Body For Life is written by Bill Phillips who has been doing this for a long time. One thing I like about this book is that it has lots of pictures of before and after. It is just amazing transformation for many people. They have a website, Body For Life that I check out every now and then. It is a pretty good website and I find a couple of things to download especially their charts. The book has two parts, the exercises and the meal planning.

The exercise itself has two parts as well. The strength training (weight lifting) and cardiovascular training. The strength training is broken down to two sections, the upper body (shoulders, biceps, triceps, back and pecs) and the lower body (calves, quads, hamstring and abs). The schedule is set up to do weight training 3 times a week, one week it would be Monday and Friday for upper body, Wednesday for lower body, then next week would be Monday and Friday for lower body and Wednesday for upper body. It may look like not enough training to make a difference, but let me tell you...the schedule is set up so that your muscles can develop during the resting period because of repairing and all that. Each part of the body gets 6 sets of weight lifting, Set 1 has 12 reps of light weight, Set 2 has 10 reps of a little bit heavier weight, Set 3 has 8 reps of a bit heavier weight than Set 2. Set 4 has 6 reps of the heaviest weight. Then Set 5, you go back to weight you used for Set 3 and do 12 reps. For Set 6, you change different exercise for same muscles and do 12 reps (I usually use the weight I used in Set 2.) This may be a bit confusing, just read the book because it explains the program much more better than I can.

The 2nd part is meal planning, it has 2 components, authorized food and meal replacements/supplements. Bill wrote in his book that the meal plan needs to be 5 to 6 small meals, and each meal has one serving of fat, carb and protein, and the thing is that he has a list of authorized food. I am not sure if the list is on the website but it is in the book. Also in the plan, Bill endorses meal replacements designed to meet the 1/1/1 servings per meal. He also encourages people to take supplements such as vitamins and minerals because we can't really get it all from the food we eat. One good thing about his meal plan, 1 day is free day where we can eat anything we want. That is a bit scary because knowing myself, the free day would be all binge-out kind of day. I am not following the meal plan because my dietician and I developed a meal plan that allows me to have enough carb during the day where my blood sugar won't spike and crash and cause me to eat more.

I think the most common phrase that I have seen is "health and fitness". Since I already wrote a post about health, I want to write a post about fitness and how it fits in the whole scheme of my weight loss and lifestyle. I often wonder what does fitness really mean, and by breaking down the word: fit-ness. It seems to say it is a state of "perfection" of the body. According to Merriam Webster online dictionary, the second entry of the word Fit means: sound physically and mentally. The word -ness means: state : condition : quality : degree. It only makes sense that combination of the definitions to make the word Fitness would be that it is a state of sound physically and mentally.

Being fit is important because it contributes to good and long life, as well as continues to have good quality of life. I do believe that being fit will allow me to live my life to the fullest and really enjoy life the way I should enjoy life. The plan of action to get me in this state of fit includes three parts: aerobics, weight lifting and changing my eating habits. In this post, I will cover two parts, aerobics and weight lifting. The eating habits has been discussed in the past and probably will continue to be discussed in the future.

What is Aerobics? It basically means to exercise with oxygen, a great way to strengthen my heart and my lungs. Right now what I have been doing is lot of walking. I have not really done power walk or really force myself to walk faster. I should because I have been walking a lot lately and I rarely get exhausted from it. I need to walk faster so that I can raise my heart rate and maintain it. Two things that I really want to do in the future, it is running/jogging and riding a bike. Those two things I have been wanting to do for so long because it looks so freeing. The last time I rode a bike, I hurted my tailbone so bad that I couldn't really sit down for a few days. I realized that I was pretty heavy to be sitting on a little bitty seat. I hope some day within 2 years or so, I will be light enough to ride a bike and not hurt any part of my body. Once I do that I want to ride my bike as much as I can, maybe do a tour or two for AIDS Ride. We will see how that goes in the future.

The 2nd part is anaerobic, which means that I will exercise without oxygen. Yeah, it sounds a bit strange but anaerobic does not exercise or strengthen your heart or your lungs. Weight lifting is mainly anaerobic, there are other stuff that are anaerobic as well but I will concentrate on weight lifting because I have been doing that for 4 months steady now and I am really noticing change in my body. From Jan to middle of April, I have been following Bob Greene's Total Body Makeover plan and then last week I switched to Body for Life plan so that my body doesn't get used to the routine. I plan on keep changing the plan every three months. I will explain more about Body for Life plan in detail in tomorrow's post.

