My fitness journey (so far)
I don’t know how, when or why, but at some point in my life I got fat. Like, real fat, almost 3 digits (in kg obv). Actually, I do know the answer for all of that but I do like a dramatic start.
It was after the pandemic. I got into a relationship and started to live life again. In this process I stopped working out and little by little I “let myself go” (or, as I prefer to say, “me deixei levar”). The snap happened when my ex took a video of me leaving the sea in a beach day and I didn't recognise myself. Who is this beer-belly-old-fart? I thought. I was me. Looking like I was in my 50s, grumpy and hating life. I said enough is enough.
The accordion effect
It is an interesting thing when you get fat. Since it happens in slow bits, It feels like you wake up one day and you got 20kg overnight. I was not used to that - during the pandemic I was in the best shape I’ve been in years! Even when I was grinding & sedentary in my early 20s, I somehow managed to keep a skinny-fat body type. Never fat.
You don’t realise the gains along the way, but when you finally do, you want to recover in record time and it was exactly what I tried to do (who haven’t?). In a futile attempt, I changed my life and diet radically. I knew it wouldn’t work, but I was pissed and wanted quick results. I would win some and lose some (kgs), but in the big picture I was not getting any better. I was consistently going to the gym but the cravings for junk food would make every effort go to waste.
The real change
One night I was browsing reddit (as per usual) and saw a thread in /r/getmotivated which got my attention. A dude posted a picture of a whole-year calendar where every day was marked with a circle. I entered the thread and he explained that every day he worked out he would mark it with a circle. If he failed, he would mark with a X. I noticed it was not a single picture, but actually an album. I scrolled and my jaw dropped. This motherfucker has been doing this consistently for the past 4 years (!!) but this was the first time he got a 100% streak - he did not fail a single time for the past 365 days!
I dived into the comments section and learned some effective concepts that improved my life.
No Zero Days! (Or, Never Fail Twice)
No zero days. This was this guy’s philosophy. He explained that for any big goal in life he would apply this method. It does not matter what, as long as it is habit-based: read more books, invest better, play guitar better, get in shape... In his case, it was the latter. The idea is that 1 is better than 0. So, let’s say you wanna get in shape. It’s humanly impossible to give 100% every day, so let’s say you are lazy today. What do you do? A single push-up. 1 > 0. The trick is that once you do one push up you do another, and then another, and then another. James Clear elaborated on that with many more words in Atomic Habits. The idea is to break the inertia and create momentum. Once momentum is created you go a long way!
Another Redditor explained a similar concept: you don’t need to work out every day. But you can’t go 2 days in a row without working out. Never fail twice. A different look, same idea: do not allow yourself to fall into inertia. Keep momentum alive.
The simplicity removes the mental burden often associated with creating a new habit.
Learning how to eat
The next step in my journey would be to fix my diet. A friend of mine recommended a meal-prep service tailored for gym rats. I filled the form and boom: I had meals for the next 2 weeks. When the first batch arrived I realised I was eating around 3x the necessary intake for my weight. Eye-opening. I used the service for around a month and a half and by the time I got fed up with the taste of the frozen tuppers I got used to the appropriate portion size and started cooking myself.
Around the same time, I listened to a podcast where a journalist was talking about his own journey on losing weight. He is American (so you can guess how his diet was) and mentioned he basically tried every single died under the sun. Some worked better than others and most of them caused the infamous accordion effect. From that podcast I got two interesting insights:
- Just eat fresh. There’s a reason Mediterranean diet is considered one of the healthiest in the world. It basically consists of non-processed food and fresh, often raw, ingredients. Also a bunch of (very good, extra-virgen) olive oil instead of butter.
- Kill your biggest sin. This is the idea that stuck the most with me. Diet-wise, everyone has a “big sin”. For the journalist, it was his after-work beer. Every day he would drink a few cans to wind down. Just by removing this he started to lose weight consistently. Bear in mind that he didn’t quit drinking, he simply decreased and removed a bad habit. I reflected on my daily routine and noticed my biggest sin was breakfast. Oftentimes, it was the typical coffee + bread with ham and cheese combo (in Brasil we call it Misto Quente. Bikini para los españoles). By removing that, and, as a side effect, doing an intermittent fasting, I started to see steady progress.
I’m not a machine and I was not inspiring to be one. My approach was simple: eat healthy most of the times and avoid The Big Sin during weekdays. Weekends are made for living, no restrictions.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast
Progress is addicting. I copied the idea of having a physical calendar in my house and I placed it in front of the bathroom, which made it impossible to ignore it. Every day after shower, my ritual was to mark it with a X (the zero days) or a circle (the good days which I exercised). Every couple of days I would weight myself and also note it in the calendar. The combination of 4-5 days of exercise per week (nothing crazy, just applying the no zero days philosophy) + eating slightly better started to show slow results. Painfully slow, but consistent results and this was a great feeling. Now that I had momentum going on, it was easier to be healthy and exercise even during weekends. Doing so did not feel like a chore anymore.
My calendar. February 2023.
I kept the ritual of marking every day in my physical calendar for 3 years until I noticed it was not necessary anymore. Being active became a part of my life. In this journey I lost around 25kg. Am I shredded? Far from that, but that doesn't matter. The goal now is to keep this active lifestyle for the rest of my days, maintaining a good balance between consistency, discipline and moderation. Imagine if I ever get to my 60s: by then it will be around 3 decades since I first saw the most beautiful marked calendar I’ve seen. Unforgettable.