P90X Workout – Hang In There!
© Tim Pannell Photography
I started doing my 2nd full round of the P90X workouts last week and I’ve lost 2 pounds. I’m now weighing 266.
I’m also riding the bike for an hour a day as well. My left knee is still tender, but the motion from the bike doesn’t bother it in the least.
I feel good and I’m feeling all my muscles again after the workout.
I don’t ever remember sweating this much in my life as when I’m doing these workouts. Maybe it’s because I shave my head and there’s nothing there to soak up the sweat. Let me rephrase that………..I shave 1/2 my head, the other half falls out before I can get to it.
In any case, my endurance is better than ever. I have noticed being a bit weaker in general after taking one month off of P90X. I’ve had to drop 5 lbs off some of the dumbbells I’m using for a few of the exercises.
My guess is that I’ll be adding that weight back on within a week or two and quickly surpass where I left off over a month ago.
I’ve basically got close to 3 more months to go on this and my expectation is to have lost at least 24 more pounds by the end of it.
After this round I will be looking at doing Shaun T’s INSANITY Workouts. I hear they’re pretty intense. I hope I’ll be able to keep up.
If you do happen to be overweight like me and are wondering about P90X, I would ask you to check with your doctor first before starting the program.
With that being said…..many overweight guys have asked me if its just too much and too intense of a workout if you’re carrying 50 plus extra pounds.
My answer is it depends on the individual. I took it pretty easy the first month or so. I did what I could do and when it got a little cuckoo I slowed down or even rested and waited for the next set of exercises to begin.
Trust your instincts, if you think its pushing you too hard, take an easier approach. There is always someone on the workout dvd that’s not maxxing out and is taking it a bit easier than everyone else. Pace yourself and most of all, be patient.
The results will come in due time. Some people lose weight right away, some are stubborn losers and yet others may put on weight initially. I put on about 8 pounds before I started losing weight.
I could have gotten discouraged, but instead I just focused on how much better I was feeling and how much more energy I had. I got through it and eventually started losing the weight. At my heaviest I was 310 – now I’m 266 and dropping…..pretty cool!
Hang in there!
Amber – My Fitness Motivation
It’s my oldest daughter’s 25th birthday today. It’s hard to believe that this much time has passed by since Amber’s first day. It was one of the scariest days of my life.
The Fam - Christmas '08
She was born 3 1/2 months premature and weighed in at 1 lb. 13 oz. Eventually she would get down to 1 lb. 8 oz. The doctors gave her a 5% chance of living and said if she did manage to live she would most likely not be much more than a vegetable.
Kim and I had been married just shy of 2 years. She was 21, I was 23, both super young and naive and didn’t really know what was going on. We didn’t have any family in town, my mom and sisters had left the previous day for California.
We were camping up in the mountains when Kim went into labor. She wasn’t really even showing yet. We made the drive down as fast as we could and got to the hospital. Kim was hemorrhaging badly. They injected steroids into the uterus to get the baby’s lungs to stiffen so they wouldn’t collapse and seal with her first breath.
The goal was to wait at least 24 hours for the steroids to work. 12 hours later Kim’s blood pressure got so low that we almost lost her and at that point we decided that we’d take our chances and let Amber be delivered right then.
So, at one minute past midnight on July 8th, 2004 Amber Pannell made her way into this world. The doctors didn’t expect her to make it through the night. The doctors didn’t know what a tenacious spirit this one would have.
It’s the most difficult thing in the world to watch your baby daughter, the size of a Barbie doll struggle for life. To this day, I’ve never experienced anything harder than to have to sit and watch an undersized infant fight to breath. It was so hard not being able to do anything to make her more comfortable and ease the pain she was in.
I’ve also never seen anyone more determined to live and fight as hard as she did. I am continually in awe of her. Today she is 25. She functions at around a 5 year old’s level. She has a great sense of humor and is usually a kick to be around.
She had a tough time watching each of her 3 brothers and 1 sister pass her by. That was always traumatic for her. She’s aware enough to know she has a problem and sometimes that’s more than she can handle.
In spite of her hardships, she beat the odds. She was oblivious to those odds we received the day she was born. She chose to fight, she chose to work, she chose to overcome. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t feel completely inadequate to be her father.