My main reason for finding a doctor was to help me with my weight loss. What motivated me to lose weight? Basically when I turned 30, a switch was flipped inside of me that made me decide enough is enough. I am tired of being morbidly obese and all that comes with being that heavy. People rejected me, many thought I was just a desperate horny man and weren't willing to get to know me. But then again, it could be a projection from my own thoughts. I have been heavy for a long time.

Looking back I realized that I have tried dieting because other people expected me to diet and lose weight. When I was at the deaf school, the first time I went on the diet was because I wanted to. They had the system set up for me and I was doing good. However when I slipped and had candy or something. I got punished, and I remember yelling at the houseparent that she shouldn't expect perfection from me because I was only 9 years old. Yeah, my mouth got me in trouble often as well. Then 2 years later, it was required that I go on a diet. It was written in my Individual Educational Plan (IEP) that I will go on a diet. That plan continued for 3 more years (even when I transferred to the local public school system) until this nice guy who was the IEP coordinator at my school told the IEP team that the diet had nothing to do with my education and he took it off of the plan. That was pretty much the last time that I had to deal with weight loss issues until 1997.

In 1997, I went into a very deep depression and I was living with my friend. We barely had food in the house and she kept egging on me about my weight so I decided to get out of the house and walk twice a day plus swim in the middle of the day. I did that for about 8 months and I lost a lot of weight. When I decided to move away. She told me that I will gain back all the weight that I lost. Well I did. In 1999, I met someone that I liked soooooo much that I wanted to date him. However he had just started dating someone else. I was so upset so I decided that maybe if I lost weight, I could win him over. I started walking and using the weight room at the college gym. I lost a lot of weight in short time. Then lot of things happened at home with my dad and I was having a lot of problems with my roommates. Food became my source of comfort again and I gained weight. Then in 2004, I had a total melt day the day after my 29th birthday so I decided to go to the gym and lose weight. Unfortunately the switch wasn't flipped internally so I didn't really lose much. But August 2005, something different happened and 40 lbs lighter and 7 months later, here I am, writing this post.

My doctor and I agreed that losing 5 to 8 lbs a month is a very healthy way to go, it will ensure that I will keep the weight off later on. I am hoping that I can lose about 100 lbs a year. The 100 lbs a year goal is slightly more than 8 lbs a month, but it is still healthy goal. The ultimate goal is go down to below 250 lbs. I don't think I have seen myself below 250 since 9th grade, and that is like 16 years, a little more than 1/2 of my life ago. Enough is Enough, I am losing weight and I intend to keep it off for the rest of my life.

I talked a little bit about the doctor in my previous post. I have a reason for that because today's post is all about doctors and the results of the doctor's visit today.

Why do we see a doctor? I think the answer is quite easy there, because they are experts in the human body, in its design and functions. However not all doctors are experts in specific design and functions so that is why we have so many different types of doctors for so many different designs and functions. When we need to have our car to be looked at for regular maintenance or for a tune up, where do we go? Do we take the car to a pawn shop and ask the dealer to fix it? No, we take it to the garage to a mechanic who has expertise in working with cars. The very same reason why we do go to doctor.

Now how do we find a doctor? If most of us are lucky enough to have medical insurance, there is a hitch with many insurances, they have a list of approved doctors for you. Some of us who may not be lucky enough to have insurance sometime are SOL...and if we are lucky enough, we can find a doctor who works with uninsured patients. For me, I have insurance so I checked out the biggest health cae system in this little town that I am in. I looked specifically for doctor who work with overweight people without resorting to gastric bypass surgery or those drastic measurements of losing weight. I found two doctors and I called to see if I could make an appointment. ALAS I ran into a problem, I couldn't get the first doctor I wanted because he wasn't accepting new patients. Ack, so that is something most of us need to keep in mind when we are looking for a doctor, ask this question "Is Dr. ________ accepting new patients?" and it will definitely save you time and trouble. Lucky for me, I had a 2nd doctor on the list to see if I could get an appointment with. He was accepting new patients.

