After reading through old blog entries, I have come to realize how essential it is to keep an accurate recording of my thoughts, energy levels and what I did and ate throughout the dial in. I found the first few days pretty tough, mentally, and reading throgh my blogs from my practice dial-in last April, and my IDFA dial-in this summer helped me so much. So many of the feelings have been the same. Always at the beginning I feel anxious about how my body will respond, and I have little voice in my head that tells me I’m getting too old, my metabolism and hormones won’t respond so well to the training and dieting, or in this case, that I’ve gotten too soft! Usually I turn to my coach for support when this happens, but this time I was able to coach myself through it. I took the necessary progress pix from Day 1, to have for the future, and then rolled up my sleeves ,(or slipped into some spandex, actually) and got down to the business of cutting. Every day I have been pouring through old food logs to track patterns of eating behaviours, and used what I found to help guide me in fleshing out my current nutrition protocol, and now at day 9, I am feeling absolutely confident with my program. Jean-Jacques Barrett sent me my current training plan yesterday, and I did his new leg workout, and it was another Killer. He calls it Lactate training, and it focuses on drop sets, and is almost entirely built from supersets, so the volume is pretty high, but at the same time really heavy as the sets are built up of mostly 6 reps. Yesterday I had the feeling that I had finally hit true Ketosis, and my yoga mat smelt like ammonia, as did my gym clothes. My yoga postures are coming back to me. I couldn’t do guillotene for almost a month, and now it’s so easy again. I’m not crazy stiff in the morning as I have been all of November, and I am feeling a tightening up all over. I’m also naturally reaching for protein and fat for fuel, and am not even remotely interested in grains or starches. Mentally, I’m all in, and the next 4 weeks should be a breeze, (except for the hard pushes at the gym). I am doing Bikram in the mornings on an empty stomach for my cardio, and sticking to heavy weight-training in the afternoon…
Hope this helps!
Paz y Luz
~Michelle