Today, I’m overweight by over 50 pounds. I know what the odds are for someone my size to overcome their weaknesses and get back into shape, but as I sit here writing, remembering the day that Amber came into our lives, I can’t help but feel that I owe her this at the very least.
I want to stick around a good long while to make sure that she’s well taken care of. I can’t sit back any longer and procrastinate the day I get my butt off the couch for good and get back into great shape.
Kim and I have 5 amazing kids, that we couldn’t be more pleased with. They are our reason for living. I want desperately to lose this weight and get back into shape. I owe it to my kids, I owe it to my wife and I owe it to myself to become healthy again.
Today is a milestone in my oldest daughter’s life, I think I’ll make it a milestone for me as well. I will no longer be the overweight guy that needs to make a lifestyle change. I’m now the guy making the lifestyle change and I will never look back again.
Thank you Amber for being such a great example to me of what it means to never give up, no matter what the odds. Amber, you’re my inspiration, you’re my motivation, you’re my reason for succeeding. I love you!
Beware of the Atkins Diet!
The short name for the Atkins nutritional approach is the Atkins diet, which was the brainchild of the doctor named Robert Atkins. He had gained a lot of weight in medical school. He read concerning this diet in the medical journal and decided to improve it and release it under his name. For all kinds of additional information about Atkins you can click over to Fat Loss for Idiots.
Atkins, in his Atkins Diet, believed prevailing theories about weight gain were all wrong. First, he dismissed the idea that saturated fats were bad. Instead it was carbohydrates that led to the weight problems Americans have. Atkins held that our obsession with fat actually worsened the problem. He pointed to all the low-fat foods that were high in carbohydrates. That meant people on a diet regularly ate foods that were of poorer quality than they usually ate.
The Atkins diet shifts the focus. By cutting out carbohydrates people would burn stored body fats. Lose the fat lose the weight. It’s not just a matter of eating less. Dr. Atkins held that your diet could actually help you burn calories. The Atkins diet allegedly burned an extra 950 calories daily. But the claims were not true. For some good information about burning calories visit Fat Loss for Idiots.
Dr. Atkins also touted the positive influence this Atkins diet could have on people with type 2 diabetes. As contrasting to type 1 diabetes, type 2 is repeatedly closely associated with diet and people who weigh too much. So in general any diet that helps decrease weight will help address type 2 diabetes. Nevertheless the Atkins diet is also low in carbohydrates, which must be avoided with type 2 diabetes anyway of caloric intake, so by means of this feature of the diet Atkins claimed those who suffer type 2 diabetes would no longer need medication such as insulin. The medical world, in general, disagrees with Atkins on this point. They agree lower carbohydrates help with type 2 diabetes, but there is no proof that carbohydrates cause the disease.
What steps does one take to follow the Atkins diet? It follows four phases – induction, ongoing weight loss, pre-maintenance and lifetime maintenance. Here is an overview of the most important phase – Induction.
The Induction phase is the most difficult phase of the Atkins diet. Atkins is flexible as to the time period – but recommends two weeks. During this phase carbohydrates are severely limited – only up to 20 grams per day. The goal is to enter a fat burning metabolic phase called ketosis when the body, starved of glucose, will begin converting stored fat into fatty acids needed to power the body. Weight loss during this phase can be extreme – some Atkins followers reported losses of 5-10 pounds a week.
Learning the ideal carbohydrate levels for weight losing and for day to day intake after the weight loss ends are the purposes of the final three phases in the Atkins diet. Millions of people are still losing weight on this diet – but beware the dangers of taking in too much fat. For additional information please visit Fat Loss for Idiots.
Jack LaLanne – Fitness GURU Can Still Kick My Butt
Jack LaLanne – Be Happy!
Do any of you remember Jack LaLane? He’s gotta be about 112 years old by now, but he’s still kicking butt and taking names.
I remember when I was a little kid seeing my mom watch him on tv and do workouts to lose weight. For crying out loud, I think I remember him pulling a semi or something ridiculous.
He was fabulous in his stereotypical 60′s fitness jumpsuit. I am amazed he’s still going strong. It just shows what hard work and a great attitude can accomplish.