On the day of the appointment, I saw my doctor for the first time. We had an intake session, basically he just wanted to find out what brought me to his office and what I was looking for. This session gave me a chance to ask him a few questions like what was his philosophy about weight loss and other things. The end result is that we formed a partnership in taking care of me.

Now I am going to fast forward this to seven months later, today I had a routine check-up with him. My doctor wanted to review three main things, weight loss, diabetes and blood pressure. Today's visit was all good news: my weight loss is going great, 40 lbs in 7 months. My doctor's medical student was surprised when he saw that I lost 40 lbs in 7 months. My blood sugar has been in the range of 120 in the mornings before I eat. That is about 10 points higher than the American Diabetic Association's recommendation for people with Type 2 Diabetes but my doctor seems to be okay with it, I am feeling fine with that. My blood pressure is in normal range with help of a blood pressure medication, however this morning when the nurse took my reading. It was high and I felt like "Oh no, my doctor will increase my medication" but he didn't because he said he thinks I have white coat anxiety which contributes to the higher reading.

With all this good news, he told me he wants to do lab work to check the hemoglobin (A1C) where they check the percentage of glucose attached to the protein in the blood cell. The protein in the blood cell lives for about 12 weeks, that is about 3 months so with A1C, we can find out what is the average glucose. I had one last Jan, so he wants one in June, he also wants a lipid panel. The panel tests for cholesterol and other fats in the blood. I am hoping for a lower reading on my lipid panel, but we will see how that goes.

After all, we do know I am working towards a healthier ME and my doctor is willing to work with me on that so I should be willing to be prodded with needles to be tested so we can see how it is going.

...a point of knowing that I am getting older and ready to settle down and enjoy life as an adult with responsibilities.

I ended the previous post, before I took a pic of my dinner and blog that. One of the things that pops up often in many people's lives as they get older and become adults is their health. Health is a concept, an overall view of a person's body functions meant to be measure to ensure a good quality of life. Now I feel that being healthy is important because I do want to live as long as possible. Growing old does not mean my health has to decline. I think that if I step up and become more active and do more in taking care of myself that I can be healthy for as long as I want to be.

In order to know what needs to be done to reach that healthy status, one must get tested and have some kind of benchmark to work with. September 1, 2005, I went to my doctor for the first time in a long time. I got my benchmark for my weight and my blood pressure. My doctor ordered lipid panel and glucose test and asked me to come in the following week. When I came back next week, we decided that I needed to do a few things to make things better fo rme so we started medication for my blood pressure and my doctor approved the exercise and diet plan I went on.

The funny thing is that I had no clue that my blood pressure was dangerously high. I had a few clues that my weight was causing my body to come apart, like my knees and lower back hurts often. As for being diabetic, I had a couple of clues, I was thirsty a lot and I was constantly hungry. Or maye I wasn't hungry all the time, I just ate because I wanted to eat to cover up my emotions. That is the hard part here, trying to decide if the eating part was a clue that I was diabetic or that it was getting out of control.

Somewhere I read that our bodies are like our cars. I agreed with that perception and I realized that what I did when I went to see my doctor was that he was giving me information about what I need to do to get healthy, just like when you take your car to a garage and have them run the diagnosis test on the car to determined what needs to be done. In future posts I will go in depth about what I am doing with my health in terms of maintenance, activities and repairs. There are what I came up with from the information I got from my doctor. As always, I talked with my doctor about my plans to make sure the plans are sensible and not hazard to my health. My doctor and I have this kind of relationship that we ask each other for permission to change things. When I went on my blood pressure medication, we had to make modification and my doctor asked me "are you okay with increasing your blood pressure medication?" Doing that made me comfortable with him knowing that I can talk to him about what I do and he could give me feedback and make modifications as needed.

Let me stress this again: Your doctor is the most important team player you can have in your life when you are working on getting healthy and staying healthy.

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Originally uploaded by TomasG.

A culinary delight that I created for dinner last night. Chicken was marinated with sesame and ginger salad dressing. The pasta and vegetables were mixed with a little bit of olive oil, salt, pepper, red flakes peppers and italian seasoning. The garlic toast had garlic, parsley and butter.

