… and not tough in every way I would have expected.

I do like a challenge though and fully appreciate that any challenge worth doing is not going to be easy.

I am just nearing the end of a self-imposed 90 day challenge to get leaner, fitter and healthier, which I see as 3 distinct goals of my challenge, i.e.:

– Lose Weight (eating less and moving more)
– Get stronger (daily exercises working different muscle groups)
– Get Healthier (as a result of the above plus healthy diet choices)

The last article I wrote was all about how (and why) I designed this challenge to meet these goals and at the end of the article I have updated it every week as a personal record of how it went for me.

If you want to read about it, here it is: 10 Health & Diet Tips I’m Trying Right Now

As a big part of the experiment for me was learning, I want to capture some of that somewhere which is what this article is about.

Calories

The biggest education for me in this challenge has been learning about how many calories different things have. It is quite amazing how many calories there are in relatively small things. A Jam Doughnut for example – lots of calories (about 240 calories).

Peanuts – OMG – calories in peanuts. When I did the slow carb diet and read that peanuts were allowed, I ended up eating lots of peanuts. That diet advocates ‘no counting’ and just eating the right things, but I reckon that eating lots of peanuts may well have something to do with why that diet was a lot less effective for me than I thought it was going to be (as I wrote about in this article: 3 Reasons To Try Tim Ferris’ 4-Hour Body (Slow-Carb) Diet – And 10 Reasons Not To… … and got plenty of interesting comments about!).

Doing this challenge and actually counting calories meant if I was going to eat some peanuts, I would weigh them, e.g. eating 30g of peanuts (184 calories) so as not to consume too many calories. As 30g is just a relatively small handful of peanuts, at 184 calories (nearly 10% of my daily ‘budget’) I wonder if it’s worth it and tend to eat something else instead.

Even some very healthy foods can be rich in calories, Houmous and Avocado for example. So, as I still want to eat healthy foods such as these I just need to be careful.

Foods high in fibre are great – low in calories and really good for you – carrots, salad, celery etc.

Bread and cakes in general – pretty high calories.

So I will hopefully now know going forwards roughly how much I’m eating whenever I eat anything which is great. Hopefully this will mean that without having to explicitly measure, I can keep a fairly healthy diet both in terms of what I eat but also in terms of how many calories I eat.

Water

I still don’t like the taste of water much and I am less used to drinking it than I had hoped but I do think you get more used to drinking it if done regularly.

I can drink more water more easily now than when I started, I just don’t love water that’s all.

Hopefully I can continue to drink more water going forwards because it is definitely beneficial in terms of overall health and also in terms of beating hunger (sometimes when you feel hungry your body is actually craving water).

Drinking plenty of water is definitely a good thing to do.

Your Body Fights Back

Completely expected, but your body fights back.

First week or two I lost weight and saw some good results but then for the next weeks it was much, much harder. Particularly week 3 if I remember rightly, I put in the same effort and had the same stringent constraints on diet etc but saw no change. That can be really demoralising but where I am quite proud of myself is by recognising this and just continuing, ploughing through and eventually seeing the gains continue – even if in a smaller way.

As time goes on the changes will be smaller and smaller and harder and harder to achieve but as I’m now in a better place weight, health and fitness-wise than when I started this challenge that’s completely OK.

Building Strength

This is where it’s really tough. Really tough. In my case anyway. Maybe I ned a personal trainer after all, but I have found that despite pushing myself quite hard on exercises such as crunches, press-ups, planks and squats, I have seen only marginal progress week on week.

My theory on this was that a personal trainer will get me to do these exercises but with a bit of research it can’t be that difficult and if it’s just about motivation then with a system I create and then via that structure, have something to stick to, then I can motivate myself just as well as any personal trainer would.

I still think there is something in that theory and I certainly have made progress but I’m just saying that progress in this area has been really tough – and slow. Maybe that’s just the way it is.

Sugar

Eating less sugar in general means that when I do eat sugar, it tastes a little sweeter.

