WS Chronicle

A few weeks ago, I wrote the first article in a series of articles about my fitness journey after the age of 40. In this article, I want to expand upon a particular aspect of my fitness journey – nutrition. I will discuss what my habits were prior to starting my journey and what my diet looks like now. 

On my first day at the gym, I weighed in at 226 lbs. and that shocked me to my core. That was the heaviest I have ever been in my life. I knew I had to make changes, and it had to start with what I was eating. 

I have never been a person who ate or craved a lot of sweets, so that wasn’t an issue. My problem was I enjoy fried foods, and I wasn’t eating many fruits and vegetables. I also enjoy a beer or two after work. 

When it came to fried foods, my list was extensive. I like fried fish, fried chicken, fried pork chops, and fried shrimp, just to name a few. The problem wasn’t that I enjoyed fried foods, it was the fact I was eating these delicacies way too often and they were not contributing positively to my fitness journey. 

To say it was difficult to let those fried foods go would be an understatement. Since I was eating these types of foods at least once a week, I decided to cut back and turned that into enjoying them only once or twice a month. Doing that allowed me to start seeing those losses on the scale that I was looking for. After cutting back on fried foods, I also felt a lot better during the day. I had more energy, and I felt stronger in the gym.   

Incorporating more fruits and veggies into my diet was a more difficult task at first. You have to buy the fruit, then clean it, and then eat it all before it goes bad. Initially I was very inconsistent with my fruit and vegetable consumption because of my busy schedule.   

It then dawned on me where I could find the place to introduce more fruits to my diet and that was breakfast. I rarely ate breakfast and when I did, it was normally not something good for me. So instead of eating fast food for breakfast, I decided to use breakfast as a means to eat more fruit.   

For the last six months, I started drinking smoothies in the morning for breakfast to add more fruit to my diet. I chose to include bananas, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, Greek yogurt, and honey, with two scoops of protein powder. That combination usually keeps me feeling full until it’s time to eat lunch, and if not, I will usually have some Greek yogurt with fruit as a snack.   

Since introducing these smoothies into my diet, I quickly noticed positive effects. I had more energy, I didn’t need my traditional afternoon naps, my guy health improved drastically, and my sweet cravings totally subsided. I also incorporate some version of this smoothie when I am on the run, or if I am about to work out and feel hungry, and it has worked wonders. 

Vegetables were a little easier to add because I truly enjoy vegetables. The main thing for me was increasing the frequency and making sure I started to eat fresh veggies and not the canned stuff because of the added preservatives. I make sure I have some sort of vegetable with pretty much every lunch and dinner meal that I prepare. My go-tos for veggies are spinach, cabbage, broccoli, carrots, onions, garlic, asparagus, and greens. I eat at least one of these each day, every day.   

It was now time to tackle my next food vice. After addressing my addiction to fried foods and the lack of fruits and veggies in my diet, I had to fix the most glaring issue, which was my alcohol consumption. After work, I would routinely drink a beer or two when I got home to relax after work. This was not an everyday thing, but I would have a beer or two multiple nights out of the week. That changed after a conversation I had with a friend that is into fitness. 

I explained to him the changes I had made to my diet and expressed that I would like to see more changes on the scale and in the mirror. Even though I was making progress, I still wasn’t seeing them in the mirror and that bothered me. He then asked me if I drank or not and asked how many calories were in the beer I like to drink. 

I googled how many calories were in the beer I like to drink, which is Stella Artois by the way, and found it had 127 calories per beer. Drinking one or two is not that bad, but on a game night, I can easily drink 6 or 7 and that added a lot of calories to my diet.  

He made another great point by making me realize that I was putting a lot of empty calories in my system right before I went to bed. Instead, when I do drink beer now, I like to have them primarily on the weekends and not during the week because I don’t have the time to burn off those calories.  

All these changes have allowed me to get down to 188 lbs. as of today.   

In my next article, Part 3, I will discuss more about my fitness journey and what has helped me to achieve my goals.