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Fitness Post: Fighter Diet challenges and losing weight is a mind game

I’m back!

It’s been a long time! The last few years have been a whirlwind of kids getting older, parenting struggles, work struggles, and mental health struggles. It’s been a challenge, but I have learned to put my best foot forward at all times.

I’ve learned quite a bit from the last 3 years,  especially about myself and how I wasn’t doing ME any favors. I’m a “carry the world on my shoulders” type of person. I thought I needed to do it all. I need to take care of the home, be a beauty expert, be a professional chef, have a great career, be in great shape and a wonderful wife. Yeah, that’s impossible, at least my idea of who I needed to be was impossible.

Now I strive to be the best person I can be. To do things that I like to do, not just what is expected of me. Fitness is something I have always enjoyed. I love lifting weights. I love Soulcycle. I love feeling sore the next day because I had a great workout.

But I also love food. Like alot. I can eat all the food. Going to a new restaurant and enjoying a decent meal with a glass or 2 of wine is extremely gratifying. Trying a new a new cookie recipe woofing them with the kids is a guilty pleasure.

This is my dilemma. I have weight I would like to lose. However, my love of food outweighs my desire to lose weight. What in the heck should I do? I have to remember that weight loss is a mind game and I need to find a way lose weight while balancing my mental gratification for good food.

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Pauline Nordin from Fighter Diet

I tried fitness a 12-week challenge on Fighter Diet. Pauline Nordin runs Fighter Diet and she is very motivated to get you fit. She puts together a wonderful exercise program and diet plan to get you through your 12 week journey. every week you need to take progress photos to see your results. You are also part of a fitness group on Facebook with other participants to get you motivated to keep on getting lean and building muscle. This program can provide real results. Most participants will likely need to do more than one challenge to see the results they desire to see. As they say, fitness is a lifestyle not a journey.

My negatives with Fighter Diet is that fitness is a lifestyle change and the Fighter Diet lifestyle is a very strict lifestyle. Each challenge has a set menu that they want you to follow to the tee – You can make adjustments using the Fighter Diet food pyramid, but it is discouraged. It can also be tough to navigate through all the information if you are new to the process. Fighter Diet is mainly about volume eating, so you eat huge plates of good that are not calorie dense; think massive bowls of cabbage or green beans mixed with a lean protein source. Bread is not Fighter Diet approved, nor is  full fat cheese (there are certain options/brands that are available if you ask the right questions and can navigate the FB group well enough to search). My concern is that when you are done with the challenge, will you have the correct tools to use to keep the weight off. If you continue to use the Fighter Diet principles as a lifestyle, you should be okay….but what if you want to drink beer, have a slice of pie or eat a grilled cheese sandwich – How do you balance that? This was my main reason from moving away from Fighter Diet to a IIFYM approach. I also feel it can be triggering if you are battling food disorders.

All in all, Fighter Diet is a great system with a wonderful workout plan and an active facebook support system. I think the system really works if you can stick to the diet and Pauline Nordin is very passionate about what she does. She is someone that truly wants you to succeed with your fitness goals. I just feel that the diet is very difficult to stick to for the long haul.

 

Paying for Our Own Oppression

Really interesting discussion!

Dances With Fat

Fat MoneyI was in an interesting conversation on Facebook where people were discussing whether or not, as Size Acceptance activists and/or Health at Every Size practitioners, they buy “diet’ products and why or why not. This is something I’ve thought about a lot.

There is a quote by Anna Lappe that says “Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.”  As an activist, that rings really true for me – the way that I spend my money is a form of activism.  I can spend money in a way that supports companies that support me, or I can fund companies that do something between ignoring and outright oppressing me.

First, to be clear I’m not talking about a boycott –  boycotts have absolutely proven to be effective tools in the right circumstances, and it’s true that if everyone stopped buying products that attempt…

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My lunch

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I’m so bummed this came out blurry, but this is an example of the lunches I’ve been bringing to work recently. I chopped up 4 baby bok choy and a handful of spinach, mixed with a bit of ginger dressing from Trader Joe’s, mixed nuts and a little bit of chow mein noodles.

