So, my story:
I once was an exercise fiend. I wrestled in high school and was in the Navy and tend to think that if you aren't dripping with sweat, it doesn't count as a "workout".
But as you get older, life gets more complicated. I'm not convinced that metabolisms actually slow down on their own much as you age, but rather I no longer have time for a 3-hour intense workout 6 days a week like when I was a wrestler.
Worse, I've had a string of small to moderate injuries over the past 10 years. That's been the big issue for me. My body doesn't recover from a workout the way it used to, so muscle pulls, shin splints and really bad soreness have taken quite a toll.
Worse still, I started noticing an unusal pain in my left knee a couple of years ago. It turned out to be a torn meniscus. It's not a terrible injury in that it doesn't really affect any moving parts, it just causes pain. And you can just slice-off the torn part and live with a slightly thinner pad between your leg bones. But between conservative doctors taking months to authorize an MRI (perhaps I needed to act like it hurt more?), months to wait for surgery, and months for the newly shaped mensicus to wear-itself a new surface for smooth knee motion, I spent more than a year doing little or no exercise. Over the summer, I gradually started getting back into it, mostly with biking, since it is low impact and highly uniform (with running, one misstep can cause a major injury when you are out of shape).
I'm 5'7 and when I was 18 I wrestled at 135 lb. Two months ago my weight peaked at 178 lb. I know that in the grand scheme of things, that's not terrible, but it isn't what I'm used to or want to be. So after a halted start in September for a bad calf pull, I've had two solid months of the best workouts I've had in many years.
The formula that has worked for me is a little bit of running and a lot of biking, both on machines in my house. When I ran for the first time in several years in September, I could barely run a mile in 12 minutes. Now I'm running 2.5 miles in 25 minutes. Pair that with 45+ minutes of biking and I'm burning 600-700 cal/day, 4-5 days a week.
The other part is, of course, diet. I'm not a healthy eater and I don't much care for healthy eating, instead opting for a calorie-based diet. When I wrestled in high school, I did a "soft prezel" diet, which meant simply that the only thing I ate for lunch was a soft prezel. It isn't a big change, but dropping a few hundred calories a day means you can lose weight. Today, the approach is two-pronged:
1. I used to eat fast food for most lunches. I like getting out of the office and being by myself in the back corner of a McDonalds (Wendys, Subway...) for a half hour. I've replaced that 600 cal lunch with a 150 cal protein bar or bag of prezels.
2. No alcohol. A few years ago I switched to diet coke, but drinking a glass of beer/wine or two a day is still another 150-300 calories. So cutting that out has a big impact.
Now, this diet only applies during the week. On weekends, I still do what I want. But even over 5-days, it's something on the order of 2-3000 calories. As if I skipped a day of eating. Combined with 2500 calories of exercise, it is a delta of 5,000 calories a week.
I'm down 12 lb in 2 months, though that includes a two-week period where I was sick and worked-out less, but also stopped eating (lost 6 lb in two weeks ,gained a lb back the next).
My body feels good; no shin splints and manageable knee pain. The muscle soreness is still pretty bad, but that's a "good" pain. We'll see where I'm at in another two months, but my rough goal right now is to lose 5 lb a month for 2-4 more months.
The main thing about working-out is to do whatever you can do to make it work for you. Everyone has differences in what they are used to or can get used to:
lisab said:
Yeah, it's hard getting into the habit of exercise. I have fallen in and out of exercise so many times in my life! Here's my advice.
In the first six-months-to-a-year, you can't give yourself any wiggle room. What I mean is: you're looking for a way to convince yourself to do exercise, a logical reason that will make your energy surge, an argument to use as a bargaining chip that will make it easy to do it...stop, just stop trying to find the perfect leverage. It doesn't exist.
In this first phase, which is the hardest phase, you must do your exercise without questioning why. It's like...paying taxes. Laundry. Going to work. These things you just do, not because you want to, but because you must. You simply must.
That's absolutely key. No compromise. I'm a procrastinator and exercise brings the procrastination out of people. I'm constantly trying to decide if I should take today off or work out today. Oh, you worked-out yesterday so you don't absolutely have to today? Are you sore? Would you get a better workout tomorrow? Home from work 15 minutes late? IRRELEVENT! If you aren't injured, do it. It isn't a choice. It isn't optional. You have to do it.
One tidbit of advice: do your exercise in the morning. It gets it out of the way first thing, before things happen that will derail your plan.
That's a personal thing. If you can do that, awesome. But I'm not a morning person and the only time I've been able to work out at 5:00 am is when I had a drill instructor in my face. Also, because I work out hard, unless I'm already in great shape, a workout wrecks me for a few hours so it would interfere with my work if I tried to work out first. So I work out when I get home from work, even if it means I don't eat dinner until 9:00 pm.
There will come a day when you will wake up before your alarm goes off, and feel like you can't wait to jump into your running shoes and run for an hour. That's a marvelous feeling!
There's never been a day in my life for that in the morning -- but right now because things are going well, I'm back in the minset that I love working-out because I'm excited to see what I can do today.
[edit] Oh, and an added incentive for me: I turn 39 in a few weeks. I'm determined to be in as good or better condition at 40 than I was at 30.
Injuries take weeks or months to heal, assuming they heal.
