REBUILDING: BECOME HARDCORE

A common mistake that people make when starting a workout routine is that they go in unprepared.  Most of us want to believe that we are physically stronger than we really are.

I have always been tall, big boned and looked like someone with brute strength.  And I believed it despite getting constant back and leg pain from just walking.  Walking up two flights of stairs would leave me heavily winded, but I still believed I had super human strength because I looked like I did.  I fit the big & tall label perfectly.

June, 2010.  Flirting with that 300 pound mark.

I was physically strong, but only in short bursts, and despite that, I was still convinced that after years of inactivity, I could walk into any gym tomorrow and go hardcore for at least an hour.

This is just the mindset that I as a physically strong looking person had, and it is the same with a lot of people of all body types.  One of the most common New Years resolutions people make is that on January 1st or 2nd, they are going to go to their local gym or health club, get a membership and make new health changes for their life.  That, "New year, new me" meme that millions of people post on their Facebook and Twitter timelines on December 31st.

For a lot of people, the "New year, new me" deal ends up being nothing more than a spur of the moment thing.  They see others talking about it, it gives them a sudden burst of inspiration and they hop on the bandwagon.  And that's where it ends.  A post or a Tweet, followed by a few 'like' clicks and comments of encouragement from friends of family.  The end.

Screencap from a 2011 Facebook video.  Size 3XL shirt.  Close to being at my physical worst.

For those who actually stick to their word and do go seeking out a gym membership, they go in ready to go, all guns blazing.  Ready to tear it up.  They do some pre-workout stretches as their favorite pulse-pounding songs play on their iPods.  They grab a 30 pound dumb bell and do 10 reps.

Whoa!

"Let me sit here for an extended rest period, and when it looks like nobody is looking, I'll just casually walk over to that rowing machine over there."

Position yourself on the rowing machine.  Set a moderate difficulty level and a time of 30 minutes.  Countdown.....3-2-1, GO!

What the f***?!

"Let me rest for a second, and when it looks like nobody is looking, I'll just casually walk over to one of the available treadmills over there."

Get on the treadmill.  Set a moderate difficulty level and a time of 30 minutes.  Countdown......3-2-1, GO!  Your arms are still a bit sore from 10 reps on 30 pound dumb bells.  Your back feels a little stiff from the rowing machine.  And now your legs are starting to feel sore.  You look at your watch.  You are barely 15 minutes into your workout!

You lower the difficulty level on the treadmill.  Go for another 5 minutes.  Step off the treadmill.  Walk back the the change room in pain.  Too sore to shower, so you change back into your regular clothes, go home and collapse on the couch.  Then what happens?  The next morning, you wake up in more pain than you went to bed with.  As a result, you don't go back to the gym again.  Luckily it was just a 30-day free trial membership with no commitment.

Congratulations!  You've been brought back down to Earth!

February 20, 2014.  Day 50 of rebuilding.

You went in completely full of yourself and you gave up.  You went in trying to run when you didn't even know how to walk.

NEWSFLASH!  Michael Jordan did not come out of the womb with the ability to dunk a basketball.  Wayne Gretzky did not come out of the womb already knowing how to skate.  They became great by starting with nothing but a will to succeed.  And they started with the very basics.  They had to learn to crawl before they walked.  And it is the same with starting a new workout and diet plan.

If you want to be successful at making positive healthy changes in your life but have no prior experience, odds are you will NOT be able to go an hour at the gym, and you will NOT stick to a strict diet by practically starving yourself on day one.  Your head might be ready, but your body isn't.

You need to start from scratch.  And that means doing what you thought would be too easy and beneath you.  It means not seeing quick results.  The beginning stages of a new workout and diet routine is a lengthy warm up process, much like how we stretch before starting a workout.

October 7, 2014.  Day 279 of rebuilding.

