and desserts. In retrospect, this approach was flawed in a variety of ways. First, defining something as "healthy" can be highly subjective - as an example, an 8 ounce glass of Orange Juice has the same amount of sugar as three Oreos! Second, trying to restrict your diet to only healthy foods isn't really sustainable long term for most people (certainly not for me). The key to successfully losing weight and keeping it off is making changes that are sustainable long term; ya know, the old "it's a marathon, not a sprint" cliche. And finally, the weight you gain/lose is (almost) entirely dependent on whether or not you're consuming more calories than you're expending. You could eat nothing but ice cream all day, and as long as you are consuming fewer calories than you expend through the day, you would lose weight. Conversely, you could eat nothing but spinach and baked chicken all day and if you eat more calories than you expend, you would gain weight.

I started tracking calories on MyFitnessPal and aimed for a 500 deficit a day (the equivalent of 1 lb a week). My weight loss was pretty consistent and I would highly recommend trying this out if you've ever wanted to lose weight but struggled with it. Doing this also allowed me to treat myself to desserts and junk food on a semi-regular basis as long as it fit into my daily calorie limits (in fact, I'm eating a Twix Ice Cream bar as I type this). This made it much easier to stick to a diet long term instead of removing all manner of tasty foods from my "healthy" diet.

2) Following a specific program in the gym

It's kind of funny and sad at the same time to look back on what I had done in the past to try and get in better shape. So much wasted time. I followed a popular program created by someone who actually knew what they were doing, rather than just randomly picking an exercise to do at the gym based on a whim. The program made sure to focus on all movements equally, rather than just the muscles you can see from the front, which is definitely a mistake I've made before. It also had specific instructions about when to increase the weight on a certain lift and by how much.

I've changed up the program that I'm following after 4 months as I'd like to focus on building muscle a little more instead of just focusing on strength. This new routine has me going to the gym 4 days a week, though the workouts have been fairly short so far. I'd love to stay with it and be able to join the 1,000 lb club (combined Bench Press, Squat, Deadlift) within the next 6 months; I'm at ~864 right now using predicted 1 rep max. But with winter coming and Wow at home ... will I still be motivated to do that?