How To Go From A Pigging Pig To A Muscular Menace
My previous blog post sounded preachy. I said a lot of stuff without showing my own results. Today, I'll prove my credentials by presenting what I have achieved throughout the six years of my fitness journey.
2016 was the year when I began taking my health a bit seriously. Back then, I was focused only on reducing weight and didn't care about my overall health or well-being. However, what caused me to make up my mind to lose weight was a scary experience I had one night. I had a dream where I couldn't breathe, no matter how hard I tried. It felt like I would die. The fear of dying woke me up, gasping for air. I immediately realised that my air passage was getting blocked somehow when I was asleep. Though I didn't know what I was experiencing was called sleep apnea, I knew I was experiencing this likely because I was obese. This was evident to me because I was pretty athletic when I was a kid and never had such an incident happen.
12-year-old me |
I only started getting fat when I turned 12. Since then, the fat around my face and neck bothered me - especially when I tried to sleep. But because I had become careless, I thought I would get used to it. I was lying to myself to avoid fixing my poor lifestyle. This mistake of letting myself loose cost me a lot. You might not believe it, but I started suffering academically because I let myself get fat. Yes, being fat made me dumb.
I would always wake up tired and sleepy (even if I slept early). I couldn't concentrate and would experience brain fog quite often. Even my short-term memory was failing. The thing is, obese people's upper respiratory tract fat deposits narrow the airway; there is a decrease in muscle activity in this region, leading to hypoxic and apneic episodes, eventually resulting in sleep apnea. A significant consequence of sleep apnea is impaired cognitive functioning because your brain doesn't receive enough oxygen. I endured this for five years, from the age of 14 to 18. Another thing about sleep apnea is that it can kill you in your sleep. I thank God that I didn't die. Instead, that near-death experience led me to seek a way to finally fix myself. After avoiding action for years, I finally took the first step by controlling the portion and serving of food I consumed each meal.
This is how I looked in 2017 towards the end of high school. |
Not just that, but the belly fat made it hard for me to bend down and tie my shoelaces even though I had lost a significant amount of it. It got to a point where I wished I just had a flat stomach, even if I never achieved the dream of having washer board abs. Thus, I desperately began searching for answers on the internet, and though the available information back then wasn't as much as today, I was still overwhelmed. I found everything so complicated, especially workout plans and the related jargon. Due to this, I avoided hacks and solutions provided on the internet. However, I would go back and forth, eating like a bird and seeking answers on the internet when my extreme diets didn't work. But because I found sifting through information too boring, my progress halted. Again, I was making excuses for the work I had to put in.
However, in the next year, I decided to get over it. It was boring, but I had to do my research if I wanted results. I slowly started learning about what kind of foods I should eat and how to calculate my daily caloric intake. I also installed a full-body home workout app and performed the workouts shown in it for 30 days straight. I did see some results, but my expectations weren't met. I had significantly reduced my man boobs but still had a paunch, and the exercises weren't as hard as before.
My progress plateaued once again, but I didn't give up. I ditched the workout and just focused on dieting. Staying on a diet longer helped me to continue my weight loss, though it was excruciatingly slow.
Anyway, 2019 was the year I had a breakthrough when my family and I went on vacation to Israel. This was when I learned the importance of cardio as a weight loss tool. We had to walk a lot to go places, and without even realising, I had lost enough fat around my belly that my abs began to show. The abs I was working so hard on but wasn't able to see because of the excess fat surrounding it.
My current physique. At 73kgs. |
And for those of you wondering, yes, I train my legs. |
He had been trying to lose weight for a really long time. He'd hit the gym now and then, but his diet was out of wack. He was around 100kgs when he came to me, and with a proper plan, I could bring him down by 13kgs in a few months.
Comments
Post a Comment