The beginning stage is not about SEEING results quick, it's about FEELING them.  I started my rebuilding process with nothing more than 10 minutes of very basic yoga poses a day and eating more fruits and vegetables and less junk.  I still ate some junk in the beginning but less of it.  After day one, I was in pain.  The next day, I woke up in more pain.  My body had been inactive for so long that it was in a state of shock.  But as time went on, my body quickly got used to the activity.  My 10 minutes of basic yoga a day turned into 20.  My intake of junk became less and less.  As I felt my body waking up, my energy started going up.  I traded sitting on my couch watching movies and playing video games for going out and walking.

After three months, my basic yoga had gone from 10 minutes a day to 30 as I was able to hold poses longer and would add new ones.  I was feeling and seeing results and working out was quickly becoming something I felt like I HAD to do, to something I WANTED to do.  Eventually, I went out and bought two 25 pound dumbbells and started a weight training routine.  Shortly after that, I added a cardio routine by doing Tae-Bo style punch and kick workouts while I put a UFC DVD on.

I now alternate cardio and weights.  Cardio one day, weights the next.  And while I do have a gym membership, I do most of my "beasting" in my living room.  My gym equipment consists simply of a yoga mat, two 25 pound dumb bells and a pair of MMA gloves.  Everything else comes from inside which was locked away for many years and had to be woken up and charged.

Home "home gym".  Simple as this.  Yoga mat, two 25lb dumbbells and MMA gloves.
(The gloves are for when I get energized and bang my fists together.  It happens.)

You need to crawl before you walk.  Walk before you run, and run before you sprint.  You don't start hardcore, you BECOME hardcore.  You ARE as strong as you think you are, but you need to give your body a chance to catch up with your thoughts.  And every minute counts.  If you are only able to go a few minutes during the beginning stages, a few minutes is better than no minutes as you are at least keeping your body active.  BECOME HARDCORE!

December 18, 2015.  Day 716 of rebuilding and still going strong.

Don't tell ME that YOU can't do it!

Chef Nairby

Rebuilding: Wake Your Body And Your Taste Buds

This is the first in a series of stories about how I have been rebuilding my life.

I spent the majority of my life being overweight and in terrible physical shape.  I would live in constant physical pain.  I would spend my day at work sitting and doing very little and then go home, sit and do nothing.

At one point, I was in such bad shape that I weighed well over 300 pounds.  I don't know exactly how much over since my scale only went up to 300.

At a family BBQ in 2009.  This isn't even me at my worst which was to come.

I didn't care about anything.  I was content with just living through the constant back and knee pain.  I bought sized 3XL shirts and hated the way I looked.  I looked like a huge freaking bell.  Many times, I would tell myself, "that's it!  Starting tomorrow, it's time to start getting in shape!"  That was usually while I was on my way to work and then the motivation would completely disappear at the end of the day.

My diet consisted of crap.  Junk.  Because it was cheap and made me feel relaxed at the end of, what I thought was a tough day.  But seriously, what is so physically hard about a job where you literally sit on your butt all day?

My awful diet, if you can even call it that, got so out of hand that when I was at my absolute worst, I would order a pizza meal for dinner that was supposed to feed a family of four.  And I would order this thing at least twice a week since I had a pizza place that was a quick 2 minute walk away from me.

Twice a week!  A large pizza with 3 toppings, 10 fried chicken nuggets, two dipping sauces and 4 cans of soda.  TWICE A WEEK!  Add that to the crap I was eating on the other days.  Burgers, triple-decker sandwiches, chocolate bars, doughnuts....pure garbage!  That was my life for so long.

Then in December 2013, something happened in my life that completely made me hit rock bottom.  One of those situations where you realize who your true friends are, and in this case, are NOT.  Only days after this went down, we got hit with an ice storm here in Toronto that took out the power of a lot of residents, myself included.

I was in a very bad place.  And now I had no electricity which the city was saying could take up to a week to restore.  To make things worse, My annual holidays started at the same time.  So it was me in the dark with nothing to do but think.  And with where my head was at, it was a very rough situation.

(May, 2014) Day 50 of my rebuilding process.