I love adding the nuts because the salad tend to stick with me longer and I don’t feel starving two hours later. 🙂

Getting back on track

It’s been tough for me to get back on a fitness schedule with the baby in the mix. Nevertheless, I have to do it. Albeit, in baby steps.

I’ve broken out the jump rope and am pledging to do 15 minutes of jumping rope a day. Using my interval trainer app, I’ve but in 18 reps of 30 seconds high intensity jumping and 20 seconds of downtime for squats. That’s my week.

Getting the diet back on track is in order too. Since I’ve been nursing my daughter, I’ve given myself a bit of freedom diet-wise. I didn’t want to mess with my supply and I have successfully nursed her for 10 months so far. We plan on making it to 1 year, but I need to get back on the horse so to speak.

This week we’re focusing on fresh veggies. It doesn’t take long to steam veggies and to grill up some meat. So that is what is on the menu most of the week, We do have a fast food night coming up (long day for everyone), but I’m hoping to go out for Lebanese instead of a burger.

I’ll check back in to report progress.

Still here

I’ve been so busy lately that I’ve neglected this little blog. Everything is fine on my end. We recently sold our condo and bought a new house. Moving is such a traumatic experience for me. I just needed time to get back in sync. We have lots of home projects going on, so I still don’t have much time to post, but I’ll try to pen a few quick and dirty messages here and there.

I haven’t been as healthy as I should be, but right now life has been about keeping our head above water. Life is hectic with a baby girl, a seven-year-old with tons of energy, parents that need help, and making the new house our own. I haven’t even dreamed of exercise to be honest. 🙂 I have managed to keep my stress and anxiety in control, which is a good thing.

I’ll post more about my new house soon and we’ll see where life takes us this summer.

LydVicious Fitness

Sometimes even I need help with it. I bet you didn’t think so, did you? Yes, it’s true! Let’s take today for instance. It’s dreary & raining outside, which is tough even for a normal person I think (been a long time since I’d consider myself  “normal” so I’m only guessing) 😉 For me though, rain flares up my rheumatoid arthritis, making all my joints ache & scream. The very LAST thing I want to do on a rainy day is get out of a warm bed. Add to that today is Day 1 of my competition “diet” (I hate that word, gotta come up with something else to call it. It’s really just eating clean. No sugar, no salt, no dairy, no breads, yadda yadda yadda… can’t give you guys the full details otherwise how will I ever make a living?) 😉 So anyway, yeah today is Day 1…

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A fortnight with gastroenteritis and trying to get it together.

I haven’t been on recently because I’ve been sick and because I have been busy. My son came down with a bout of the stomach flu and I contracted it soon thereafter. He had it for about 12 hours, I had it for almost 2 weeks. Oh lucky me.

Apparently, folks who have IBS don’t handle the stomach flu well. Makes sense since our digestive system is already sensitive. Thankfully, I didn’t have any bouts of vomiting. I have this fear of vomiting that keeps me from ever having an eating disorder, which I guess is a good thing, but I digress. I have dedicated the past week and a half to regulating my system – that means taking it easy, eating clean (lots of probiotic foods too) and drinking lots of water.

I have been bad about the water part, just call me lazy. I’ll manage to get 5 glasses in on a good day. My coffee to water ratio is about equal right now,  and I need to correct that. At one point, not too long ago, I drank more coffee than water.

SO 🙂 My body is still out of sync at the moment, but I’m working my way back on track. This weekend, I kicked my workouts back in gear with Zuzana Light’s ZWOD #2. I was somewhat able to keep up with her 15 minute time – I came in at 16:28. The weather was great in Los Angeles this weekend so I got to hit up this:

The beach! I’m signed up for the Irvine Lake Mud Run this coming March with a few friends, so we decided that some “training” might be a good idea. I was a bit apprehensive about running, I’m not good at it.  You can get me out there to do a bootcamp workout confidently, but tell me that I got to run a mile and I become a whiney baby. One of my friends is an avid runner and I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up, but, thankfully,  I didn’t do as bad as I thought I would. I ran about 2 miles before I collapsed from sheer exhaustion ;). Foodwise, I didn’t do so bad, I had postworkout grilled fish tacos and a bowl of sauerkraut a bit later on. That evening I started wearing a BodyMedia GoFit armband, but I’ll get into that in another post.

