The Ultimate Reset - Week 1

I've been doing this program from Beachbody called the Ultimate Reset. It is a cleanse, but I don't have to starve myself or just drink only juice for a month so I figured I could handle it. I'll explain basically what it is. It's a 21-day program where you follow recipes made with whole foods and take various supplements. It is set up in three phases which are seven days each.

This seemed to be the right time to do the program because it is recommended that you do not do any strenuous exercise during the 21 days. Since I just finished up my last race for the summer I would normally take a little time off to give myself some rest. Well, that time for me often ends up being where I get back into some bad habits and gain back some weight. This way I can take a good amount of time off to recover without gaining weight. In fact, I should end the Reset quite a bit under where I started which was already pretty light for me.

I don't want to go into too many specifics about the program. You can get more information at UltimateReset.com if you want to know more. I would rather just focus briefly on my experience during this first week.

When I weighed in on Day One I was 169 lbs. Today I weighed in at 161 lbs. That's as light as I can ever remember being since college. I don't know exactly what to attribute that to, but with that kind of loss I think there must be a good amount of water weight. My biggest change has been giving up diet soda. I have been drinking a lot of Pepsi Max lately. I often lose track of how much I drink, but I'm sure it was a lot. That has been a challenge. I'll call it my very own Pepsi Challenge. The first few days my head was throbbing and I had  a feeling of just not being sharp mentally. It was hard to focus and I felt groggy. This did go away and I'm feeling pretty good now. I used to just be tired and feel like I have to drink a soda to get my energy back. Now I don't seem to have that dip that I use to have.

The food is also a big part of that. It's mostly things you would expect. Lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and little dairy. It does adapt as you move through the phases so there are things you can eat in the first week that you won't have later. One thing I noticed is that there are a lot of Japanese food items. Many of them are very alkaline-type foods which are good to counter the normal acidic foods that we usually eat. There is an entire collection of recipes and an online cooking segment for each recipe that you can access with your Team Beachbody username and password when you purchase the program. My favorite recipe so far has been the Nori Rolls, which are a lot like sushi. That's something I think I will eat even after the program is done.

One thing that really surprised me was the feeling I had during the first week which is very similar to working out. They say in the program that you are giving your body a workout from the inside out. Your body is working to remove the toxins that you've been putting in it for years. This is part of the reason why you aren't supposed to work out. Your body is already working hard.

The last thing I wanted to mention is the supplements. There are some pills that you take each day as well as a packet of green powder that you mix with water called Alkalinize. I do not like Alkalinize. I have to plug my nose and then I can drink it down, but I just do not like the taste. I looked up the ingredients and did some research on the benefits and it is some good stuff in there, but I have a hard time with that one.

So those are some of my thoughts on the first week. I'll be posting more of a full review on PromiseToBeFit.com as I go through the next two weeks. I'm already 1/3 of the way there so I'm confident that I can make it through the program.

"Your journey won't always be easy. But like all journeys of growth, it can change your life for the better."
 - Isabelle Daikeler - Cocreater of Shakeology and Beachbody Ultimate Reset

Still Fits

I had a red carpet premiere event of a video I worked on recently. I decided that I should probably wear a suit to the event. But wait, I have a tux that I had to buy back in 1992 when I was in my college Concert Chorale. I have no idea when the last time was that I wore the tux, but I thought I would try it on to see if it fits. Sure enough it fit just fine. I was able to wear the tux for the night pretty comfortably.

At the time I purchased the tux originally (1992), I had been through my first season of college cross-country. I wasn't able to put weight on if I tried, so it's pretty impressive that I am able to wear anything that I used to wear at that time. It's a great feeling to know that even after all the weight I put on since college, I have been able to get myself back to my college shape.

I've started up my second week of Insanity: Asylum this week. I feel like I've hit it pretty hard and I'm really feeling strong right now. I weighed in today and I'm down four pounds from my weigh-in last week. Some of that is probably water weight, but it's still good to be back down under 170 again. That's pretty low for me, but I think I can probably still drop about five more pounds by the end of the 30-day program.

“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.”

