#A NEW ME – WORK IN PROGRESS
Be fit, motivate family and friends, and spend less for healthcare in the future.
I kept doing what I was doing – sports and clean food – but changing just one thing was crucial to start seeing a drastic transformation – I started to finally count calories. Lifesum app is what I needed.
Sport: I keep doing what I was doing – 5 exercise and powerful finish. Just a pull up bar and a bench from equipment.
Food: eat clean food as usual – vegetable salad, protein (beef or chicken or fish) and a soup.
Counting calories did all the magic. I limited myself to 2050 calories daily budget and started to track food intake through the Lifesum app as it contains both Asian and Russian food choices (I do not weight food, just pick an appropriate dish and roughly input its size). The goal is to stay within a budget. After a while I noticed that lots of fruits I eat after every meal were not fitting my calorie budget anymore, so did the alcohol. That’s it.
In reality keep losing weight and not starving is a bit more complicated, if you’ll be interested I will break down the key aspects as I move further. Hope I’ll motivate some of you to follow me to a “new you”.
COMPLETE GUIDE ON LOSING WEIGHT WITHOUT STARVING. MANUAL.
Here is my complete guide on how to lose weight.
1. MOTIVATION
My motivation is to be fit, motivate family and friends, and spend less for healthcare in the future. You can use me and my online transformation progress as your motivation to become leaner, faster, stronger, healthier and sexier.
2. FOOD & SUPPLEMENTS
It turned out that diet contributes to 70% of success! I eat clean before but did not count calories intake and I kept weighting 109-110kg until I finally started to track food intake.
What to eat: green salads + soup + protein (I mostly eat beef, chicken & fish). Here are some items froms my menu:
2.1 SALADS
Variety: I mostly eat 3-4 ingredient salads, great infographic recipes series “50 Simple Salads for Every Season” is my major source of inspiration – I found ones which ingredients are easy to find in Singapore and eat them regularly. In particular I mostly eat number 38-43 & 47. I also like the simple Greek salad and Carrot, Apple & Walnut salad.
Serving size: put your two hand palms together with fingers tight – this is the serving I usually eat, one finger in height and two hand palms in area. In 60% of time I eat Greek and Carrot, Apple & Walnut salads for lunch (thus put a bit more in serving) and almost every time green salads for dinners.
2.2 SOUPS
Lunch Soups:
2.3 BEEF
I usually grill Filet Mignon steak myself for a few days ahead and mostly use 365 days grain fed USDA choice tenderloin.
2.4 CHICKEN
- Mediterranean Stuffed Chicken Breasts
- Summer Chicken Succotash Recipe (just chicken without the side dish)
- 5 chicken breasts receipts
- 24 chicken breasts receipts (just chicken without the side dish)
- Zucchini Noodles with Chicken, Cilantro and Lime
- Chicken Schnitzel
- Classic Russian Burgers “Pozharskie”
2.5 FISH
I mostly cook Red snapper fillet, make it pan fried and juicy. Sometimes I grill and smoke Red snapper too. I love meat of Red snapper and prefer it to seabass, salmon and other types of fish.
2.6 HOW DO I TRACK CALORIES INTAKE (IMPORTANT!)
I set a daily limit at 2050 KCAL and am using Lifesum app to track my intake. I key in the food that I’ll going to eat prior to starting the meal (the app already has a wide database of dishes so I just have to select the most appropriate ones; it also remembers your previous choices which eases the tracking process). It’s very easy to track food, it requires only 10 sec. or less to key in the meal and I got used to the app in about one day.
2.7 SUPPLEMENTS
- BCAA: take pre-workout – to (1) cancel out fatigue and enhance exercise performance and (2) help repair damaged muscles, decrease muscle soreness and increase muscle function.
- Protein: take post-workout – to facilitate a healthy muscle recovery and muscular growth.
- Omega-3 (fish oil): to increase metabolic rate by raising cell activity and fat burning. Omega-3 fatty acids are important because they improve every cell in the body. Take after every lunch and dinner.
- L-Carnitine: to help body convert fat into energy through a process called fat oxidation. Carnitine is the delivery system for fatty acids and by elevating carnitine you increase fat burning and give the cell right genetic machinery to raise metabolism. As the result you have more energy, feel more motivated, and lose fat. Take after every lunch and dinner.
- ZMA: to enhance muscle recovery, boost muscle size and strength, facilitate fat loss and achieve better sleep quality. I really feel I sleep better and get more muscle relaxation during a sleep. Take it sometimes when I need to relax and have a deep sleep.
3. EXERCISES
Workouts are more important than cardio for weight loss the multiple of reasons. I practice Calisthenics because it’s a great way to dramatically transform one’s body, stack on muscle, lose fat and learn incredible new skills – all with no equipment except a bar and a bench. No expensive gym memberships, personal trainers, etc. I can train in any location – at home, in a yard, at the airport gym, on the beach – basically everywhere, and I can start working out immediately when I have a free time slot. That reduces my chances to cheat and skip workouts.
I use Frank Medrano’s BEGINNER program and it turned out to be VERY effective. Here is my exercise progress and results, you can benchmark your progress against mine.
4. RESULTS TRACKING
I use Mi Scale weights to track the weight and fat percentage. Mi Scale wirelessly transmit results to iPhone or Android phone (which is very convenient) into the Mi Fit app that can be synched with Apple Health. I connected to my friends within the Mi Fit app and we can counter track our results and compete with each other. Mi Scale is extremely useful tool in my process.
5. MAJOR MISTAKES & HOW TO AVOID THEM
- Eat too much. If still hungry – do switch to tomatoes. It happened to me in the first month when I did not eat clean food during a day thus taking too much calories during a day leaving myself with the poor dinner. So if hungry – just eat tomatoes. Optionally – tomatoes with a bit of feta cheese.
- Eat too little. In a rush I was thinking that leaving 400 kcal will speed up my fat loss. Wrong. The body thinks it has to accumulate fat (“what if there is a war tomorrow?”) and as the result the next day I either saw the same numbers or even higher number. So, eat clean and eat out the whole calorie budget of 2050 kcal.
- Plato. It happened to me three times already – the weight remained the same during a number of day (4-5 days). Neither eating less, not increase the load helped. The way which worked best was to increase food intake a bit within the same calorie budget (from 3 to 4 times a day) and increase the number of exercises (for example I added a 6km evening walk to my morning calisthenics). In a day or two the scale numbers started to move down again.
- One day of an alcohol party cancel the week of hard work. That’s why I did not have progress during both December and January (Christmas, NY and multiple birthdays)