I can’t help but compare him to Michael Jackson, with his oxygen chamber, clean air mask to avoid germs at all costs and claims of being able to live to be 150. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bagging on Michael……his life story and struggles with personal demons is truly a tragedy.
I’m just trying to make a point …..taking a passive interest as opposed to an active interest in our own personal health. The old school, tried and true methods of days gone by sometimes outperform the latest, greatest miracle breakthroughs that are on the cutting edge.
Thank God for men and women like Jack LaLanne that are willing to defy the convention of their time and push forward for the benefit of the rest of us.
I’m all for the latest technologies, they’re a blast. I love the latest scientific breakthroughs and the dreams they allow us to have. I just don’t want to be guilty of tossing aside something that’s been proven to work for almost a century just because it’s not “hip” at the moment.
If you’re overweight, obese or even borderline obese and are wanting to burn fat and lose inches while you build muscle, nothing beats old school principles.
There are no quick fixes, it takes hard work and dedication. You have to embrace the right kind of fitness training exercises, but most importantly, you need a little Jack LaLanne attitude in you.
I’ve worked out before with little or no results and it wasn’t until I changed my workout attitude that my fitness level started turning around.
I give credit to P90X training DVD’s for reducing my body fat, but in all fairness I have to give some props to Jack LaLanne and my early childhood memories of him amazing all of us with his feats of strength.
Tim Pannell – Big Fat Mama’s Boy!
© Tim Pannell Photography
So I’m working out in public the other day and some guy yells out the window as he drives by…..”Hey FLABZILLA!” After I showed him he was “#1″ in my book………I started thinking.
Why should anybody listen to me about getting in shape? I’m still 60 lbs. overweight at the moment. Why listen to me?
I’ve actually seen this weight issue from both sides of the fence. I’ve been 185 lbs., with 6% body fat with washboard abs. I could eat anything and everything and not gain an ounce, even when I wanted to.
I’ve also weighed as much as 310 with 48% body fat with no abs in sight. I couldn’t lose weight no matter how little I ate or how much I exercised.
I know the frustrations caused by excess weight as well as the major roadblocks that keep someone in that forever heavy “state of mind.”
What was the main difference between the healthy me and the heavy me? It was attitude and expectations.
When I was fit I worked out because it was fun. I just flat out enjoyed it. No pressure, no life or death struggle, just the enjoyment of sweating and straining and trying to get stronger and faster.
When I got heavy it was a slow downward spiral that got more and more out of control as time went on. My attitude changed. I turned working out into a life or death struggle
I was easily frustrated when I didn’t see immediate results and that caused me to slide backwards more often than not. My self image took a beating. I was negative more often than I was positive.
I stopped believing in myself and got to a point where I actually reveled in my own grand mal sense of imminent failure. Let me tell ya, this is no place to find yourself.
What turned things around? I guess it came down to waking up one day and insisting that this just wasn’t good enough for me. I did a lot of soul searching about who I am, not what I looked like.
I’m more than just my weight or body fat %. I have an amazing life, a great wife, 5 amazing kids, a great mother and sister. I’ve had a storybook career where I’ve met and worked with some absolutely amazing people.
I have great friends whom I love that actually care about me. There is, quite frankly much more to me than this stupid weight issue I’ve been playing around with for the last couple of decades.
I have turned a corner in my life. I have turned a corner with my health and fitness as well. I am no longer allowing my weight to define me as a person.
I am working out once again because it’s fun, not because I have to. It’s made all the difference in the world.
I’ve dropped over 8% body fat in the last 6 weeks, that’s over 26 lbs. of fat that I’ve dropped. I’m training my body to burn fat more efficiently for fuel. I’m eating healthier more organic meals. Life is good.
Today I rode the bike for half an hour and followed it up with the P90X workout. I held my own pretty well today. It’s a great improvement over 6 weeks ago when I was struggling to just breath.
Sure there are still days that I can get frustrated when the numbers on the scale don’t correspond with the effort I put in the previous day, but I’m no longer working out just to hit certain numbers.
I’m in this for the long haul. I’m not just feeling stronger, I’m getting stronger and I have more energy than I did just a few short weeks ago. It’s a fun ride and I’m enjoying every minute of it.
Thank you condron.us and everybody else for your support over these last several weeks, it has made all the difference in the world, you’re great friends!
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