Quote:
Originally Posted by UltArc
Point: Do what workout you NEED to, then get your own workout in afterward. Find someone better than you, and chase them. Find someone stronger, try to beat them.
(I've never been the fastest or the strongest, but I've gotten fast and strong chasing the other two!)
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This^. If you can arrange so that they are female, even better. Then the view looks good and you are motivated. (To catch anyway, maybe not to pass?)
Xist, your diet doesn't sound very good. An entire chocolate cake? Fast food, even if it isn't the worst type? Kool-Aid? Gatorade? Slim Fast Protein? Even consuming some good stuff (vegetables) doesn't make up for the bad.
Anything processed is questionable both for nutritional value and for calorie reduction. Processed foods are designed - literally - to be cheap and to make you want to consume them (in quantity), not for nutrition. Fresh (and as raw as palatable) is best.
I have seen a documentary on the evolution of cooking where a group of people were each given a cooler full of food that would meet all their nutritional needs for the day. The catch was the food was raw. None of the group were physically capable of consuming all the food in a day and they pretty much ate all day. I think there's a clue there if the goal is to consume less food and lose weight (fat).
Re. hydration: Water is best, if boring. The lemon (or lime?) juice sounds like a good idea. You can buy it in bottles (minimal processing - just some ascorbic acid as a preservative) so you don't have to squeeze it every time. Alternatively, freeze discrete portions of the fresh stuff.
Milk (plain) is a good source of proteins, vitamins and minerals, if you want more than water. Skim is not necessarily better in terms of weight loss either.
Also, take a look at the ingredients and nutrition data lists on the Slim Fast. It's a whole lot of chemicals, sugar and fat. You are going to get all the beneficial stuff, without the extra crap, with just plain milk and maybe some wheat germ or muesli.
Actually, watch out for anything liquid that has a lot of stuff in it, even home made fruit smoothies. It is really easy to consume a lot of them without feeling full.
Every person is different but these work for me:
Re. training: Running a fixed distance against the clock, trying to get faster, will only get you so far. Better is to run a fixed time at a given heart rate and try to run further or, eventually, for longer each time.
Even the cheapest HRM's will have high and low HRT alarms to keep you in the right range.
Listen to music while you run. It pumps you up, it takes your mind away from the pain and gives you an automatic means of timing your progress along your run route.
Choose the music to give yourself a warm up (speed walk?), pump up, motivation when it (usually) gets hard going and a cool down. I have several such playlists for a bit of variety.
You can also try: run for your allotted time and heart rate, then walk until recovered, then run again. Repeat a third time if you wish (or are feeling good enough after the first two).
To mix it up, climb stairs. Even done slowly that will be a hard workout if you climb high enough.
You can even figure out what your power output is if you know your weight and how far you've climbed over what time: Power (w) = {height (m) x g (9.81 m/s^2) x body mass (kg)}/ time taken (secs).
(I don't know what the units are in Imperial measurement - pounds and feet plus a conversion factor to get HP? - but the equation is the same. Find a stair well in a tall building and measure the height of one flight using a tape and multiply to get the height of how many floors you climb).
You won't always improve each day but will over time. Stress or fighting off a bug (you won't always get noticeable symptoms if an infection is kept to a low level), even hormone cycles, will affect your performance. Men do have cycles in hormone levels they are just less obvious than those in women.
You also need to rest properly. That is when the adaptation to the stress you are imposing will occur. Walk - speed walk - every second day as part of the recovery process. (~6 km/h is indeed about right for a speed walk.)
I'm not convinced melatonin (or anything else) is a good thing to be trying. Is there a medical reason for using it? If not, if I can't sleep I find some light-medium level exercise to get a bit of a 'glow' happening works.