The Plan

Alright, tonight I'm going to go over the grand plan to get to where I want to be.  It is fairly similar to the plan I laid out at the beginning of this whole deal, but, with a few tweaks here and there.  I'll sum it all up as the three pillars of Louie weight loss:

Eating

Exercise

Reward

(Awesome space pillars.)

Let's get to it, shall we?

Eating:

I truly believe that proper nutrition is going to be the foundation of my weight loss journey.  Put good in and reap the benefits.  Yesterday I stated that Weight Watchers would be the linchpin of my success and I truly believe that.  There are two types of Weight Watchers out there, a meeting based system where you talk with and get support from actual people and an online only version.  I subscribe to the online only version as the closest meeting locations are 30 or so miles away from I live.   

For those who are unaccustomed with how Weight Watchers works, here is a quick overview.  Weight Watchers is, at its core, a calorie tracker.  You set a weight goal, the program does it magic and tells you how much you can and can't eat, and you just tell it what you ate and it keeps track of it all.  Pretty simple, right?  

The big difference between  Weight Watchers and a traditional calorie counter, like MyPlate, is that the Weight Watchers program breaks food into points.  It does this by taking how much fat, carbohydrates, fiber, and protein that particular food has, throwing it through some algorithms, and Ta-Da, you've got your points!  So, for example, a Hamburger costs you around 12 points, whereas, a Grilled Chicken Wrap will cost you only 8 points.

(We have met the enemy and he is delicious.)

The program let's you know how many points you have available per day, in my case 59 points per day.  It also gives you a pool of extra flex-points you can use throughout the week in case you go over that day, in my case 45 flex-points.  You can also earn points through tracking physical activity that you may or may not use as well, it's up to you!  The program adjusts the amount of daily points you get as you gain or lose weight.  So I may have 59 points this week and after I lose a couple pounds it may change to 57 pounds.  I like this method of tracking because the numbers seem a little more manageable, 59 points vs 1800 calories.

Exercise:

This should look really familiar to those who have been reading this blog for awhile.  I'll be doing a simple progressive approach to cardio.  Start small and work my way up slowly but surely.  It worked for me in the past and I don't plan fixing what isn't broken.  Once again I shall be using Zombies, Run! as my running tool.  Here is my cardio schedule for this week:

Monday: walk 30 minutes
Tuesday: strength training
Wednesday: walk 30 minutes
Thursday: strength training
Friday:walk 30 minutes
Saturday: strength training
Sunday: rest

This plan coupled with little walks throughout the day at work should fill out my cardio needs.  And yes, I have been following this plan already and will give you an update tomorrow, whether you want it or not.

A change to my exercise plan this time around is that I am adding some body weight strength training into the mix.  Specifically this plan, courtesy of the fine folks at Nerd Fitness.  As you can tell I love things that break my management into video game like terms for me and this site definitely caters to people just like me.

(Just like me...)

Back to the workout plan, it is dubbed the Angry Birds Plan.  Basically if you would have the time to play a level or two of Angry Birds, you have time to do this workout.  From the website:

"Here’s how The Angry Bird Workout Plan works: it’s deceptively simple – only four major movements.

• Body weight squats
• Push ups
• Pull ups (or bent over rows or inverted rows)
• Planks

Each exercise will have MANY different levels based on your ability and level of fitness.

Depending on how much time you have during the day, you can do your whole workout at once, or break up your workout into four different sessions throughout the day (with each session being ONE of the exercises).  You can even split the workout across two days if you have to: squats and push ups on Monday, and then pull ups and planks on Tuesday."

Without getting into the whole thing, you do a certain number of reps of each exercise and depending on how many sets it took you to get there, you earn stars (0 to 3), just like in Angry Birds.  If you earn 3 stars (doing the reps in 2 or fewer sets) you level up and the rep count increases.  And so on and so forth.  

Here is the first level rep count:

• 30 one arm rows
• 30 body weight squats
• 40 incline push ups
• 30 one arm rows
• 60 seconds of planks

I think that the cardio/strength training combo will do wonders.

Once again, I think this post is getting a bit long (and I've got some strength training to do) so I'm going to call it here.  Tomorrow I'll give you some run reports, a strength training report (I haven't thought of a witty name for this yet), and run you through my reward system.  Thanks again for reading and until next time.

- Louie