Mitch's 10 Tips To Avoid The Holiday Bloat

As it's coming up to the silly season, it's advisable that you avoid eating all of the crap commonly associated with the season and keep your focus on kicking Rock Star's ass if you're Rod, or kicking "Captain Kung Fu's" ass if you're Jord. Here are my 10 tips to avoid the holiday bloat:

1. Every time you go to eat junk food, grab your gut and or man boob(s) - this will remind you that instead of eating the crap food you'd be much better off eating something healthy, like a salad or a McChicken without the mayo instead of 5 super sized double quarter pounder meals.
   
   
2. Chicks dig a guy with muscles - and nothing builds muscles more than lifting weights. if you have a day on the holidays when you're bored, go into a gym or come to the office for an hour, take off your shirt and belt the living be-jesus out of the weights. You'll feel good for doing it.
   
   
3. Drinking and eating don't mix - When you're drunk you eat shit because you don't care. Try and stay away from dark coloured drinks like bourbon and guiness and instead go for light coloured drinks like vodka and soda, tooheys new, gin, etc.
   
   
4. Eccentric, slow - concentric, fast - Eccentric is the "easy" part of a rep. For example when you're doing bench press the easy part is pushing the barbell up. The concentric part is lowering it to your chest - just remember: FAST concentric, SLOW eccentric and you'll feel the pain in the morning.
   
   
5. Limit drinking to once a week if you can - Just volunteer to be the designated driver and you're friends wont give you shit for not drinking - sure it sucks when everyone's on the dancefloor moving and grooving and you're standing there staring at the floor, but at least you can go home and eat a salad at 2am when everyone else is enjoying their delicious, hot, tasty, succulent beef kebab. Yallah!
   
   
6. Stick to a schedule and follow it - If you decide to train Monday, Wednesday and Friday, make sure you stick to it. Your body will get into a routine too and will "tell you" when it's ready to train. Sounds strange but it's true - almost like when it tells you it's ready to collapse after a night out on the pale ale.
   
   
7. Tell everyone about your goals - The more people you tell, the more accountable you are, which means you're more likely to stick to your plan. When I started about 3 years ago I told everyone - my mum, brother, friends, Ed, everyone. You don't want people to think you're a 2 bit slacker for giving up now, do you?
   
   
8. Have an end goal in mind - ALWAYS have a plan - it's cliche but if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Even if the plan's just in your head. When I started mine was to get back to 80kg's, then 75, then 70, then to get to 75 with muscle (muscle weighs more than fat for everyone playing at home). Write down your end goal and figure out a plan to get to it in the shortest possible time.
   
   
9. Walk whenever you can - Instead of driving somewhere, try and walk or ride or run. For example, if you need to go to get milk from the corner shop and it's a 5 minute drive, try walking the 20 minutes it takes to get there instead. And when you get there instead of getting full cream milk, get skim. Tastes like shit for a while but after a few days you'll get used to it.
   
   
10. Keep motivated - look at the weight loss success stories at bodybuilding.com, read johnstonefitness.com every few days (bookmark it) and even go to borders and buy a book or two on weight loss/muscle growth to read over the holidays. There's a lot to learn and the more you learn the quicker you'll get to your goal.

And that's my 10 tips for beating the holiday bloat. If you don't like them then kick yourself where it hurts. Twice.

Rockstar Vs. Little Girl

Wow, its been a hectic day! We had our first main workout session under the iron fists of Eddie and Mitch. Rod took an eager attitude quickly running down stairs to get the skipping rope, the same way little girls do at school lunch times.

While he was doing that the Rockstar of Interspire (AKA Me) powered my way through on the treadmill, later getting into the weight with some bicep curls. I also dabbled in some push-ups, iron bridge thingies and some chin up (couldn't even do 1 proper one!)..

Today we had fish for lunch! Our food has been decent throughout the week too, we're keeping up well, we'll see who does better over the break won't we, Rodney "Maccas" Amato.

