Kratos

Picking up a bit. Ran a 5k yesterday in 30 mins and decided to run in silence. It turned out to be a bit of a meditative experience. It was nice to just be in the moment and appreciate the beautiful morning without distraction. I'm still sitting right at the cusp of hitting 200 lbs. Need to meet with a nutritionist who can get me on the path to more fat loss.

I'm clearly moving into a period where my discipline is being tested. It's really hard for me to want to keep trying right now. I haven't missed a day this week for exercise, but right now, all I can do is just show up. Motivation is really low right now; I've always heard that strength is shown when you take action without motivation. I'm hoping that at some point I will break through. I want that iron will to keep going actively fight back against my impulse to give in to laziness.

I'm respawned and ready to continue my path to a better body and better sense of self. Keeping this challenge simple. 1. Exercise everyday except sundays 2. Track food intake everyday 3. Meet with a nutritionist before the end of this challenge period. Just finished an ass kicking workout and feeling good. Good to be back.

Hey all, Respawning after some intentional time away from the world of hardcore diet and exercise. After dieting for nearly 4 months strait, I noticed a stagnation in my weight loss and a drop in my energy. This, plus masters classes and projects, really wore me down. So I've been managing to just barely keep things together, and have been eating more on the side of maintenance with some more frequent indulgence and have gained back a couple pounds. I'm ready to get back at things and reach my next set of goals. So here I am, respawning and recentering myself back on making fitness one of my major priorities and hobbies. I've lost steam the last month. I don't feel as interested as I used did before in making fitness a part of my identity. This is where the real challenge comes in. I've got to push through and not give up. Please root for me, folks. I need the strength to push through this time of low motivation. I know I can do it, but it will be hard. Me facing my next challenge

This challenge I may be over extending myself with school and being dad and everything else. I'm hanging in their and still sticking to my diet but I've backslid a bit. I'm still losing weight, albeit very slowly at this point. I'm nearly 200 lbs and 17% body fat. I haven't been this way in nearly 8 years! I'm probably going to scale back this challenge and just focus on keeping my habits: Daily exercise, keeping my diet and forgetting the rest.

Thanks for the support, Korra and Scaly. I'm holding on. I'm just making sure I keep my main habits of diet and exercise. This challenge cycle may be a bit harder for me but I'll do my best.

I'm just hanging in there. I've been tracking my reps every other day and now am on meal prep for lunch once a day. I've been having a hard time getting up in the mornings. Things have been stressful, but I'm having in there.

Ding ding! Checking in here. It's been a bit. I'm prepping for next challenge. I wanna step shit up and bring it! I'm so close to getting under 200 lbs which is NUTS! My wife told me I'm really starting to slim down which is making me feel very happy Still, I wanna take it a step further. I feel good when I take care of my body and exercise.

Welcome! I'm glad you've found the forum to be a place you feel comfortable. Share your goals, let people know about your quests as you accomplish them! I'm also new here but I've found that big changes have been taking place in me as I've been Stick(ing) With It! Dropping in daily has really helped me to not feel alone. It helps that there are many people on here with LOTS of experience and wisdom to impart. Good luck on your goals, and hope to see you more around here!

Nerd Fitness Challenge Here it comes! Round 3 and I'm feeling jazzed! After several weeks of plateauing, I'm starting to drop weight again and I'm seeing some tone and definition that I have never noticed before! Either I was too critical of myself to notice these things when I was younger and it was easier have a healthier looking body, or I'm actually getting a point of fitness that is altogether new! Either way, I've been building up a gut and lovehandles the last few years that is stubborn but SLOOOOOOOWLY getting smaller. As of the last challenge, I feel pretty damn solid now in terms of my commitment to exercise and diet. I will need to eventually seek a 2-4 week break from dieting and eat at a maintenance, but for now, I'm looking to maximize my improvement rate. Here are the goals for this challenge. 1. Track workout reps/weight EVERY SINGLE DAY. I have a spread sheet started up and I may make it publicly available online. It's nothing fancy and that is what I want. I want to prove to myself that I can get where I want to go without fancy tools and supplements and expensive gear. 2. Meal plans. Know what you are eating down to the gram. I down want to mess around with guesstimating my caloric intake and risk eating too many calories or whatever day after day. Doing this 5/7 days a week. The other two days, I can eat as I go but I will still track my calories and eat within my deficit with one cheat meal a week. 3. Stress management. I don't feel really stressed, but I think that is because I'm acclimated to stress. What does this mean? Not sure yet but here are some thoughts: light caffeine, green tee, no late nights, meditation/mindfullness, breathing, maybe occasional yoga, journaling? We'll see.

