katmessing

Hi Chris-Tien! I'm sorry I disappeared off the map for a bit. I did follow through, but I am repeating the challenge again to keep working towards the pull up. The AM pushups I did every day, the 6 hours of sleep not so much, and every other gym workouts turned out to be 1-2x a week. Womp. I did meet with a great new trainer though, and I've fallen in love with the TRX suspension workouts. I'm going to rely on those and Tabatas for gym workouts, and I got a nice new pullup bar in my doorway for Xmas! Keepin on keepin on. Thank you for the support, and I'll try to do better to check in with everyone!

Hey guys! I came up with a fun way to stick to your diet. I'm posting to share it so that maybe it can help you guys out too. It's very in line with the gamer mentality we all have at NF. It's pretty cool if you can commit to the gameplay! So. Stickers. When I was a kid, everyone went rabid when the teacher baited good behavior with sticker rewards. If you had enough stickers in your sticker book, you touted them like merit badges. Puffy stickers with goggly eyes. Ecstatic smiley faces of every variety. Lisa frank. Hot wheel. Scratch and sniff. The animal ones with actual fuzzy textures. The giant sparkly metallic kind, envy of everyone in the whole class. There is great motivational power in stickers. Why not harness it to stay on track with your diet? I don't know about you guys, but diet tracking apps don't really work for me. It's annoying to upload pictures, browse databases, and key in portion sizes for everything I eat. It's awkward in public. It's WAY more convenient to keep a notepad and write everything down. And you can put stickers in a notepad! Plus, everyone's long term goal is to eat wholesomely, but it shouldn't be at the expense of never enjoying treats every now and then. Obviously a slice of homemade birthday cake is worth more than a handful of M&Ms for "something sweet" after lunch. I built this mentality of differentiating "special" treats into the game. Here are the rules I set up for myself personally in my sticker-diet book. It's a little complicated but I'm neurotic like that so it suits me fine. Feel free to steal this and adapt it for your own priorities. If you like it, get thyself to a Staples or craft store, pick out a booklet of little stickers that engages your inner-kid enthusiasm, and give it a shot! Here goes. The Sticker Merit Diet: GAMEPLAY Write down everything you eat. Every. Thing. If you follow your diet (*A*) that day, you earn a sticker. If you follow your diet for three days in a row, you earn a small reward.(*B*) If you follow your diet for a week straight, you earn a big reward! (*C*) There is NO PUNISHMENT for not following your diet. You just didn't follow your diet. This is a positive reward based game! Consistently aim to challenge yourself. I've been at this for about six months now, and it's still pretty tough at times. If it becomes too easy (you'll know when it is) to follow your diet for a week solid, modify it so you level up! Experiment with paleo, eliminate processed foods, or make your rules a little stricter. If you can sail through all your diet obstacles and you are happy with your lifestyle, mission accomplished! DIET RULES (*A*) You define your ideal diet. Think hard on your habits and where you need the most incentive to eat right. Decide your conditions for a healthy diet and aim to meet them all, every day, so you rack up your sticker badges. For me this includes: eat a salad every day, limiting myself to one unhealthy food serving per day, and eliminating junk food (soda, candy, potato chips, artificial cheesy things) entirely. An unhealthy food in my case is: one *~*SPECIAL TREAT*~*, one serving of white bread/rice/pasta, one serving of red meat, one serving of buttery/creamy/oily food (slice of pizza, miscellaneous food you might have at a restaurant, etc), 2 oz of high fat cheese, or one alcoholic bev. (*B*) Establish a 3 day reward. Find something small, repeatable, and something not unhealthy, for following your diet for 3 days straight. You could win a bigger shinier sticker, or an hour of guilty pleasure TV, a favorite healthy-ish snack, whatever. It has to be cheap; expense cannot be a deterrent in this game. (I use these popsicle things called Smoozies, they're tasty, treat like, and I can order them in bulk.) It works best if you can invest yourself in getting whatever it is, so that if you're halfway into your 3rd good day on your diet, and an enormous cake presents itself to you, you can withstand the temptation because you WANT the reward instead. The strategy: treat + sense of victory > impulsive eating. (*C*) One week reward! This is actually pretty tough to get, so the stakes are higher. For my 1 week reward, I let myself buy or do something fun for under $100. You can set your expense limit at whatever is reasonable, the idea being that you can do something nice for yourself without breaking the bank. It doesn't have to be expensive! I used one reward to get my nails done with gal pals, I used another to get a rocking new pair of gym shoes. A concert ticket, a new video game, or something that shows off your increasingly good-looking self. The one caveat here is that your reward cannot be food. Eliminate the idea that you can ever deserve to eat badly. ~*SPECIAL TREATS*~ This is the part of the game that keeps your sweet tooth in check while and diet realistic. That adage of nothing tastes as good as eating right feels is, IMO, baloney. Obviously whoever thought of that has not had my mom's banana bread. So identifying a sweet treat as *special* allows for some leeway in your diet. If a unhealthy food is Special, that means it will life-enhancing as opposed to just "tastes good because it has sugar and fat in it". Examples: A home made pie made just for you with love by your SO for your birthday. A lavish dessert at a fancy occasion restaurant. A regional specialty donut that is unique to the area that you are traveling to on vacation. A deliberate choice to indulge in an ice cream cone, because it is a perfect summer day on the beach and it's just what the doctor ordered. A cookie or two from the new recipe you're trying out. Etc! Special treats are NOT store-bought or mass produced. Special treats are NOT the kind of treat you eat "because it's there", or because you happen to crave it. They do not have high fructose corn syrup. Examples: a slice of your coworker's birthday cake from Walmart. The brownie that comes with your combo meal. Candy, cookies, chocolates, ice cream, pastries, extra whipped cream caramel frappacinos, or anything like that that you suddenly want when you're out grocery shopping or running errands. Etc! BONUS This is an optional part of the game. I let myself offset 1x high fat food, so that I can have 2 high fat foods in a day and stilly earn a sticker, if I complete one of the following bonuses. There is only one bonus credit per day allowed. 1. Have a second salad, so that 2/3 of the day's meals were dark leafy greens. 2. Go to the gym and complete a solid workout. 3. Earning a "gold star" at work; i.e. working a double or triple, generally kicking ass way above normal levels, getting shit done. Game on!

