One Year of Healthy Living

It’s been a full year! Remember when I started? I was 150KGs, 330lbs. So, where am I now? Well, I have lost a total of 58KGs / 128lbs. Isn’t that amazing? :) The best part is… I feel like I can simply keep doing this all my life. It does not feel like a diet anymore. It is why I titled this blog post “Healthy Living” instead of mentioning how much I have lost. It is gone. It is part of the past now.

With that said, isn’t an annual weight loss chart cool! :) What’s cooler? A side-by-side photo comparison :)

In case you are following my monthly updates, you might be interested in knowing what happened and how things moved during August. As planned previously, I decreased my daily caloric intake from 2200 calories down to 2000. That was more than enough to kick my July plateau out of the picture. I started seeing weight loss just the next day. Unbelievable how 200 calories a day can affect our weight. To give a sense of scale, a 355ml can of coke is 160 calories.

My exercise plan was the same as the previous month; four days of weight training and four days of cardio mixed in a way that gives me a single day of full rest during the week. During the week of 19th, I had to slide back two sessions for day to provide me with the 20th as a free day. I had some business travel to take care of. That was pretty much the only exception I had to make for this month.

One interesting observation I have, and to be honest this is not unexpected, is that my Vo2Max has drastically improved. The way Polar measures it is through a custom metric they call “Running Index.” It is not merely a measure of VO2Max; it is a combination of various variables to assess your running performance. Here is my chart since I started running in mid-January 2019. Moderate to Elite 👍

Strava Game ON

In case you were wondering, I’m still on Strava :) This month I had two challenges to crash. The first one is a series of runs from NYRR. I was able to get to the 2470th position out of 10K runners. This was just part of one of my daily 40 minutes runs :) I wasn’t in it for the ranking, just saying! (Otherwise, of course, I would have a better ranking, what were you thinking?) The second challenge was about running 30 miles in 30 days. My monthly plan comes down to roughly 75 miles per month. So, the Roka Dirty 30 challenge was an easy one as well.

Next month, I’m going for the Escape Plan challenge. Fifteen minutes of activity, four days a week for four weeks is the challenge. My monthly plan covers this one as well :) The challenge will be my first week of September where I will have some travel. I will make that happen though!

Monthly health education

For the last two months, I managed to get some educational progress specific to health topics. This month I got another Coursera course completed. It was the “Science of Exercise” course from the University of Colorado. Unfortunately, I will need to put this tradition on hold for a while. I have some non-health related courses in my queue that I have to get to.

I liked this course very much. At the end of the course you are tasked to write an essay about the changes of VO2Max in exercising individuals. Feel free to read the one I wrote. It did get a passing grade :) These are peer-graded by the way, nothing crazy.

What’s next?

I know this feels like a significant milestone, but the thing is that I don’t want to make this a big deal. Why? Because it is not a big deal if you are in this for the rest of your life! That is the exact mindset that kept me in the diet for so long with zero cheat days! I mean, I had my cheat meals maybe, but I never labeled them cheat meals or days. I didn’t plan for a cheat meal. I had to do it for social reasons :) that was it. That’s why this “one-year” milestone doesn’t carry a lot of weight for me. I’m going to have another one next year, and the next, and the next. It will just keep going. Does that mean I will stop blogging about it? Of course not. I like blogging about it, and I will keep doing that as long as I love doing that. :)

To be concrete, I will keep the diet at 2000 cal/day and the exercise plan as it is for September. This will be a pretty busy month with a lot of travel, so I’m not sure how much I will succeed. We will see in the next months’ update :) Stay in touch, and see you on the next one ;)