I had to get out of the house, so I walked to my local mall to see if there was anything going on there.  There was electricity but very little.  Most of the stores were closed but there were people EVERYWHERE.  And it was one of the most depressing sights I had ever seen.  Hordes of people lined up at every electrical outlet available to the public.  People camped out to charge their devices so they could watch movies and shows on their iPads, iPods and laptops.  Most of these people were in fine shape and there they were throwing their lives away.  Slaves to technology.  I found a place to sit in the mall and fought tears as I could not believe what I was seeing.  I left the mall and walked back home.

My power was restored after two days and my head was a complete mess.  I spent Christmas with family and it did very little to help.  I spent New Years alone.  Then on January 2nd, 2014, still feeling depressed and with another week or so left in my holidays, I said, "screw it!"  I grabbed a yoga mat that I had bought 5 months earlier and started my rebuilding process.

Day 274.  October 2nd, 2014

I laid the yoga mat out on my living room floor, and for the next 10 minutes, I did the most basic yoga poses you can think of while I put 'The Soprano's' on via DVD.  Ten minutes was all I was able to do.  The next day, I was in crazy pain.  My body had been in a coma for so long that it was just waking up.  Despite the pain, I did another ten minutes of basic yoga and watched more 'Soprano's'.

The pain quickly went away as I kept at it.  My body was waking up.  But this journey meant more than just working on my body.  It meant changing what I eat.  I completely dropped the pizza and junk and took advantage of the supermarket across the street and canvassed the fresh produce section on a daily basis.  I came to realize that not only was my body asleep for years, so were my taste buds.

The junk I was eating on a daily basis killed my sense of taste.  When I took that first taste of a fresh clementine, the flavors exploded in my mouth!  And I wanted more!  As time went on and I became more disciplined with my eating habits, I was getting hungry less, and therefore, SPENDING less on food.

When we consume garbage food, it does nothing good for our body because it contains ingredients the body does not use.  Thus, we eliminate it through our poops (that's right!  I said poops!) and become hungry again sooner.  The ingredients in the garbage foods, like sugar, that our body keeps gets turned into fat.  Eating garbage food is cheap because it does very little to satisfy our hunger, therefore we end up buying more and more of it.  Meanwhile, eating healthier foods means more ingredients, vitamins and minerals that our body uses to keep our energy up.  And as our body gets stronger, we end up craving food a lot less and end up spending less on food as a result.  So in the long run, healthy food is actually CHEAPER than junk.  And that is why healthy food is more expensive then junk.

November 4, 2014 (and still going strong!)

Healthy food is more expensive because it is an investment in your health that pays off very quickly.  Junk is simply a temporary solution to fulfill a craving.  I'm not saying that we should all become vegetables or starve ourselves.  I will eat some guilty pleasures every now and then because I know that I will work it off.  The key is that I needed to wake my body up after depriving it for so long.  I built up my metabolism by eating better in the beginning, and once I knew that I had the discipline to work the junk off, I knew it was safe to indulge every once in a while.  But after waking up my taste buds to the awesomeness of healthier foods, a lot of the time I will pass up the junk.  Not because it's junk, but because the good stuff just tastes better.

It is now February 3rd, 2016.  Day 763 of rebuilding.  Working out every day, not because I feel like I have to, but because it has become a regular part of my life.  The first step was waking up my body and taste buds and to not get discouraged at the pain in the beginning.  What should you expect from the first few workouts after a life of immobility?  This pain is what ends up discouraging most people from continuing.  But it goes away quickly.

I was in terrible shape.  Got no exercise.  Weighed well over 300 pounds.  Now I am in the best shape of my life.  Workout every day.  Weigh 240 pounds, last time I checked, building muscle and still going.

There is something that I like to say that I will stick to until I'm dead in the face....Don't tell ME that YOU can't do it!

The first step is to wake up your body and your taste buds.  Start investing in your health.  It's worth it.

Chef Nairby