Yeah new challenge! Go team! And! How have some of youse guys added those progress percentage bar to your posts? They're neat.

Hey wow, thanks everybody. I had a suspicion. But it also makes me kind of sad, because if it weren't for my experience with the first guy a year ago (my first trainer) I would have absolutely no reason to doubt anything this guy is telling me. Think of how many other timid people hitting up the gym for the first time fall victim to bunk fitness recs! Thank you everybody for sure. For where I'm at physically, my player stats are: 25 y/o gal, new-ish to fitness. I spent the last couple years really honing in on diet and have made great strides (down to 155-160 from 185 in college 3 years ago). I'm relatively satisfied with weight range, but I'm just… squishy. So last year I got my first gym membership and started training with super-awesome guy, who left, and I took the summer off to save money. Now that it's getting cold I thought I'd head back. The goal's always been just to be healthy and active. The cosmetic result is more like a bonus rather than a main focus. I've been following the NF blog for a while and jumped on the latest 6 wk challenge. I've never been able to do a pull up, ever. But I bet I could with the support! So thanks for all the resources and encouragement! Hopefully in a year or so I can help out other people too. Ya'll rock!

Hey everybody, Working out for the first 6 week challenge to get a pull-up. The first week I scrutinized all the forums here, and put in place some of the most effective/favorite exercises I used to do for strength conditioning with my personal trainer. Here's what I started doing, 2-3x a week: 3x sets of: 10x dumbell rows, 25 lb. each arm 30-45 seconds planks 10x TRX rows (per inverted row recommendation) 10x squats I tried to keep a fast-ish pace to keep my heart rate up while still keeping good form. To be sure, I wanted some feedback and so I scheduled a session with a new trainer (my old guy, who was amazing, no longer works there). But this new guy, I'm not so sure I like his recommendations. I told him the pull-up goal, that I tend to avoid machines because they feel unnatural for movement, and I'd done high intensity workouts before that I responded well to (Tabatas, but he didn't know what those were). He immediately put me on the lat pulldown machine on the lowest 10 lb setting (come on, bro!) and after I mentioned I really liked the TRX, he put me there. I asked if he could vouch for my past workout and he said you should probably avoid lifting heavy things, because you don't want to bulk up (red flag #2), but email me and I'll make you a workout until we meet next time. So I email him the next day and he recommended: "For the time being I'm going to give you a leg workout to do because I want to focus more on upper body next time. Pretty light and simple leg workout to get you back into it." Leg Press- 4x15Leg Extension- 4x12Leg Curl- 4x15Body Weight Lunges- 4x10 (each leg)TRX Squat- 4x15 An easy leg workout?! Am I nuts here? I don't think he's listening. I'd always done full body workouts before, and my last trainer took fastidious notes and kept a chart for me to track my progress when I came in on my own. What do you guys think of my first workout compared to this one? Should I ditch this guy? Much obliged!