—Jim Rohn

I Made It

I made it to Bloomington, Indiana after almost ten total hours of driving today. I needed to go down to Iowa for work this morning and then left from there. It looked like the GPS was going to match my printed directions pretty well so I trusted it. Not always a good idea. I went through so many small towns and took so many turns when I should have just stayed on one road for the first hour. After that it was all good. It was about 80 degrees outside so I tried to take advantage of not being in a hurry and made a lot of stretch stops. I also listened to about half of the audio version of Tony Dungy's book - Uncommon. Very inspirational stuff. I must say that I got a little emotional when he was talking about the 400 meter runner in the Olympics who pulled his hamstring coming around the last turn. His dad came from out of the stands to help him finish the race. That's my all-time most memorable Olympic moment.

My legs were getting pretty stiff from all that time in the car so I really had to be deliberate about getting out every once in a while and stretching. My back had been bothering me for the past couple of weeks. I saw my chiropracter and massage therapist yesterday to try to get ready. I've also spent a lot of time with my rumble roller lately. Overall, now that I'm here I feel pretty good. I felt like I should have taken advantage of the high temperatures lately by doing some training on the track, but I didn't want to take a chance on doing anything that would make me too sore, especially with my lower back issues lately.

Tomorrow's the big day for me. I run the 400 meters in the later afternoon. It is set up as a timed final for my age group and we currently have enough guys where there would be two heats. It's nice to not have to run a preliminary round, but I'm not sure how they will set up the heats. We've often had guys who sign up and then don't show so it's possible that we could have one heat.

So my preparation for today was just to try to stay loose. No running and no workout. I'll do a little foam rolling on the rumble roller tonight and then again tomorrow. My diet for today was a couple of grilled chicken wraps for lunch, an apple and Gatorade for snack, and a turkey sub with a lot of vegetables for supper. I'll see what the hotel has for breakfast tomorrow. I have some Shakeology and a shaker cup and I will have that sometime in the morning.

The Shakeology Cleanse

I've got a lot to cover so I'm going to try to get it all down while it's still in my brain.

I'm less than a week out from the USATF Indoor Masters National Championships in Indiana. I don't yet have my entire trip planned out , but I'm pretty close. Just working out some details of what time I can leave on Thursday. My first race is the 400 meters on Friday afternoon at 3:30 pm so I've got a little time if I didn't want to get all the way there on Thursday night. They are going to run the 400 as a timed final, so we should have a couple of heats and I'm not sure how they put them together. Then I think they just go by time for the places. So you could win your heat and not place. I guess I would rather do that than have to run prelims and a final.

I have been tracking my exercise time for a thing at church called the Journey to Jerusalem where we log our miles and try to make it a certain distance by Easter. As I tracked my time over the past few weeks I realized that I have not taken a day off from exercise during that time. I also did about a week and a half of two workouts a day. Some of those workouts were Insanity: The Asylum followed by P90X2. No wonder my back is mad at me. My lower back problems have returned, but I have stayed ahead of it so far. I had a few days at work with a lot of standing and that seems to be the worst thing for it. I just need to be really careful right now not to push it too hard.

I also weighed in last Friday and the scale showed 172 lbs. That's probably lower than I usually am at this time of the year, but when thinking about having a national track meet next weekend, that's a little higher than I would like to be. I still think I need to take about a second off of my 400 times that I ran so far this year and the lighter I can be while still maintaining strength, the faster I should be. I don't want to add too much more cardio into my workouts and I realized that it is probably my diet more than anything right now that is keeping me above 170 lbs. It's odd to think that not too long ago I was 200 lbs and would have been more than happy to be under 190.

What I decided to do was something called the Shakeology Cleanse. I will go into more detail on what it is on Promisetobefit.com, but basically it is replacing breakfast, lunch, and dinner with a shake. Then you only eat fruits and vegetables for the rest of your snacks. You're supposed to do it for three days. I am just doing it for one as a test run. Drinking the shakes is the easy part because I have three different kinds here at home and there is a lot of variety in some of the recipes. The eating of only fruits and vegetables the rest of the time was the difficult part. I think I could do this for three days and I'm sure it would really take some weight off in a short period of time.

What a month

February was a very busy month. I haven't posted to the blog much this month and probably haven't been doing a very good job checking in with the people I am coaching. I had a big project at work that took up a lot of time including nights and weekends. The problem is that even now that the project is almost done, everything else has built up behind it. It's like being gone on vacation for three weeks and coming back to everything that has come in during that time, only without the break of actually being on vacation.

So here's a quick update. I decided to run the USA Track & Field Masters National Indoor Championships in a couple of weeks. I plan to run the 400 and the 200 meters. Since I am not currently training on a track all of my workouts will be Beachbody programs. I'm still going through P90X2 and plan to stay on schedule, but I have also added Insanity: The Asylum workouts as well. I think the Asylum workouts help me to train my speed and endurance as much as possible without actually running on a track.

