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The past couple weeks, well, honestly probably more like the past month, I hit a bit of a hold up in progress. I’ve been doing great with working out but I’ve been struggling to stick to my meal plan. Which, honestly, is the opposite problem I had back in April when I first started Profile. I was doing great sticking to the meal plan they gave me but workouts were few and far between.
Initially, I was going to write about a different topic but after thinking about it, I decided that this would be a good thing to talk about since it’s very present in my journey right now. So I’m going to use this post not only as a way to hopefully help someone else with their struggles but also as a way to try to dig further into my current struggles and try to find the solutions.
In the Beginning
When I look back to the start of the year, I struggled with both aspects, nutrition and working out. I had no real desire to focus on either of them but knew I needed to in order to meet my goals. I decided to try to mainly focus on what I was eating, trying to start with mostly just working on portion control. From past experience, I knew that going cold turkey into eating better was just a way for me to do good for a bit and then bounce right back to old habits.
This actually worked pretty well, I was slowly starting to lose weight which, of course, gave me more motivation to keep it up. Working on eating smaller portions did two things for me. One, it helped me start to shrink my stomach a bit and two, it helped me to want to start to find smaller meals that would actually keep me full. Thus, I actually started to work on nutrition before I really even started to focused on it.
This also helped in starting to give me a little more motivation to start working out. I was slowly losing weight without doing so and I knew that if I kept with the same eating patterns but threw in working out, I would start losing weight faster. Not only that but working out was an essential part of getting to my goals. You can’t go from a 33:12 2mi to a 16:36 2mi just by losing weight. Sure it’ll help, but it’s just not feasible to think you can do it without actually training your body to do so.
I had a good jump start with working out during FFLAT (Fitness for Life Annual Training) in the first couple weeks of January. It’s a program that the Nebraska National Guard has to help those failing height/weight or the APFT to learn how to start making changes and get to where they need to be. Not only are you working out twice a day, but you’re also learning how to make your own workout plans, how to make a meal plan, the importance of picking out the right shoes, and so much more. I had made a workout plan during this where I would start off working out 3 days a week and then slowly up it as I went. I enjoyed the plan I made but didn’t really stick to it after a week or two.
Here Comes April
Back in April, I started to work with Profile by Sanford. Because my work partners with them and has a fitness and health reimbursement program, I would be able to sign up for free so I figured why not give it a go. They do more than just helped people lose weight but that’s one of the biggest things people go to them for. They have different meal plans for everyone depending on where they are currently at and what their goals are.
If you’re there for weight loss, the first plan you go on is their Reboot plan. It’s pretty meal replacement heavy and the goal is to get you into ketosis. This was something I wasn’t too sure of at first because I didn’t really want to do any kind of keto diet but since I would be meeting with a coach once a week, I decided to give it a try. I was pretty solid with the plan for the whole month of April and ended up losing 13lb and 3% body fat. The body fat is calculated by the scale they give you so I’m not sure how accurate it is.
The whole month of May, I was at military training in which sticking to this plan was not feasible nor would it have been healthy. During this time, it was a lot of MRE’s and army food so I really just focused on only eating when I was hungry and eating until I was full, the end. It worked out pretty well, even with the last week being a week of a lot of junk food for all of us, I still came home 5lbs lighter.
June
My first week back from training, I kind of just ate whatever I wanted as a celebration to making it through the training. After that, I went back to the meal plan and started to workout more. June is when I really started to kick off my workout habits. This is also when I got more into rucking and started to really enjoy it. I would go for 2-3 rucks a week, varying in distance and speed. Then I found a ruck based workout plan made by GoRuck that is supposed to help you prepare for their GoRuck Light event, something I plan to do someday.
I knew that I should really be focusing on running since that was what I needed to work on most but I had no motivation to do so and knew that if I tried to schedule runs, I just wouldn’t do them. So I compromised with rucking as my cardio because at least then I was doing something. Cue a chance meeting with one of my sergeants outside of drill who called me out on doing so and basically said no, you’re going to meet me Monday and Wednesday and I’m going to run you. Which was perfectly fine with me because I knew I needed the push and I knew he would do just that.
Not only did that first run kick start my motivation to keep running, but it also gave me all the confidence I needed to crush the next APFT I had which was upcoming Saturday. The APFT I had done the month before, I had ran a 27:55 2mi so my goal for the next one was to run a 25min 2mi. The first run that we did involved a 1/2mi warm-up jog and then some running around the track, stopping at various spots to do some short station work. By the time we completed this, we were at about 2mi and it had taken us between 25-26 minutes to do. I went into that APFT knowing I would be able to crush my goals and ended up running a 22:30 2mi.
Even though I wasn’t able to continue to work with that sergeant, I stuck with similar workouts the next week. As fate had it, I ended up having to take another APFT that next Saturday for record. I was upset about this at first because I had just taken one with great improvement that I 100% would have made a record instead of a diagnostic if I had known I needed to. However, this ended up working out in my favor. With the help of one of my battles pacing me, I gave it my all and that ended up being the first APFT I’ve passed in a solid 4 years at least.
Since then
That was all the motivation I needed to kick my workouts into high gear. Since then, I’ve been working out at least 3 times a week, more recently I’ve been doing a consistent at least 4 times a week. I’ve never missed a day of cardio and even on the days where I didn’t do my planned workout, I usually still did some kind of active recovery. That big success was all I needed to get out of my workout struggle. Now, I have more motivation than ever to crush my goals of meeting the male APFT standards and on top of that, my body is feeling better than ever with all this exercise.
Now, things have kind of switched from where I was in April. I’ve been solid with working out but the meal plan part I’ve been struggling with. It started off because I gave myself a little longer than I initially planned to celebrate the victory of passing my APFT. I started saying I would give myself the weekend. That turned into a couple of things on Monday and slowly turned into the whole week and then two weeks. I started to gain some weight back and quickly realized I was reverting back to old habits so I did my best to put a stop to it.
I started focusing on sticking to plan more and did okay but not nearly as good as I should have been. I was still eating extra crap here and there and it was putting me at a bit of a halt in progress. I didn’t really think about why until my coach asked me during last week’s appointment why I think it is a struggle now but I had little to no problems with it in April. The only thing I could really think of at the time was that I just lost a little bit of that motivation maybe and needed to find it again.
I did a pretty solid job at sticking to plan last week and managed to break the 203-204 hurdle, weighing in at 201.2 yesterday morning. I’ve also been thinking more about the things that have changed since April. The biggest thing I change I could think of was the fact that I have been working out more. During my next meeting with my coach, I’m going to bring this up for us to talk about. I’m thinking that maybe part of the problem as to why it’s been so hard for me to not eat all the things is because I’ve been burning more calories and my body is telling me I need to start adding in some extra so it can do it’s thing properly.
Now maybe this is just my subconscious telling me I want more food but this is exactly why I want to talk with my coach about it. I’m not sure what she will say but if nothing else, I imagine we might try adding in an extra shake or bar during the day to try out for a week or two to see how things go.
Maybe I need it, maybe I don’t. It’s all a part of listening to your body and trying different things to see what works and what doesn’t. The hard part is listening to your body and doing what it’s actually telling you, not what you want it to be telling you. It’s all about balance and figuring out what works for you.
Learning to listen to your body and how to interpret what it’s trying to tell you is all a part of this journey. Once you get the hang of it, it’ll help you figure out the best ways to get to your goals and before you know it, you’ll be out there crushing all of your goals.
As always, I’m rooting for you! Go out there and do great things!