Welp, earlier this week I decided to end my caffeine fast after two weeks. Turns out baby with flu keeping us up all night, day light savings and just life in general was too much for me to be able to be effective. So I started reintegrating caffeine into my days but at MUCH smaller levels. I feel waaaaay better than I ever did consuming 500 mg a day. Now I'm at like less than 120 mg a day. And it's actually working for me again which is nice. Way more cheerful and focused. I'm gonna keep trying to lower the amount I use day to day so that I eventually get to the points of having maybe the equivalent of a cup of coffee a day. In other new, I'm starting to incorporate calisthenics into my work outs. Treated myself and bought some wooden parallel bars for push ups, planches etc. Got my ass beat by some super fun workouts last night. For the next challenge I may start incorporating stress management techniques like meditation, prayer, mindfulness or something. I'm continuing to eat at a consistent calorie deficit and exercising daily, but I have not quite seen the change in the scale or body fat percentage in a few weeks. I'm toning up and getting stronger though. I'm wanting to hang in there for a few more weeks before altering my diet, but I may go back to intermittent fasting for a while. And hopefully taking care of my stress levels will provide some additional assistance to my weight loss goals.

Oh man! I'm so sorry to hear all this. It's a very good thing for you to be looking after those kids. I hope you stay safe and I'm praying for this whole conflict to end.

Had an ass kicking leg workout last night. Since I was super warm after the workout, I decided to try some pull-ups. Set a new PR with 16 Pull-ups!

Over a week without caffeine. I'm really craving it right now since I've had about 3 sleepless nights in a row because my baby has the flu. But I'm holding strong. Gonna make it to the end of the challenge without folding. My weight is down today: 203 lbs and I'm thinking I've broken out of a plateau by increasing my daily caloric intake. I took a few days off my diet to eat regular and even a couple of more fatty and carby options like a burger or some pasta carbonara. I think it helped to boost my energy levels a bit as well.

Barcelona was great! I managed to find some screaming good deal tickets so we decided to head over and spent about 10 days around Barcelona, Girona and Cadaques. It was beautiful and there was so much to see. We ended up walking over 8 miles on a single day! I would highly recommend making the trip!

Were you walking around a lot while on vacation? Last year I went to Barcelona for 10 days and I ate so much gelato, and chocolate and fatty foods and was astonished to find that I had lost weight instead of gaining 5 pounds! Turns out that all the walking around the city really makes a big difference. Too bad my job can't be walking around as a tourist all day. I'd be dropping weight so fast

4 days without caffeine and I'm starting to feel more normal. The couple days were rough and I was feeling like a zombie. Doing my morning exercise has been a hard sell without heavy stimulating pre workout to coax me out of bed. The last two days I've had to do my workouts in the evening instead. I don't want to repeat this threedays in a row because the mood boost from exercising early in the morning has been very helpful for being an effective human at work, school and home. Plus, the more distant I become from a routine, the more I feel myself drifting away from the mindset of "this is important" and I want to drift back to not exercising or eating healthy. When I start to drop into autopilot mode, that has been when I've lost my edge and momentum. This time around is supposed to be different. I need to keep my drive and motivation up. I've been losing fat on my body and I've been feeling good about myself, I don't want to go back to feeling like shit all the time.

How are things going? Haven't seen you on in a while.

I need to get off caffeine for a while. My intake is out of hand. I'm going to add to my challenge to consume zero caffeine until the end of this challenge. Once it's over, I'm going to need to set a low limit on how much I can consume in a day. It does nothing for me and is just getting ridiculous. I'm still doing good on my challenge. I did take two days off of working out because I had a busy weekend and last night, some family stress really affected me more than usual. I woke up feeling like shit and made myself get out of bed even though it was 5:30 and it was the best choice I've made all day. I felt so much better after getting in a workout, and it wasn't even that great of a session. In other news, I'm at 12 pullups for my PR. I'm getting pretty damn stoked. Never been able to do this many pullups EVER in my life. I think I'm gaining weight (in a good way) while I've been in a cutting phase of my diet. My gut is shrinking slowly but noticeably, but my weight is remaining at 202-205 lbs each week. I'm tracking my calories every day to eat 75% of my BMR, and exercising daily. I did think that I would weigh less by now, but I've been sitting at this 202-205 for about 3 weeks now. I guess that over the years my muscle mass has really diminished and my body fat has really accumulated. So my weight loss looks like net zero but the slow transformation seems to really be happening.

