Hey peoples, how is it going this wonderful Saturday and the last day of April? I did it guys. I ran my first 5km today, non-stop. Remember I had mentioned in my last post that I was going to aim to do a 3 mile run this weekend. Well I did. I actually covered 3.25 miles!Did it this morning in 45 minutes and I am super elated. My legs almost gave way after the run cos it was a first time but it feels really great though!

Right after my 5km run….

Back to the tennis court after the run

This 5Km run for me is hugely significant and is perfect for the next thing I would like to share from my weight loss experience till date. I have called it the shock therapy! For the weight loss process, my finding over time has been the need for some shock therapy every now and then.

So basically, you have decided to cut down your weight, and determined that you are going to have to cut down your dietary consumption as well as change your dietary intake, and you will need to rev your physical activity. The first couple of days when you start off on your plan, your body immediately feels the changes, and the brain needs some time to acclimatize to the new way of life. This sort of explains why just reducing your quantity of food, cutting late night feeding, and removing most of the items I recommended in one of my  earlier posts automatically shows results. If you sustain the diet beyond a week, you will definitely feel the effects and can drop 2-3 kgs within two weeks depending on how aggressive your diet plan is. Secondly, you have been physically inactive for a while and decide to task your muscles, bones, lungs and heart, so you start walking long distances in an effort to increase your calorie-burning metabolism. For those who have tried adding daily exercise to their routine, I am sure you have had the experience of severe muscle aches by the next day following your first attempt at exercising. Your whole body aches and you can feel the work you have just done in every inch of your body. Again, this is a new experience for the muscles and for your body, and the effects are rather fast. It’s like moving a car from 0 to 60kmph in less than 5 seconds. Your body has to use up a lot of energy, rapidly boost circulation and increase your cardiovascular function to accommodate this change.

A study done in Norway in 1991 showed that you have to exercise at almost 50 percent of your maximum capacity to increase your metabolism. You also need to ensure that the exercise you engage in is one that ensures continuous burning of calories even after the exercise session is over. This type of exercise is the one that increases body temperature and makes you sweat.It can be moderate or intense. However, our bodies are designed in such a way as to adapt to changes by increasing its capacity. This is what sometimes leads to the weight loss plateau. Have you noticed that after a while, it becomes very difficult to lose weight marginally? It becomes almost a struggle to shed each additional pound despite the fact that you continued with the same diet and exercise routine that helped you knock off the first 5-8kgs within 2 months. Turns out that the body learns to adapt by increasing its efficiency at performing movements such that it doesn’t have to exert as much energy and thus you don’t burn as many calories as you originally did. And that means your weight loss will come to a halt.  I read from a  body building site that as the body progresses through days, weeks, and months of training, its structure, and function, changes to accommodate the consistent workload. This, they call Chronic physiologic adaptation. Please take some time to open the link and read more about how our bodies adapt to exercise.

In my experience so far, I have had interesting weight loss plateau periods. In the first two months, I lost roughly 10kgs then I got stuck. For almost three weeks, I struggled to break the 86kg mark, so I oscillated between 86 and 88kgs that period. It was quite depressing because it seemed like all that I had been doing which worked suddenly didn’t work anymore. Thankfully, my physiotherapist friend who helped tremendously with advice on my journey, was on hand to listen. So I shared my new challenge with her and she told me one thing: You have to increase the intensity of your exercise or increase the duration. At this time, I was still mostly walking and hesitantly doing a 5-10 minute run at the beginning of my tennis sessions. With that new information, I set out to challenge myself to increase my runs during the tennis sessions. So I went from running round the tennis court 10 times to 20 times. This is about 1.5 miles total. Essentially, I doubled the distance I ran. Secondly, chatting with dopekid, I shared the same with him about my struggle, and he introduced me to HIIT – High Intensity Interval Training. The suggested routines involved using the elliptical machine and cross trainer, but since I am not using the gym, I decided to adopt the principle in my own routine. I then changed my running ground from the tennis court to the hockey pitch which has a much larger perimeter (about the size of 4 standard tennis courts) and enabled me to cover a longer distance. Then I added in some sprinting to my routine. So after running about 1-1.5 miles round the hockey pitch, I would sprint across back and forth, about a 150m run both ways combined. In less than 2 weeks of implementing the new changes, thanks to the information from my friends, I dropped to  the 83 – 84 kgs range. Shortly after that, I dropped further to 82kgs. Awesome, right? So yeah, my body required additional stimuli to shock it into increased metabolism and more rapid calorie burn.

