Be More Superhero

My Dream Physique

The quest is to go from an over weight, out of shape 26 year old guy to someone that I am happy to see when I look in the mirror.

This blog will detail my journey from day one and will hold all of the trials and tribulations that I will face on my fitness challenge.

I don't know whether anybody will read this blog or not, I am writing in the hope that someone will find it useful and to go back and read it myself as a motivational tool.

Many times in the past I have tried losing weight, my lowest weight in memory was just under 210lbs and that was back in college when I used to run for an hour every day without fail. Since then my weight has rocketed up in periods of intense weight gain, first off from 210lbs to 224lbs during my A Level exams, then from 224lbs to 252lbs during university and finally from 252lbs to 280lbs in the last couple of years. 

Too much BS has been written on fitness

There is no one reason why it has happened, no great tragedy, or any change in ethos that I have recognised. I don't know if it is metabolism slowing down or a more comfortable lift style now that I have my own things like job, car and house.

The biggest problem seems to be losing motivation, either I am unwittingly not applying myself enough, or expecting changes to quickly but at any rate my body doesn't seem to change when I have tried to get in shape, so I get demotivated and quit. 

This problem is confounded by the absolute mountain of health and fitness advice that can be found wherever you go, from youtube to forums to magazines everybody seems to be giving advice on health and fitness, yet they all seem to disagree with each other, there doesn't seem to be one plan that everyone can agree on.

Being a geeky guy, I read all I can on a subject

Being a geeky guy in general seems to lead to reading everything I possibly can on any subject that interests me so that I can know as much as possible about it, the same is true for health and fitness, I have read countless plans, huge swathes of advice and diet plans beyond counting.

So I am going to try something that I haven't been able to find elsewhere, I am going to try each of these different plans and see how it actually works on a normal person who can't go and buy weird food or have the luxury of time to eat 8 small meals a day, or workout 3 hours at a time. After two months if no changes have happened, or the changes are negligible then I can expose the plan as being baloney and move on to something new, someone, somewhere amidst all of the white noise must be telling people the right way to go about things.

So I am going to start off my fitness plan with a nice motivational anchor 'Why am I doing this?", "What's going to be different to the last times when I failed?". I am doing this because the other night my fiancee told me that she is worried about how healthy I will be in the future, and the amount of stress that my unhealthy living is putting on my heart. This was really hard to hear, my fiancee has never mentioned my weight before and is the most supportive person I could hope to have around me, it was a real slap round the face, but it has been the jolt that I needed to kick my ass in to gear and do this thing.

Next up is my goal. Now I know that weight can be a poor measure of healthiness, right now I weigh 280lbs of mostly fat, for arguments sake I could become a superhero and weight 280lbs of pure muscle, now if I just rely on scales then I would think that I had utterly failed. Instead am I going to measure myself on bodyshape, by taking photos of myself tomorrow (day 1) and then every 2 weeks, hopefully over time I will notice a change in my physique and know whether or not what I'm doing is working.

Time for a plan

So I have my motivation - having a healthy heart and being fit for my fiancee and wedding

I have my goal - to alter my physique (going full Thor would be my ideal dream)

Last up comes my health and fitness plan. So to begin with I am going to try the 5x5 regime for my workouts and the Paleo lifestyle for my diet. 

The 5x5 workout regime claims to be inspired by the way that the Governator used to train back in the day, and its focus on total body big lifts like squats and deadlifts does seem to make a lot of sense, many of the sources I have read agree that activating big muscle groups creates the most stress on the body forcing it to become stronger. The plan ignores isolation moves like curls and lat raises, arguing that those muscles will get worked out by contributing to the big lifts. The regime doesn't mention any cardio so to begin with at least I won't do any.

The Paleo diet claims that for most of the time there have been humans (in one form or another) we have been hunter gatherers and it has only been relatively recently that we settled down, planted crops and started eating grain, dairy, fruit pastels etc. It claims that our bodies have not yet a\adapted to eat these foods because evolution only happens very slowly, and bodies only really evolve when there is a pressing need, with their not being a pressing need to use grain foods better because by the time it ruins our health we are middle aged and have already reproduced. The idea seems sound and the people that live paleo are filled with zealous conviction.

So tomorrow is Day 1, photos and the next blog to follow . . .