I'm honestly kind of amazed at the change that has taken place so far. It's been a month now I think, and I haven't missed a single day of exercise (except sundays when my exercise is a walk with my family). I'm hesitant to celebrate or even acknowledge the success for fear that I'll fall off the wagon and back into laziness, oversleeping, overeating of unhealthy crap and feeling complacent. But this time around, it really feels different. The main difference this time is that the change I made was not to do a diet, or workout more. Instead, the change I made was to my personality and identity. I decided that my health was important enough to put major pastimes on the backburner and consider my health to be my new major hobby. I still do the things that I was committed to when I feel inclined (video games, music, tinkering), but the thing that I practice everyday is testing my body physically and monitoring what I put into it. I started out in the beginning by telling myself "this is who I am now. I am an athlete. I am someone who is committed to exercise and proper diet." I continued to tell myself this until I didn't really feel like I have to. Now over the last two weeks, it's started to click. I'm to the point where I reflect on my workout I did earlier that morning and I can't help but feel excited to get home from work and try getting in another session just because I want to. I want to go deeper. My body is slowly changing and I'm liking what I see and it's making me more confident. We'll see how well I hold up with all this but so far a have observed a major improvement from one small change: I made diet and exercise part of my identity. I just wanted to write this up here, in case maybe it would help someone. If this continues to work for me, I'll be recommending it to anyone. I want to ride this change all the way to having the body I never dreamed I could have and feeling sharp and energetic all the time.

Thanks for the recommendation! I go to church in a passive sense, but considering what you're saying here make me want to participate more by serving the people in my community. I may look into some secular community clubs as time goes on and I have the bandwidth to spare.

I was feeling pretty bummed out the last two days. I've been reading too much news and consuming too much media outrage, politics etc. I'm American and not one who is inclined to a specific party, though I try to relate to each point of view including those with "hokier" views. Leaving out details so as not to make this a "political" discussion, I've felt disappointed by world leaders lately but even more disappointed by the way people in the world seem to be treating and judging each other based upon that someones outlook or convictions. It seems like us regular folk not running the show but just living our lives can't help but find reasons to be constantly angry and seeing the worst in each other. It's times like these where I really wish I could become a superhero alter ego like we discuss here and help to "change the world", make people believe in each other and give each other a break. I'm sure many people here can relate to this feeling. I don't have a dog in any political fight. I just wish there was a way I could overnight transform the way we see each other. I love here at NF that no matter where we are from, we all have a couple of things in common: we've made life decisions that are making us unhappy and we want to change them, we love stories of heroes and we want to be like them. I think that our focus on trying to better ourselves, serve each other within this community, cheering each other on is a seriously important element to why this place feels so safe. Anyway, that enough rambling on what's got me down today. Sometimes, the general anger and indifference being spouted into the world here in the US with the constant flow of drama, really makes me wish I could just grab these people and hug them and tell them I love them until they soften up. I'm already really distant from social media where the anger is most concentrated and toxic, but I'm feeling like I should dawn the mask and cape and start acting like a super hero in my community and bring people some love and cupcakes and tell them they're beautiful (especially those that I may feel less inclined to like). Holy shit what a ramble. I love all of you. I wish all of you success in your goals.

Keeping things real. Still exercising daily and tracking my food intake. I'm on the path. The gains are slow but I'm trusting that if I continue to follow the science, I'll be seeing long term gains that are worth the wait. I feel more energetic most days. This morning, not so much, but I skipped my morning workout so that's probably why. Since I finished my workout an hour ago though, I feel that energy has come back and has me craving more. I'm excited to get up tomorrow morning and get wrecked! I think I could use some more time to be introspective.

As of today, I hit my lowest body weight since probably 2016. Feels good. I'm starting to look forward to my morning workouts and I'm trying to sneak in a couple extra sets of pullups once in a while since I'm working on getting my rep count up. It's really exciting to be in a place in my life where I like exercising and I'm liking dieting. I don't feel like I'm on a diet because this time around , I'm eating the foods I like and I'm mainly just working on making my calories count for what I need most. The chain: 🪢🪢🪢🪢🪢 🪢🪢🪢🪢🪢

Good point of caution. I don't set too much by it in terms of the actual value. What I'm looking for is a downward trend, and a slow and steady on at that.