The Naturale Yogi

Since this quarantine lockdown started I’ve taken advantage of this period of staying at home a chance to focus on my fitness and health because what better way to spend your time quarantined on your own than to actually work on yourself. Especially during this time when health is really your wealth as if you fall sick it would be different than getting sick at any other time in history.

I saw a lot of people online starting their own at home fitness challenges and I participated in one where you wore a shirt while you did a handstand on the wall. It was great and I got to follow a workout plan without ever missing a day because we’re always at home for the next 30 days at least that’s what I thought until it got extended to 45 and then 60 days at the time of writing (it might change once this gets published as there are talks of a third extension). This is all good but if there’s anything I’ve learned since I started caring about my health as a 13 year old because aside from how I looked I truly cared about eating healthy or knowing the right foods to eat, I knew that a great and effective fitness plan is really 80% nutrition and 20% exercise. No one can out exercise a horrible diet. I repeat, no one can out exercise a horrible diet. This has been true for me throughout my highschool years when I used to fast during cheer season because I thought it would help me loose weight and make me lighter for the season, I was obviously wrong.

Fast forward to 15 or so years later I know it’s time to clean out my diet once again after being loose at the start of the year due to several out of town trips. I had to do something to clean up my diet but I didn’t know where to start once again. I’ve been fasting for 16 hours a day since the end of 2018 and this has worked wonders in keeping my weight within range that I’m able to bring my weight back down once I feel like I’m getting too heavy but this was all done intuitively.

One day around 3 weeks into thw quarantine lockdown a friend was chatting with me and told me about something she was on. There was an online coach who created meal plans customized for her status and situation and she’d be following that for the next 30 days of whatever remained of the quarantine. I jumped at the idea of having a customized meal plan for me because being a vegetarian it can be tricky to create a balanced meal plan if you are’nt paying attention to all your macros. I didn’t even know what those macros were! I signed up for the entire thing and thats how I ended up phase 1 of my body recomposition with the help of this coach as well as my own workout plan.

This meal plan focused on a balanced diet of the three macros that I ate around 6 moderate meals per day. The first 2 weeks were an adjustment because I wasn’t used to eating that frequent and the last 2 weeks were about tweaking the plan as I ended up hungry later in the day so I actually had more calories added to my plan and I ended up losing even more! The key is body recomposition and not merely weight loss which was exactly what I wanted, burn fat and gain muscle for optimal BMR and physique. I’m moving on to my second month and I’m excited to see even more improvements!