I'm currently doing 2-a-day workouts on about half of the days each week. Typically this would be some kind of cardio workout in the morning and then the P90X2 workout at night. I may also work in a high intensity cross-trainer workout for 20 minutes when I can get away at work. If I do the cross-trainer then I only do one other workout. I need to work on my endurance and also burn off a little fat. I'm about 7 lbs heavy right now for where I would like to be for competition. I'll need to focus a little more on the diet and may do a Shakeology cleanse this week.

I'm also planning to move to Phase 3 of the P90X2 program. I hear the workouts are pretty intense so that will be a good thing right about now. I'll take part of my competition week as the start of a recovery week which will include a few days of Yoga. I've got it all figured out in my head so we'll see how my body responds.

I'll try to update a little more often than I have been lately. It helps to keep me on track and think through what I am doing. We'll see how this all works out. Last year was the first time that I ran an indoor meet for a long time. This year I ran three indoor meets so far so I have at least been on the track. The competition looks pretty good for the Indoor Championships so I will have to step up my training, especially this week.

The cooking experiment

I've been trying out some new recipes lately in an effort to help with the dinner around the house. I also wanted to make sure I am incorporating some P90X2 friendly meals for dinner. So far I have tried three recipes from either teambeachbody.com or the P90X2 diet guide. One has been moderately successful with the family and that was a breakfast frittata. The other two did not go so well.

Normally we do pretty well for having healthy dinners. My biggest problem is that I am a pretty picky eater, especially when it comes to things that are good for you. I could eat cheeseburgers, hot dogs, and pizza every day. But I have to choke down a chicken breast or most vegetables, especially cooked veggies. The rest of the family likes them, so that leaves me to either force myself to eat them or grab something else for myself.

So I picked out a few recipes from the P90X2 diet guide that I decided I would make. My first attempt was fish tacos. Now I'm sure that when prepared by someone who knows what they are doing these are probably delicious. The problem is that instead of someone who knows what they are doing, I attempted to make these. Needless to say they did not turn out so well. My son keeps reminding me of the time that we had fish that didn't taste like anything.

As I mentioned, the frittatas turned out well. For the kids I cheated a bit. What they got was more of a ham and cheese omelette. Mine was completely egg whites, but for theirs I still used some yolks. It's hard to mess up eggs too much and I have been making omelettes for years, so it's a small victory.

Yesterday I made up some chicken bacon ranch wraps. It's one way that I can eat chicken and enjoy it. It also has a good mix of vegetables inside that I can make up to bring to work. It's a complete meal all wrapped up in one convenient package. My son didn't like that there were onions in it and my daughter took all of the insides out and just ate the tortilla shell. My wife ate hers, but only wanted a little bit because she was not very hungry when we started to eat.

So I guess the moral is that I can still make up these foods for my lunches, but maybe I should stick to homemade whole wheat pizza when I cook for the family. I know they like that.

My Diet Plan

Diet is a very important element of health and fitness. While I've followed a number of different plans over the years I haven't settled on just one. Rather I have taken elements from many of the programs and incorporated them into my everyday eating program.

A diet is no good if you can't stick to it and your progress will often be lost as soon as you go off the diet. So I have decided to stop with dieting and just use things I can follow all the time.

Although I generally eat things that I want, I do try to follow these rules:
1) Eat 5 to 6 times a day.
2) Consume most of my carbohydrates at the beginning of the day.
3) Try not to eat after 7pm unless I have just finished a workout (then it's usually a recovery drink, Shakeology, or whey protein powder).
4) Eat 5 servings of fruit and vegetables each day (can include Shakeology).
5) If I don't like it I don't need to eat it.
6) I don't deprive myself of foods I love, but I don't need to go overboard either.
7) If I'm full, stop eating.

That last rule is one of the most important, especially if weight loss is your goal. This is a key principle of a program called Winning Weighs. Imagine your body is like a car and you fill it up with fuel. If you keep filling after the tank is full you will end up spilling gas all over. In your body the excess food that usually would get used for energy is not needed so it is converted to fat for use later. Since you're probably not going to be going for an extended period of time without food, you most likely don't want that fat.

Whatever you do for your nutrition plan, find something you can stick with and that gets you the results you want. I could stick to an all pizza and peanut butter cup diet, but it probably would not help me to run faster or feel fit and healthy.