The next day was Beach Day 2.0 – The family edition. I started off the day with Zuzana’s ZWOD workout again. My time was 30 minutes this time around! I’m guessing it was because I was very active the day before, so my body was tired, but whatever. I did it!

For breakfast,  I had what has to be my favorite cereal mix at the moment:

  • Koala Crisp rice cereal (awseome and gluten-free)
  • 1 tbsp shredded unsweetened coconut
  • 1 tbsp almond slivers
  • 1 tsp chia seeds

Gobble that up with some unsweetened almond milk. nom nom. 🙂

We got off to  a late start and for various reasons, didn’t have time to prepare a meal at home,  so we decided to stop somewhere and pick up some food. This is where we ended up:

Going into a burger joint, it’s easy for your diet to spiral out of control. This is a nightmare from a weight loss and IBS standpoint. I can’t say that I made a *perfect* choice, but thankfully Fatburger had a “healthy” option.

I had a veggie burger and skinny fries. I discarded half of the wheat bun and ate less than half of the fries.  Fatburger uses boca burgers, which are tasty, but next time, whenever that may be, I’m going to ask them to ease up on the mayo.

The Beach! Oh how I love thee, especially in January. 🙂

I got to bump around the volleyball a bit, chase around my son, dip my feet into that freezing California ocean water. It was a beautiful day.

On the way home, we stopped at Mitsuwa, our neighborhood Japanese grocery store, to go shopping for the week. I should do a post of our typical Mitsuwa shopping trip – sneaking in photos when I can. That would be fun!

Anyway! We bought fixings for an amazing sashimi salad – sushi grade salmon, octopus, seaweed salad on a bed of salad greens tossed with a bit of sesame dressing. I should have taken a picture, but we were famished and scarfed down that meal pronto.

This morning, I did not get to workout, but I did pack my awesome cereal mix to enjoy at the office. LOL!

Hopefully better than great by the end of the week.

 

 

Using leftovers: Baked Shrimp & Pineapple Egg Rolls

I had some old pineapple in my refrigerator that I feared would go bad soon. Instead of eating it straight, I figured I would find a way to use it for lunch. I also had a little bit of shrimp left over that I needed to use, so I thought making a shrimp and pineapple egg roll would be tasty.The pineapple was getting to the point of being overripe, which is perfect in a dish like this because you can even cut into the core a bit and won’t have any tough parts. I’m not going to have exact measurements, because I really made this on a whim, but just make this to taste.

  • Cooked shrimp, chopped
  • Fresh pineapple, finely chopped.
  • Fresh basil, finely chopped
  • Fresh ginger, grated
  • Rice wine vinegar
  • Raw honey
  • Sesame oil
  • Soy sauce
  • Salt & Pepper, to taste (optional)

Preheat oven to 425 degrees

Mix shrimp, basil, ginger and pineapple together. In a separate bowl, whisk the vinegar, honey, soy, sesame oil (+salt & pepper) together in a bowl. You want to make just enough to lightly coat the shrimp mixture, so don’t make too much or else the egg rolls will come out watery. Incorporate the oil mixture with the shrimp mixture until evenly coated. Let it marinade for 15 minutes

Beat in egg in another bowl and set aside. Take an egg roll wrapper and brush with egg wash. Put shrimp mixture in wrapper on one side; fold corners in and roll like a burrito. Brush egg roll with egg wash.

Place egg rolls on a greased baking sheet (I used non-stick cooking spray) and bake for 15 minutes.

Let them cool before eating.

I served with salad greens, shredded carrot, almond slivers and Tamari Ginger Salad Dressing.