That’s great and the ideal is that a healthier diet ensues with sugar feeling a little more extreme when eaten versus more healthy choices.

In my case, unfortunately it doesn’t take much for old habits and cravings to kick in, so when I start eating a little sugar/sugar based products such as biscuits – see next point.

Cravings Don’t Stop

Sadly, after 78 days of doing this diet, the cravings for snacks, chocolate or things that I really like the taste of just don’t go away. A single chocolate can have a huge amount of calories for it’s size and how much it feels like it fills you up (which, let’s face it isn;t the reason you were eating the chocolate in the first place).

2000 Calories – friend or foe

When I started this challenge all optimistic and excited about it I was astounded at how easy it was to eat less than 2000 calories per day. Everything I’d heard and read told me this was going to be really difficult but it really wasn’t. I could have a small breakfast, a decent meal at lunctime *and* a decent meal in the evening and still have some calories left over to play with.

I took great pleasure in finding low calorie things I could have as snacks if needed – things like rice cakes and crackers and even found that I like the taste of these things.

As I got into the swing of my challenge the 2000 calorie mark became more of something I ended up using up like a budget, using up fully and as a result found it hard to keep to.

Weird the way this switched around but it basically tells me that with the right mindset it is fairly easy to eat a lot less and a lot healthier – but that mindset easily shifts and/or disappears completely.

Inactivity is a Double Danger

You would think that if you are not doing much, just sitting around and watching telly that you don’t need to eat much, right?

This is absolutely true. If you are sitting around, not doing much then you don’t need to eat much.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works. In my case, if I keep busy then I don’t need to eat much and it is mainly because I don’t have time to. My body may even need a little more fuel but if I am busy (in an active way), then I don’t eat much because I don’t have time.

If I am not busy, that’s when I tend to eat things I don’t need to. I have cups of tea and too many snacks. That’s when the cravings kick in and I make little excuses to myself.

On this particular diet, counting calories has been a good safety net for this particular danger – having a calorie budget I have to stick to every day has given me the extra will power I need to keep a tight check on how many calories I am eating in these snacking moments.

The big question is whether after completing this 90-day challenge in 2 weeks and going ‘back to normal’ (i.e. not measuring everything) whether I will be able to keep some discipline. My guess is that this is something I’m reallt going to struggle with.

Addicted To Rice Cakes

I have a problem that when I find something that I think slves a problem, I then go overboard and major on that thing. In this case, rice cakes. I love the taste of yoghurt coated rice cakes. The problem is that the yoghurt coated ones (is it really yoghurt – no it isn’t) obviously have a lot more calories (4x) than plain ones and if you get to *really* liking them, then eating these as a low cal alternative snack ends up being counter-intuitive because you end up eating too many.

I have had to ban myself from purchasing these – at least as a part of a healthy diet – if I buy them – and I mean chocolate or yoghurt coated ones – it is strictly as a normal, unhealthy snack – in the same way as I’d buy biscuits.

So beware of rice cakes – most are OK but when they are chocolate or yoghurt coated they are no better than anything else.

Conclusion

As I said earlier there are a few lessons I have learned doing this challenge and have captured here.

I have no idea where I go next but it’s definitely been a worthwhile challenge. I have enjoyed it for the most part (because I like challenging myself) even though it really has not been easy and I have seen much better results than with any of the ‘off the shelf’ diets I’ve tried.

One last thing I have learned is how I would tweak the challenge and diet system itself – mainly in terms of increasing the effectiveness of some of the exercises to get more intensity in less time as I get stronger but also reducing some of the other parts of the diet to make it easier to sustain on an everyday basis whilst still keeping me at a good level of weight, health and fitness.

I have even made a set of ‘rules’ for v2 already but I first of all want to revert to no system at all and see if some of the changes I have made will stick around all by themselves as newly formed habits. Fingers crossed!

What I do know is that this works so if I do need to do it again it should have even better results because I am coming from a better place and with all of the learning from the first time around.