Becoming the Ultimate Me

[Shukar]

I decided it was finally time to stop lurking about these forums and sign up for an account.

Firstly, some background on the name. Shukar was the name of my character in the first Exalted game I played in. It's lots of magic, lots of adventure, and as a Solar, all about being the best anyone could possibly be in whatever you decide you want to be good at. Shukar was literally the best at everything because through careful application of nearly limitless cosmic power he had decided it should be so. I've decided that reasoning should apply just as well to myself as it does to an RPG character. Thus, I have taken his name for my own here to remind myself that I can be the best at anything if I apply myself, for no other reason than because I have decided to make it so.

So far that's been turning out pretty well for me. When I started this epic journey of self-transformation it was January 2010, I was getting married in 8 months, and I weighed 283 pounds. Now I'm pretty tall at 6'5" so that's less terrible than it might otherwise be, but I was overweight, and not at all in very good shape. I decided I needed to do something about that and so I did. Started off by just cutting back on calories, amazing what will happen when you switch from 1500+ calorie meals to 700 calorie meals. That plus cutting out soda and trying to cut back on sweets got me some pretty good results, considering the small amount of real effort involved, and by the time of the wedding I was down to 249. Kept it up and added in some running around early October, by which point I was down to 227, working my way through the Couch to 5k program. by the end of the year when I finished that I made it to 198 and was looking a lot better.

By this point I had excess skin from the weight change, and still too much bodyfat for my tastes. January was when I decided to go fully primal in conjunction with a friend, she dropped out after about a week and a half because she was having too much trouble figuring out what to eat, and it was the best I remember feeling in a long time. Sadly I was not able to stick with that as strictly as could be hoped leading to my current diet of trying for Primal with the addition of some rice and tubers, and not quite making it there for various reasons.

January was also the month I decided to start doing the Nerd Fitness Beginner Bodyweight Circuit so by the end of the month my body fat was down about 4%, and my weight was up to 199. Since then I've tried my best to keep doing a mixture of running and resistance when I workout with varying success. There was a month or two in there where I didn't do much working out at all and my stats suffered.

Since then I've run the Warrior Dash in my Vibram Classics, picked up my running substantially in terms of distance and pace, put on some more muscle (and sadly also some more fat) using some methods from Tim Ferris's The Four Hour Body, and started doing some more resistance training again, mostly bodyweight circuits as before. Runkeeper, Dailyburn, my scale, and a lot of skill with excel have served me well on this quest and right now I'm sitting at about 207 pounds (and slowly falling since I'm slacking on my resistance training) and a body fat that's slowly climbing.

I'm a huge fan of personal tracking, I track my weight, body fat, sleep quality (soon to be expanded with a Zeo), running pace, distance, and now heart rate (all through Runkeeper on my iphone), my calories in/out and workouts (dailyburn), and even how much water I lose during a run (scale, weather data, and some math). So now I come to this place for like minded people who want to become the ultimate manifestation of themselves.

Edit: Holy cow that was way longer than I thought it would be when I started, sorry about that guys.

[zielperson]

Welcome!

How are you tracking your body fat%?

::zielperson::

[Josh_C]

I'm very curious to hear what you think about the Zeo. It sounds interesting if it actually works.

[Shukar]

@Ziel, I'm currently using the Accu-measure Personal Bodyfat Calipers, but I'm not sure I trust them fully. In part due to the fact that I know I'm introducing at least some error when I make measurements, and in part due to the fact that even when I'm being as consistent as possible between the 3 readings I take I can get a range from 6mm to 12mm. I'd really like to find something that I can use at home a little more easily to get consistent results, even if they aren't accurate the trend is really what I'm more interested in than the number.

@Jcamson, Aas soon as I've got some data from the Zeo I'll let you guys know how it works out. Right now I'm just taking notes each morning when I wake up in a text file as to how I felt like I slept, awakenings during the night, if I get tired throughout the day etc. I'll be continuing that for a while after I get the Zeo to try and figure out how they line up. Hopefully the data comes back useful.