My Health Journey

In the post "How I Lost 50 Pounds and Kept Them Off" , I discussed the changes I took over the course of the last few years to gradually lose the weight. The main idea is to lose weight gradually enough, while keeping the focus on building healthy eating and exercise habits, so that by the time you reach your desired weight, those habits are so ingrained that you would keep staying active and eating healthy.  In all those years, for instance, I counted calories for only 4 or 5 days. That's all I needed to get an idea of portion sizes and see how what I'm eating measures up against my caloric needs. Beyond that, counting calories felt like a waste of time. As I saw from my own results, it was unnecessary, as long as I eat nutritious whole foods and stop eating when I'm full. What I left out of that earlier post, is how I got myself to instill each of those habits in me. The book No Meat Athlete has excellent sections about habit-forming. For me it meant ...

I found that alternating between hard workouts and "negative exercise" reduces injuries and helps promote recovery. By "negative exercise", I mean yoga, stretching, foam rolling, massage, deep relaxation, or the like. Rather than having strength and muscle-building as the main focus, these negative workouts build flexibility and balance. Nowadays I do some form of physical activity daily.  I reserve hard workouts like runs longer than 2 miles and weight training to every other day.  I find that 10 min of basic yoga poses (neck and shoulder rolls, side bends, cat/cow, ...)  before  a weight training session helps reduce the soreness afterwards. A few hours after the hard workout, once I start feeling soreness, I follow up with a 20-min yoga session. The yoga poses help me survey my body, identify mis-alignments and soreness, and begin working sore spots for recovery. The next day, I follow up with a more comprehensive yoga and/or foam-rollin...