The last part of my health re-fixing journey that's had me take something of a hiatus from the live poker is diet.
As many of you know I did p90x a year ago, and a bounty I put on myself was that for every regular soda I drank before finishing p90x, I owed klink $500. In 3 months of drinking diet mountain dew and pepsi max, I successfully tricked my brain into preferring these diet sodas and I've been drinking diet ever since.
I went from 177 to 160 in no time, and the 12 months since I've kept it at 160 (height 5'9) via my regular eating habits and (lack of) working out. After a year I realized that a sedentary 160 looks kinda crappy compared to a p90x'ish 160, and that the number on the scale isn't the only thing I have to pay attention to. I ignored my diet because, hey, I'm staying at the same weight... not realizing my bodyfat% was climbing slowly and lean muscle mass was decreasing.
When I got the home gym, I realized working out was not going to be enough. I wasn't going to see results over a year if I kept eating fast food 3 times a week, and bad snackyfoods every other day.
So now that I'm paying attention to diet, the question is what diet is best for me. This has always been kinda difficult since there's a million different options and every option says the other one is inferior. Since I'm using starting strength as a basis for my weight training, I tried to see what Mark Rippetoe (author of starting strength) said was best for dieting in conjunction with the weight training program. He said in an article online that people who used either his program or CrossFit found the best results with the zone diet. The next day I bought the book and got to reading.
I like the book because there's no gimmicks about it, and it takes a scientific approach, treating food like medicine. You calculate your lean body mass, plug in your activity level, and find out how many grams of protein you need daily. Through a bunch of fun calculating, I discovered my daily protein requirement is about 85grams.
You divide those 85grams into protein blocks of 7grams. So that's twelve 7g "blocks" that need to be taken like medicine daily. I spend 3blocks for the 3 main meals, and 1 block for three snacks, and keep it even throughout the day. Then I use 12 blocks for carbs (9g of carbs per block) and fat (1.5g of fat per block) then go from there. It's 6 meals with those block distributions. So for example, breakfast is gonna be ~21g protein, ~27g carbs, and ~4.5g fat. The next snack will be 7g protein, 9g carbs, 1.5g fat. And so on. Your results may vary since your bodyfat% is prob different.
The execution of this kind of diet is easy. In practice (being a live grinder) it's been a little challenging. You have to know what kind of stuff to shop for when you're at home, and you have to figure out which food venues near work actually offer options that are reasonable for the diet.
Fortunately there's a Subway 2 blocks from the cardroom, and a 6 inch turkey or turkey/ham on wheat (remove 1 of the bread slices) hits the ratio just about perfect. So when I'm working I can just use a subway diet of sorts. Bread is less preferable to veggies for getting the carbs, but as long as I'm hitting the right numbers I should be fine.
For December I'm going to try and get the form correct on all my lifts, and once January rolls around I'm going to start another log, and have it last a year. It will be pretty boring
but it will have records of all the weight reps and diet logs.
But now that I have a good idea as to how the lifting and the diet schemes are gonna pan out, I can go back to being a Palomar grinder, except I'll be doing it the right way for my health. Woo!
