Only one week has passed since Amalia and I decided to lose weight. While yesterday morning I had 1.6kg less than a week before, this morning I was back up to 89.4kg, making the difference only 300 grams. It's a continuous up and down. [sigh]
We knew we had to do crazy shit to do lose weight. And we have started, last Monday, at the gym.
Amalia told me a body styling course was up at 7:30 last Monday and that she was going, so I planned accordingly and did weights beforehand. Being at it I noticed, however, that actually it was up at 8:30. The course at 7:30 was an aerobic class. "Aerobic I", it said on the plan, so it was neither the beginners' course nor the super-advanced one where you have to have mastered every move. Having done body styling and some aerobic moves before, I thought I could easily handle it. The world is not enough, right?
So we decided to do aerobic. As we stood in position I noticed that the only other men in the course were two gay guys. It was a course full of girls, and yet I didn't suspect anything. On the contrary, I was standing in first line with Amalia. Beginners should be in the first row so that they learn, right?
So the course started, and very soon we discovered that we did not know all the moves. Actually, some of them were way beyond our capacity. The teacher threw nothing but mono- or bisyllabic words at us, most of which seemed to be clear instructions for everybody, just not for us.
The girls kept going in perfect patterns, it seemed, while at some point Amalia and I started tumbling around like love childs of drunk village idiots and stranded whales. A couple of times I must have almost run into one of the girls next to me who had decided to move into a different direction than I. That bitch.
However, when I asked Amalia somewhere in the middle of the one-hour course whether she wanted to leave, she dismissed, "Nah, we've already made complete idiots of ourselves and annoyed everybody. I'm staying."
That's the spirit!
So we stayed.
The two gay guys actually made me a compliment when the course was over. And I even think that for my first time I didn't do such a bad job.
Too bad nobody appreciated our performance as our first.
But we will be back, harder than ever.
The world will have to deal with us.
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I'm starting to wonder if you're psychic -- since you pointed me to your blog and asked for commentary exact when you and Amalia start to try losing weight, even though you don't (yet) know that once upon a time my main job was as a personal trainer.
Seriously.
Since I can't personally travel 10,000 km to Germany to help you guys, I can only give you some tips:
DO focus on the weight training (vs. aerobics) -- and that goes for BOTH of you. Weight training increases the amount of calories you burn over the day (as you recover and replenish your muscles) AND, if you make sure you get enough protein, it also helps you build muscle and with it increase your Base Metabolic Rate, i.e., how much energy you burn just by being alive.
Aerobics -- what we PTs call "Energy Systems Work" -- are useful, but don't waste too much time on them; it's important to keep your aerobic capacity decent (so you're not tired just by walking up a flight of stairs), but it yields diminishing returns: if you spend a lot of time doing aerobics, your metabolism will actually slow down to adapt.
Increasing the amount of weight you lift, on the other hand, yields ALWAYS more weight loss, because you keep increasing the amount of calories you burn. Even if you're adding an almost negligible amount of muscle, you'll still be burning many more calories.
Also, you should never do a lot of aerobics AND a lot of weight training on the same day, because they will interfere with each other (10-15 minutes of aerobics after weight training is OK though -- but not more than that)
My most successful students have, as beginners, started off with by doing 45 minutes of full body weight training on Monday/Wednesday/Friday (meaning, train all your major muscle groups on each of these days -- no splits), with 30-45 minutes of aerobics on Tuesday and Thursday.
Yes, that means training 5 times a week, which is a good habit anyway...
Another tip: the staples of any weight training program that has a weight loss objective are three main exercies: the bench press (at some point you should be able to bench press 1.5x your bodyweight), the squat (you should eventually be able to squat 2x your bodyweight) and the pull-up (you should be able to pull yourself up for 5 sets of 5 already, and eventually you'll be able to do 5 sets of 12 pull-ups).
Also, for crying out loud, do remember that weight loss is 80% diet; you can train 30 hours a week and not lose a pound if you eat poorly. I've found that the Zone diet is possibly the best compromise between sustainability and results. Look here for the summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_diet
If you follow these tips, you and Amalia should be able to lose between 0.5 kg and 1 kg a week, which is actually, I've found, the most sustainable target. By the way, do prepare Amalia for the fact that, as a girl, it will always be harder for her to lose weight than for you so if you decide to "compete", to see who loses the most, you should work on a 1.5:1 ration to make it fair (i.e., you losing 1.5 kg is only as good as her losing 1 kg).
By the way, your weight naturally fluctuates about 2-3 kg during a week, mostly due to normal changes in hydration levels. The most reliable way of keeping track of your progress is to combine taking your weight only once a week, naked, immediately after you wake up (I do it on Monday mornings) with seeing every day how your pants fit; there's nothing that indicates your progress better than the circumference of your waist.
Finally: if Amalia complains that lifting weights can/is making her "bulky" -- that's an urban legend; women cannot physically build any visible amount of muscle until they are already extremely lean and/or are on steroids; the amount of estrogen (and lack of testosterone) they have, plus the naturally higher body fat, prevents that the buildup of visible muscle mass; if she feels her muscles are getting bulkier, it's water retention / swelling, which is perfectly normal in the first few months. It will come down.
Hope this helps everyone... E-mail me if you have questions.
Thank you so much for your ideas! I will show them to her, and in spite of this slimming my chances to win the weight-losing competition easily, we will very probably adapt our workouts to your advice!
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