I am an athletic person and all my life I have always been an active person. I played baseball, golf, basketball, Tennis etc. I have always gone to the gym, and would run to stay in shape.
I have always been conscious of what I ate for the most part never really indulged in anything, but I always ate sweets and sugars here and there. Afternoon coffee I would grab a sweet treat to go with it. Nothing is better than a coffee and a muffin.
Over the years these sweets have added up literally.
I recently started Mountain biking with a group of buddies and found that I was not in good of shape as I thought I was.
The guys I rode with were kicking my butt up the mountain. When I would finally make it to the top I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t catch my breath and felt nauseous.
I kept riding and pushing myself to get in better cardio shape. After 4 months of weekly rides I had better cardio and could get to the top of the mountain with out felling awful. However I was still trailing everyone else.
I asked my friend who was about the same height as me (5 foot 10 inches) what his secret was to get up the Mountain so fast. He looked at me and said how much do you weigh.
I hadn’t weighed myself in awhile and said I weighed 175 thinking that was the weight I normally am and that is what I most likely would be now.
He said well that’s probably the problem. You weight too much. I was like what? How much do you weight I asked? He said I was 10 pounds heavier than him and that is definitely a factor to climbing.
I went home thinking about how I was 10lbs heavier then he was. In reality I had no idea what I weighed.
I got home and pulled out the scale and to my shock I was at 186 pounds. What the heck??? How did that happen? I have never in my life been that heavy. After working hard twice a week on cardio for about 4 months I was weighing in at 186 pounds.
Apparently cardio workouts alone no longer worked like they used to when I was younger (I was 46 at the time of all this 47 now).
It was at that point I decided I needed to do something about it.
I have dieted before for short periods to shed some pounds here and there but it always seems to come back and this time it came back plus more.
So I decided to do some research and look at changing my diet for good. My goal was to find something that was more sustainable then going into calorie deficit for a few weeks.
The 3 things I found coming up over and over were Low Carb, Keto, and Intermittent Fasting.
So I decided to dig deeper on those 3 topics. Low Carb and Keto are fairly similar depending on the carbs you eat.
I found a lot of evidence that Intermittent fasting really worked well and it really worked well with Keto.
So I started doing 16/8 Intermittent Fasting. Not eating for 16 hours and then eating in the 8 hour window after the fast. It worked out well. I would stop eating by 8pm at night and then skip breakfast in the morning and wait until 12pm to start my eating window.
I didn’t change my diet too much other than this. I found that after 2 weeks of this I had lost 3 pounds.
This was progress.
After this I decided to take it a step further and incorporate the keto diet into my plan along with Intermittent fasting.
I started watching what I was eating. Eliminating almost all carbs other than fresh vegetables and adding in good fats such as avocados, nuts, olive oil and grass fed butter, and also adding good proteins like eggs, fish and chicken and some steak every now and then.
After doing this I lost 3 more pounds in the first week.
I continued to follow this plan and continued to lose 2-3 pounds a week. The more I lost the more determined I was to keep going.
I found that diet was not as hard as I thought it would be. Fasting until lunch was a little difficult to start. I would find myself pretty hungry but since I was committed to it I fought through it and just focused on getting to lunch.
Every week got easier and easier.
After 4.5 months to 5 months of following this plan – none of my clothes fit me anymore, I was in great shape and all the muscles I had that were hidden by fat started to show up. I looked and felt like a completely different person. I weighed in at my high school weight of 160 lbs.
I had not been at that weight forever.
After getting to 160 pounds it happened to be during the Christmas holidays so I decided to allow myself to eat a little more carbs but keeping an eye on them. 1 year later as of this writing I am still at the same weight and couldn’t be happier.
Since I did so much research over the last year and will continue to do more. I wanted a place to keep my notes / research in order to keep myself accountable and hopefully my story and research can help others. That is the reason I started this blog / website PulseGroupFitness.com
I have detailed this story going into more detail providing more info on the diet plan and must have foods for all this over in this article: How I lost 25 pounds