Here I am, writing a post about change. Why is change important to me at this time? Because I feel like my life is currently going through a season of change. Personally, a season of change is something that my life needs alot of changes in many areas.

Since my age clock turned 3-0, I made some changes. I took my health and my weight loss seriously by getting myself to a doctor and started losing weight. In 6 months, I have lost 35 lbs. I am hoping that by my birthday (August 21, for those who don't know that) I would be about 84 lbs less than I was when I turned 30. I have to remind myself that it took me many years to get to the point of weighting at 484 lbs and that I must give myself time to lose about 250 lbs where I will reach at 234 lbs. I won't stop at 234 for sure, as I approach 250 lbs, I will evaluate to see how I feel, look and how my health is. I might stop at 250, or I may lose more weight. It just all depends on different factors, just that I don't want to be morbidly obese and I am working on fixing that.

Along with weight loss and health issues, I have also changed my lifestyle. I no longer live with my mommy, but instead I live in a house with a roommate and I have two cats. I love my cats, they love me unconditionally and so does my roommate. My roommate is also my 'sistah'. His family has adopted me and I love his family. I know he will continue to love me no matter what and I will love him as well. I can improve my lifestyle change even more now because I just got a job where I will be working in the warehouse of a textbook exchange company. Now that I know I have some extra money coming in, I reexamined my debts and realized that I can pay it all off in 7 years at $300 a month. I better be sure that I keep this job or find a better job that pays more so I can pay off my debts faster.

Now that I have financial freedom on the edge of the horizon, I am allowing myself to take a look at some of the changes I want to make in the future so that I can move to another stage of my life. I want to work on converting some dreams into reality which involves money, time and patience. One of my dreams is to be a published author, so now I am working on putting together a book. I am using all my blog entries as potential essays to be compiled into a book. I have been reading my past blogs and I am amazed at some of the stuff I have written about. My thoughts and my feelings are out there on the internet, so why not put it into a collection and have it printed as a book, that is what I said to myself.

Thinking about being published author also got me thinking about a couple of other things that I want to do. I am thinking about going back to school and complete my BA degree in Communication Studies, then continue with school on a brand new path. The new path is culinary school where I get to learn how to cook, cut, chop and play with food. I have been collecting recipes and been cooking for my roommate. He loves my cooking and I like his cooking, but I prefer to cook because I get to experiment and make different food. I also want to take courses in photography so I can grow as a photographer and sell my work. I would love to see my work hung in people's homes other than my mommy's home.

So bottom line, Season of Change is in my life right now and I am very happy that it is there. I am thrilled to make changes because I know that means my life will be in a better place, a different phase of life, a point of knowing that I am getting older and ready to settle down and enjoy life as an adult with responsibilities.

I have been building myself up one day at a time, one thing at a time. I am reaching a point that I am beginning to reexamine my life to determine what I really want to do with the rest of my life. I don't want to live my life with lot of shoulda woulda coulda but actually achieve goals and make my dreams come true. I have always wanted to make my dreams come true however for a long time I wouldn't work at it to make it happen. I guess I felt like I wasn't worthy enough to make my dreams come true.

Over time, that has changed because I am appreciating myself and accepting myself. One thing I know that I need to do is find what makes me want to live my life the way I want to live, in other words, what is my sense of purpose? There are a couple of things that I enjoy doing a lot, Photography and writing. When my dad died, my dad left me some money and so I bought me a laptop computer and a digital camera. I start taking pictures and I found out how much joy it gave me to take pictures. Most of my work can be found at my pageon Flickr.com. As for writing, I have been doing a lot of writing over time, however I don't save my writings or actually make it worth putting together. This blog holds most of my past 2 years of writing. Sometime I wonder if I should go back and print out all of my blog entries and go through them all and pick a few of them that I will want to work on expanding and making it into essays. Who knows I may be able to put together enough essays to make a book.

These two things gives me a sense of purpose, a pleasure in life that makes me want to do it any time. But what do I derive from all that? It requires me to be open to express myself and hopefully that it will impact others through their senses and emotions. Now that is a real sense of purpose in my life. To make a difference in a person's life through senses and emotions by providing myself as a sounding board and myself as an open book. Exposing myself like this requires a fundamental change in myself.