Manifesting Body Diet and Fitness Plan – Day 56

I has been a while since I’ve done an update on my “Manifesting Body Diet and Fitness” plan.

I will most likely do a more formal update next week when I’ll officially be at the 2 month mark, but I wanted to get an interim update posted today as well.

Progress With My Diet

I started off this plan by tracking my daily meals and counting calories using MyFitnessPal.

I was only able to keep that up for a short period of time and then I stopped doing it.

I may go back, but it’s not really a priority right now.

Instead, what I’ve been really focusing more on is getting my strength training workouts implemented, and trying to make better decisions during meal times.

For example, instead of having a can of Coke with meals like pizza, or Greek food, or other similar foods like I usually do, I’ve been trying to substitute some of those for just plain carbonated water.

I haven’t cut out soda pop completely, but I’ve just been trying to build a habit of switching out a different beverage once or twice a day and just drinking more water.

Also, in terms of meals, I’ve been trying to really watch my portions and becoming aware of when I’m full and satisfied with my meal and getting myself to stop eating at that point, instead of stopping when my plate is empty.

I’ve also been making a point of drinking more high quality nutrition shakes, and a few different types of vitamin drinks that I just love.

It really doesn’t feel like I’ve been on a “diet” of any kind, but I have been losing some weight – although slowly – so I’m pretty happy with that.

Progress With My Fitness Plan

For my strength training / fitness plan, I’ve hired the personal training services of a local company called Ivanco Fitness.

Although I’ve only had 3 training sessions so far with my personal trainers Ivan and Sam, I’m really loving the program they put together for me.

I’ve done a grand total of 6 training sessions so far, 3 of which were with Ivan and Sam, and 3 of which I did on my own based on the program they put together for me.

I would have more sessions completed, but I ended up getting sick with a really bad chest flu that was going around and I had a really tough time getting my workouts done while sick.

When I did start to feel a bit better, but was still coughing, I did 2 training sessions with Sam – completing about 70% of the sets that they planned out for me, but at least I got it done.

Now that I’ve been feeling at 100%, I felt great doing those same workouts the last two times on my own.

Another thing that has been kind of interfering with my strength training regime, has been some landscaping work I’ve been doing in my yard.

Last Monday I had a huge tree fall on my property and it broke through two parts of my fence.

I had to cut the tree up into “small” pieces, and get them off the fence and then fix the fence.

That process of chainsawing the tree into smaller pieces and moving them, and fixing the fence took about 8 hours and it was the equivalent of about 3 or 4 full body workouts – LOL.

I had NO IDEA that trees are that heavy.  I’ve cut big branches and small trees down before, but I’ve never dealt with a tree of this size.

The weight of the trunk, even when cut into smaller pieces is just incredible.

We’re talking hundreds of pounds of weight for each piece.

It’s actually kind of interesting, because in the past when I would start a fitness program like P90X or some kind of daily workout or 3x/week workout program, and something like this came up and I had to go outside to work on my yard – which is clearly a full body workout in itself – I would feel guilty for missing my actual workout.

But this time around, I am looking at it totally differently.

I even reached out to Ivan from Ivanco Fitness and asked him how he looks at a situation like this.

I wanted to see what his beliefs are around this issue.  I wanted to know if he has to do something like this, where you’re out doing landscaping work or yard workout which is clearly a workout, do you count that as a “workout” for that day, or do you still try to do a strength training session that same day?

Ivan told me that in a case like this he would definitely count what I did (landscaping work) as a training session for that day.

I know it may sound dumb, but in the past when I was doing other programs if I missed a day of THAT program, because I was too exhausted after doing landscaping work on my property, I would kind of feel a bit guilty.

Now I don’t.

In fact, today I was originally going to do another strength training workout, but instead I ended up doing about 7 hours of work in my front yard building a retaining wall and putting down some gravel.

It was a great workout, especially digging / shoveling dirt and moving gravel, AND I felt really great when it was done because I’ve been wanting to get that retaining wall built for months!

My Results So Far

I haven’t done my measurements recently as far as tracking muscle gains, or body measurements.

I’ll most likely do that next week.

However, I do track my weight almost every day and it’s been decreasing so I’m happy about that.

Here’s my weight loss chart so far for the last 56 days:

As you can see, it’s nothing too drastic, but I have lost 6.4 lbs of fat so far!

The dotted line in the graph above represents the first mini-goal I set for myself when I was at 245 lbs, and that was to get to below 240 lbs.

I’ve now gone below the 240 lbs mark, so it’s time for me to re-set my goal again.

I think this time I might set it to 229.9 lbs.

I’ll have a more extensive update on all my stats and measurements soon.