By the time I started this blog, I had hit a weight of 81.5kg, and then I got stuck at that weight again, fluctuating between 81.5 and 83kg. The 80kg mark started to look so far yet so near. By this time, I was running 2 miles comfortably, walking 8km easily, though I had a lot of work-related travels in the period. We will talk about how to compensate when traveling and maintain your routine in a different environment in a future post. It took me another 3 weeks to break past the 80kg mark, which was last week, to be precise. What I decided to do was tackle my diet again and change the feeding pattern in a bid to shock the body one more time. I didn’t read this anywhere, I just figured that if I did something my body was not used to, it would respond differently, and it did. So what I did, was to add breakfast before 9am, three times a week to my routine. To be honest, when my weight loss journey started in January, I did not really take breakfast. My morning meal was usually an apple, some grapes and lemon infused water. The reason I did this was because my classical breakfast meal before the journey was bread and eggs, akara and fried sweet potatoes or oats with a lot of milk. These were all fattening for me, and I had to make a hard stop. But as I had to change what my body had gotten used to, I decided to interchange with breakfast every other day. So I had yam with eggs and stew (small portions) or other solid food in the mornings (no bread or flour-based foods). On alternate days, I would stick with my apple only breakfast and a very light lunch. However, once I had the heavy breakfast, I snacked on fruits for the rest of the day. I also cut down on the exercise for two weeks, minimizing my workouts to only weekends when I was back at home. Doing this for 2 weeks, I observed a drastic change in my weight. This actually led to my breaking the 80kg mark.

So here I am now, at 78.9kg, with a target of 75kg; I need to do something extra. Hence, the extension of my running distance. So yeah, I decided to aim for a 5km run non-stop today for two reasons – To prove to myself that I could do it and more importantly to further stretch my muscles and other body organs and elicit a response never before seen. I am hoping this will accelerate the weight loss and bring me closer to my set goal.

In conclusion, your weight loss journey will require variations as you go along. You will need to be innovative, using the principles described here, to keep your body in a perpetual state of weight loss until you reach your target, and then maintain that weight, which I am sure comes with its own strategies. Sometimes the changes may include varying the intensity or duration of your work out, taking a short break from workouts to reinvigorate, adding strength training to your routine and many others. Key is to continue to challenge your body in such a way that you constantly overload its current state of fitness. Stay ahead of the body by regularly varying your diet and exercise so as to continue to see progress with your weight loss and fitness goals. I am not at my target weight yet, but I think that if I can do this 5km run 2 more times, I should be closer to my 75kg target and can start learning about how to maintain the weight loss for the long run.

I would like to leave behind this poster that I ran into at a mall this afternoon, after my intense workout. I think it sends a strong message especially for those of us who are currently not healthy weighing, and continue to procrastinate on when to start the process of increasing physical fitness and possibly shedding excess weight if that is part of the problem. Don’t wait till a medical report recommends increased exercise or diet; usually by that time, irreversible damage may have been done. Why don’t you take the initiative now and start giving your body some good loving shock therapy? You will see it will be one of the best decisions you ever made!

For now, let me get back to resting my muscles and catching up on running-induced sleep, as I psyche myself for the next 5km run which I have scheduled for Monday morning, thank God for public holidays. Hehehehehe! Ciao