Body for Life, Eating for Life, Anti-Inflammatory

A while back I found myself weighing 205 lbs. Im 5′8 and it wasn’t much muscle. I used to be into body building and watching what I eat but then came the professional desk job. I found that I was taking work home, going out to lunch with co-workers and since I am a programmer, I was staying up way too late to get up early enough to go to the gym. So, I went from 180lbs of nice lean muscle to 205 of not so leanness.

A friend of mine told me about the Body for Life book and how much it helped him lose some weight. He let me borrow it and it was very close to how I used to train anyway, so I decided to try it out. In 12 weeks I went from 205lbs to 160lbs. That was pretty dramatic. The diet it suggests is very easy to follow and its nothing crazy. It worked very well.

I maintained the weight for almost a year, then life and work happened and I shot back up to 170 lbs. Not too bad but I wasn’t going to the gym anymore and I wasn’t eating right. That’s when I first got into jiu-jitsu.

I started training 2 nights a week and the weight was coming back off. I was very slow and would get gassed out very quickly. It didn’t help that I have pretty bad asthma on top of being out of shape. An injury and a slow training period shot me back up to 187lbs, so I decided to do my own weight loss plan of eating 6 times a day, with most of it being fruits and vegetables and doing my cardio everyday, with jiu-jitsu 3 days a week. In the first week, I went from 187lbs to 175lbs. The second week I lost another 5lbs. By the third week, I felt tired and weak and would gas out 2 mins into a roll. That’s when it hit me that I was doing it wrong.

So now I’m going back to the Body for Life idea. Since I already know how to train, I found an awesome companion book to the Body for Life book which gives a lot of really good recipes, Eating for Life.

To help with my asthma, I’m switching to an anti-inflammatory diet. Since asthma is caused by inflammation, this diet has already helped me breathe easier and longer when I roll. I found the perfect book to explain the diet and how it can help, so I’m going to combine the Eating for Life information with this book: The Inflammation Free Diet Plan. If you’re asthmatic, this book alone is awesome. Just changing my eating habits to reduce inflammation has been a HUGE help for me. Now, I don’t have to submit simply because I can’t breathe.

So, with the combination of the books above, Im going to track my weight loss and fitness levels and post them every Sunday.