havingascreen wrote:Right glassy, got your weekly planner all printed out, now going to make that omlette, take it i'm not allowed any cheese
I made some tomato soup from scratch yesterday although did add cream. Is garlic allowed?? Also added veg stock, fresh basil and parsley.
It looks like a diet i could enjoy, thanks for your efforts, now its my turn to make an effort
Brilliant! Please make sure you dont ever go hungry though. If you can follow this menu you will really feel and see the results within a coule of weeks. Garlic is great, yes. Your tomoato soup sounds delicious :)
No, no cheese, keep it very minimal with the dairy products. However, if you feeling like having some cheese (like Wallace), choose just 2 meals in the week to include a small handful of grated cheese. Maybe on your broccoli for instance. Let us know how you getting on with the menu and what modifications you've made. Also, let us know what you had on your reward day. Since the other 6 days are quite light on the complex carbs, you might like to have your favourite rice or past dish or potatoes on your reward day.
Dont eat too little but dont eat as much as before to achieve that fat burning effect. What you should be looking at is around a maximum total of 2500 calories deficit per week than what you were normally eating (assuming you want to lose approximately 1lb-2lbs of body fat) or 500 calories per day (maximum). No more than that, as any more and your body will switch to starvation mode which means it will try to preserve the body fat, rather than lose it. Make sure you drink lots of water. Sometimes the body fools us to thinking we are hungry but actually we just need water. But if you keep to the 5 meals a day, the body wont feel that way, it will feel content and never resort to dastardly tricks such as "hey lets have a chocolate"
Those cravings will be eliminated when you adopt this lifestyle.
This is great stuff havingascreen, you are already becoming a major inspiration here
aruif wrote:garlic's good for you! so i'm sure it will be ok!
i've started having breakfast again - all bran - every day. i used to have special k but i must have over eaten it because the thought of it makes me feel sick now.
i'm on my 3rd day of my food idary. its the old one i used to use which is quite helpful as i can look back and see what i ate and did then that made me lose the weight. :)
Well done! At some point, may I have a look at your food diary? :)
rawr_xoxo wrote:Well usually the muscle groups I work on depends on if said machines are free unfortunately :/
Ive started to do the bike and rowing machine for 40 mins, as opposed to walking on 15% incline for 40 mins, thought that might be an improvement.
And weights wise, I do the thigh abduction, chest press, leg press, ab abductor, the back version of the ab abductor, then do leg pull ups on another weird machine.
Usually Ill swap the ab weight machines for crunches and the medicine ball in the corner if its full, but I dont give the muscles a rest cause they never ache the next day
Please please give the muscles a rest even if they dont ache. Which leads me to wonder how are you doing these exercises? The whole point of resistance exercises (ie weights) is to put enough stresses on your muscles so that the muscle fibres re-inforce itself to handle the extra stress that it has experienced. I am not talking about heavy weights either.
So basically with any resistance exercise you do, regardless of how many reps or how heavy the weights are, your aim is to perform the exercise repeatedly with PROPER TECHNIQUE until you reach the rep that your technique begins to fail. It is that point where your muscles are experiencing the extra stress and the point where you STOP that set. DO NOT continue the set if your technique is lost because from there the load will not be focussed on the specific muscles you are supposed to be working on anymore and potentially you can injure yourself. ON the other hand, if you just do say 10 reps of an exercise and stop before you actually felt any slight pain, then that exercise was not effective. You need to work the muscles until you feel a little pain (not agony), and where your technique still just about holds form.
I think in your case, since you do a lot of gym work already, is to do all your exercises in 3 sets and 15 reps. So choose the weights that enable you to feel the pain while holding the form.
So if you enjoy going to the gym every day, I would like to see you work on different muscle groups (2 different types of exercises for each group). Mix the pattern a bit too. And have at LEAST ONE DAY REST.
If however you want to work on whole body in one session then you MUST rest 2 or 3 days, as long as the workouts you have done are of high intensity.
here is what I recommend for a second phase of first 4-6 weeks (guideline):
Sunday: REST
Monday: GYM: 5min cardio warmup of your choice, Warm up stretches (hold 10 seconds each), 20min treamill interval run (alternate between 2min moderate intensity, 30seconds high intensity), Upper body resistance workout (2-3 sets, 15 reps, 45 sec rest, 2 different exercises each muscle group) EG: for chest, chest flies and press-ups. (warm down cardio of your choice, 10 mins), cool down stretches (hold for 25sec each)
Tuesday: GYM: 5min cardio warm up of your choice, Warm up stretches, 2000m row at medium intensity setting, Lower body resistance workout (2-3 sets, 15 reps, 45 sec rest, 2 different exercises each muscle group) EG: for quads, do Lunges plus Leg Pulls, Core blast (a 15min core work blast including crunches, lower back curls, plank, sit ups etc). 10min easy cool down cardio of your choice, cool down stretches.
Wednesday: REST
Thursday: Gym: Same as Monday.
Friday: GYM: Same as Tuesday.
Saturday: Either rest or do a stretching class, or Pilates, or Yoga.
Sunday: Either rest or do a jog around the park, if you feeling energetic then do fat burn cardio circuit class.
This kind of program will both keep your body working even during the rest periods. And by all means the parts of your body you wish to enhance toning for, do more sets on, but dont neglect your other muscle groups otherwise this will cause you imbalance.
Would anyone like me to fine tune a program for you including the specific exercises to do? You can do it at home, work, gym or park. You dont even need to go to a gym to get exercising. Otherwise lets know what you are doing, we can get ideas from each other :)
I tell you what I am doing right now. On weekday evenings I go to Battersea Park to umpire cricket matches. Now since I work during most days too, I find I do not have much time to go to the gym at all what with weekends taken up playing cricket. So what do I do, well I run from wherever I am to Battersea Park, arriving at least half hour earlier before I start my work. That run serves as my cardio warm up to do some body resistance exercise using stretch bands! With those stretch bands I can work on every muscle group at all intensities. And boy are they effective. So somehow i manage to squeeze in all the workouts I need despite the little time I have. There is always a way round everything, you just need to apply some thought in your schedule. So even if you dont like exercising at home because of perhaps the family intrusion, there is always the great outdoors.
If I had kept that to myself on my trip to London people would be looking out for a babe rather than me with my generous thighs!