Hey everybody, Made it to the gym for the first time in months because I was pumped to dive into the challenge. On my mission to complete I pull-up I thought I'd start with Steve's recommendation from his post here. I thought I'd try an inverted/body weight row to see how well I could hold up. Though my gym has a smith machine, they recommended I try the same exercise with a suspension TRX system instead. From what I can tell the exercise IS very similar to an inverted row, except instead of pulling yourself up to a bar you pull yourself up using hanging straps with handles. Can anybody vouch for these? Thanks!

Hey all! My name's Kat, and I've been following Nerdfitness for a while. I'm super jazzed to finally dive in to the community and build a healthy new lifestyle. First time doing any type of fitness challenge ever, so here goes! My quest is to defeat my alter-ego. I guess you might think of it as the devil on one's shoulder, or like evil Peter-Parker. I love the analogy of having a Mario-like quest to rescue the Princess, only in my case I feel like it's more of a quest to rescue my productive, healthy self from the self-doubting, takes-the-easy-way-out, apathetic self. So many of heroes today have to learn that what's really holding them back is themselves, right? (Anyone seen Birdman yet? Amazeballs.) Anyway, I can relate. SO! First mission to overcoming BadKat is to complete a single pull-up. I've never been able to do one. But I think I could if I worked hard. Maybe even in six weeks. We'll see. My three goals to achieve the main quest are: *Do 3x reps of 10 pushups every morning before work, or whenever I roll out of bed on weekends *Get at least 6 hours of sleep per night *Complete workouts every other day, either at my gym using the recommendations Steve set out to complete your first pull-up (body rows -> assisted pull-ups -> the pull-up) or beginner bodyweight workout at home. Sundays off. My life quest is to complete a character animation shot for my reel. I'm an aspiring animator, and I have a fantastic dayjob with resources to become much better at animating than I currently am. But BadKat really has a stronghold here, in terms of getting in the way of HappyKat's ability to grow as an artist and enjoy making what she has always been called to do. I've already started, but finishing is the hard part! Let's kick this pig. Okay so player stats: 25 y/o female, currently around 157 lb. I think I'm generally healthy, and diet is something I've been making steady progress with over the last couple years (down from 185 in 2011!). Physical fitness is and workout habits been trickier to build since I've never been especially sporty. That's where the rebellion comes in. So, glad to meetcha everybody! Will post back with progress and encouragement for others soon. Kat out!

Hey all! My name's Kat, and I've been following Nerdfitness for a while. I'm super jazzed to finally dive in to the community and build a healthy new lifestyle. First time doing any type of fitness challenge ever, so here goes! My quest is to defeat my alter-ego. I guess you might think of it as the devil on one's shoulder, or like evil Peter-Parker. I love the analogy of having a Mario-like quest to rescue the Princess, only in my case I feel like it's more of a quest to rescue my productive, healthy self from the self-doubting, takes-the-easy-way-out, apathetic self. So many of heroes today have to learn that what's really holding them back is themselves, right? (Anyone seen Birdman yet? Amazeballs.) Anyway, I can relate. So player stats: 25 y/o female, currently around 157 lb. I think I'm generally healthy, and diet is something I've been making steady progress with over the last couple years (down from 185 in 2011!). Physical fitness is and workout habits been trickier to build since I've never been especially sporty. That's where the rebellion comes in. So, glad to meetcha everybody! Will post back with progress and encouragement for others soon. Kat out!