The Naturale Yogi

Here I am 6 months into this world wide pandemic and 5 months into trying to be in the best shape of my life thus far. As I’ve mentioned in some of my weekly update posts I did learn a lot during this time and I’m continuing to learn a lot. One of the topics I came across was about the reality TV show The Biggest Loser. I remembered watching it on bootleg as a teen and being motivated by all these severely overweight and obese contestants and cheering them on as they accomplished one challenge after another and eventually one of them would beat all the others and become the biggest loser of weight in the show.

One of the misconceptions about the show is that if these regular people, just like you and me, would be able to do it so can we! The truth is there are a lot of factors coming into play like the fact that for several months the contestants all stayed in the “ranch” and basically lived their lives like an athlete, their food was monitored and they trained in the gym for hours each day. This is why they are able to lose a lot of weight in a very short period of time. Regular people doing regular things like living life, having jobs, going out to socialize would not be able to do this while living their normal lives. Another misconception is that what the contestants are doing is healthy for them, the reality is that the exact opposite is true. For them to lose a huge amount of weight in the period of time given is extremely unhealthy and years after the show ends most of them would gain the weight they lost some more than others. This last one I would discuss is something that I only realized recently after watching Obese to Beast’s videos on Youtube. I didn’t realize that these contestants actually used compression clothes to keep all their loose skin in so they look slim and fit, I thought that it was amazing how they just look so good! The truth is that when obese people lose fat that they have been carrying about for years and years the skin just doesn’t bounce back unless they undergo plastic surgery to fix that.

I used to think that the methods being shown were actually methods that I could use for my own personal fat loss journey. It turns out that it isn’t because I wasn’t obese. I was merely chubby when I’ve had too much to eat. I was always just 15-20 pounds away from my goal weight. It would be so easy for me to say I’d like to lose weight and start losing 5 to 10 pounds and then I’d stop there because the scale weight isn’t going down. Today I know better and since April when I started losing weight due to a proper balance of my macronutrients I have stayed at the same weight with a plus or minus 2 pounds since early June. For one month I was dropping 1 to 2 pounds per week and then suddenly no scale weight change! It’s a good thing that now I know to take progress pictures and see how my body fat decreased even if my scale weight stayed the same. It was key to making me understand the difference between the first 10-20 pounds and the last 10-20 pounds. I realized going back to my weight loss records which I always keep track of that I have been at this weight for the last 5 years! This has been my set point for years and now it’s time for me to get into the last 10-20 pounds phase which is still different from the maintenance phase.

Now that I’m in the trying to lose the last 10-20 pounds phase, the routine has started to get boring. The excitement of seeing the scale go down everyday isn’t there anymore because fat loss has slowed down as my body is fighting to stay at my set point but at the same time because I started a weight training program with progressive overload, my muscle is being forced to grow and repair that could also affect the scale weight. I’ve made peace with the scale knowing that it’s not the only thing that measures progress as there are other things like strength in training and progress pictures. I also admit that doing this has become boring! I have to weigh and account for all the whole foods plant based calories that goes into my body and I’ve been eating the same format since April. But the reality is that in order for me to continue on this journey and get to my physique goal I need to push forward and carry on with everything I am doing because only then can I see that my body recomposition is a success. Going back to what I did would just make me go back to what I was and although the routine of meal planning and calorie and macronutrient tracking gets so boring on some days I know that this is the only way to achieve my goals and recognizing that but still choosing to move forward is something that my previous self have not been able to do.