Some Random Pictures

Here's a few pictures off my phone. The first one is Jordie's foray into the world of seafood at our Christmas party. As you can see he ate quite a bit so "Team Success" will soon have to be renamed to "Team Excess".

Second photo are the ones that convinced us to do the whole healthy eating thing Mitch and Ed along with Mitch's girlfriend Alicia. So I guess you can say it's all the bosses. Jordies, Mine and Mitch's :)

The other two is just an example of the awesomeness of the food that Jordie and I are now having. It's kind of hard to see what's in the sandwich but believe me, it's full of delicious awesomeness .... and a bit of chicken.

"In Rod We Trust"... Or do we?

Evidently not, with a weekend of splurging on forbidden fruit. For shame rod, FOR SHAME.

Taking the focus back to "Team Success", (formerly known as "Team Jordie"), I had a somewhat unfortunate weekend in regards to food, but an excellent weekend with exercise including lots and lots of walking among other things. It was an all round active weekend, which I guess balanced out the mug of liquid chocolate (thanks max brenner!) and gourmet pizza I had (can't be as bad as the fast food places? Still not great I suppose.). Sunday was fine, the only issue then was lack of constant eating, but the food was healthy, with the exception of cheese.

Weight is up though... 73kg. *sigh* I guess I have to try harder... Starting with lots more exercise!

Jordie steps up

So it appears that Jordie is trying to step up his campaign to defeat me. In an effort to destroy me he managed to sneak off early from our Christmas party, escaping the effects from the drinks for the rest of the night. He also seems to be hopping on the treadmill during the day in an attempt to demoralize me and some how managed to get me to eat McDonalds for dinner last night without being anywhere near me !

Even with all these attempts I will be victorious ! Chris and I say that our game of pool will tell the tale of how the day is going to go, well today I sank all 7 balls on one go so take that Team Jordie !

Weight today is 83.0

Dude, where's my belt ?

I just realised that I forgot to put a belt on today. When you can go half a day before you realise something like that you KNOW it's time to lose a bit of weight.

It all begins with breakfast

Breakfast is by far the most important meal of the day. Eating a healthy breakfast kickstarts your metabolism and sets you up with the energy you need throughout the day. Don't just take my word for it:
http://www.mrbreakfast.com/article.asp?articleid=7

And here's Jordie enjoying his first health challenge breakfast. A nice bowl of weatbix and a nectarine... team Jordie is off to a nice start...

Coffee and Tea: The Lesser of 2 Evils...

Both coffee and tea are diuretics - they make you piss like a mad man. They also contain a lot of caffeine and no vitamins or minerals. Jordie is having one tea a day which is ok because it contains antioxidants. Rod, one coffee a day and it's in the morning which is still bad, but at least it will (hopefully) give his metabolism a kick start.

Rod's food plan is looking good and Jordie's is great - the worst thing Jord has eaten this week is "beef" - he's eating lots of salad, potatoes and magoes - all good sources of viitamins and minerals. Hopefully this will also help to flush toxins from their sytems and clean their intestines too. Only time will tell...

Day 1 -- The decision

Not sure what actually triggered the "Ok, lets do it" response. Mitch and I had been bugging these guys for quite some time now. "Back off the chinese food man, take it easy on the coffee, drink some damn water!" but they simply ignored us, typing away, msn'ing each other about how silly we sounded.

Then one day, I noticed Jordie peak down to his lap. I could just hear him thinking: "Where is my belt buckle"? and so it began, his trip into the land we call "Self improvement". Not that Tony Robbins, lets all hug kinda self improvement, but the lets start watching what we eat and doing some good ol' fashion excercise.

The aim, lose 5 kilos of fat and replace with solid muscle mass before Jordie's trip to Europe, March next year.

Not wanting to be outdone, I saw Rodney glance over with interest. "Hey Rod, you should try this too". In typical, I'll give anything a shot style, Rod replied.. "Sure why not".

And so it began....