BFL.
Short BFL Rundown: Body For Life is basically a weightlifters workout/diet augmented to be used by real life people. You follow a strict, but VERY doable, diet and follow a workout routine that REAL people that have kids and jobs can actually do!!
The meal plan: Has you eat small portions six times a day. The meals include one portion protein and one portion of carbs. A portion is an amount the size of the palm of your hand or a clenched fist. So, you can have a chicken breast and a half a cup of brown rice.. or scrampled egg whites and a slice of toast… the point? You get to have carbs! I’ve found a bunch of Body For Life specific recipes that I’m more than certain I will ennjoy. Plus I LOVE cottage cheese and fruit. Cottage cheese is PAKCED with protein!
So that I don’t have to prepare and carry six meals a day I’ve invested in some Myoplex shakes and bars. One shake or bar can be substituted for a meal. And these shakes are VERY thick and VERY filling.
There really is a lot of options:
| Proteins: Chicken breast Turkey breast Lean ground turkey Swordfish Orange roughy Haddock Salmon Tuna Crab Lobster Shrimp Top round steak Top sirloin steak Lean ground beef Buffalo Lean ham Egg whites or substitutes Trout Low-fat cottage cheese Wild-game meat |
Carbs: Baked potato Sweet potato Yams Squash Pumpkin Steamed brown rice Steamed wild rice Pasta Oatmeal Barley Beans Kidney beans Corn Strawberries Melon Apple Orange Fat-free yogurt Whole-wheat bread High-fiber cereal Rice cake Popcorn Tortilla Whole grains |
That’s a WHOLE lot of food to choose from! And when you think about it, that’s a lot of food to eat in a day also. Twice a day you add veggies to the meal and you are set. It’s that easy.
The Workout: Is 20 mintutes of Cardio every other day and 50 miutes of high intensity weight training every other day. Do it will look like this for the first week:
Monday: Upper Body Training
Tuesday: Cardio
Wednesday: Lower Body Training + Abs
Thursday: Cardio
Friday: Upper Body Training
Saturday: Cardio
The next week you switch and do lower body twice and the upper body once. The workouts have you focus on ‘high points’ where you REALLY push yourself to do the best you can. The cardio, while only 20 minutes is an INTENSE 20 minutes of exercise. And the weight training is the most important of the exercises for sevrel reasons:
1) Healing muscles eat up a LOT of energy (fat)
2) Even when you are sitting doing nothing, muscle is using that energy just to sustain itself.
3) You get stronger!!!
I joined Gold’s Gym today where Ben is already a member. We are going to work out together every evening. 🙂
The Free Day: The one thing this plan has like none I’ve seen before. One day a week (Sunday for me) you can eat whatever the hell you want AND you don’t have to work out. WHATEVER YOU WANT. The plan allowes this for a few reasons two of which are:
1) You don’t set yourself up for failure that way. It’s not realistic to think that you are going to go 12 WEEKS without slipping once. This plan GIVES you a day to do that. This also allowes you to set short term goals within the long term goal (If I can make it till Sunday I can have that ice cream too!!)
2) Once you realize how good your body feels when you exercise and eat right, all that heavy food and the lack of energy and the heavy feeling will MAKE you want to start all over again on Monday.
I’m extremely excited to start this plan. On Monday I’ll take all my measurements (Body fat index, weight, measurements and pictures). When the 12 weeks are up I hope to have gained muscle, lost weight and have so much energy I don’t know what to do with myself.
Excited!!! 😀
I think you have it all down to a tee. and you have to also thank Atkins and all the low carb crap because the economy as suddenly catered towards weightloss and you’ll find alot of meats and other things fall within BFL.
For example, my grocery store now carries 4% fat ground beef and ground pork. Both are low fat, perfect protein and taste good in spagetti, fajitas, etc! They also carry low-carb tortillas which are 12g carbs each — a perfect meal!
I have not really looked into BFL much. It sounds pretty neat but I would recommend doing one thing different. YOu should really do Abs every day, even on your cardio day. The ab muscles recoup so quick that to wear them down s so that they will regenerate you really have to work them everyday. You do not want to work the same muscle every day but doing say hanging twist one day then crunches the next then say six inch hell the next will really bring the six pack out.
I actually considered that but for the first challenge I want to focus on upper body strength and weight loss.
I don’t want to majorly pump up my abs just so they are covered by a layer of fat.
Okay here is the thing about abs. If you jump, the majority of the power comes from your abs, if you use good posture, abs. It is without a doubt the most used group of muscles that you have. If you work your most used group of muscles more, then it will burn more of the fat that you are trying to get rid of. However the neat thing about the abs is that you do not have to work them when you are doing your workout. Like say things like leg lifts. For the most part I will do these while I am sitting in the living room watching t.v. It also kind of helps to take your mind off the burn. Also, and I know this sounds stupid, when your doing everyday things like working driving or just sitting around, try to get in the habit of sucking in your tummy. The muscles that you use to hold in your gut(not saying that you have a gut but you understand)will actually work you very well. It is a simple thing that most people would not consider working out that will make a big impact. What ever you do please keep us posted on how it works. I have a lot of people ask me how to lose weight and to be honest I don’t know what to tell them.
I will keep you all informed. After the first challenge I’ll probalby post the before pictures with the after… but right now I can hardly look at them, I’m not going to subject YOU ALL to them!
I plan on doing a challenge, taking a week or two off (still eating right and doing cardio workouts) then jumping right into a second challenge.
I figure that will have me in pretty good shape for swim suit weather. 🙂
I’ve known alot of BFL vets that do abs every day. They are definitely very important muscles and I’m trying to do that with this challenge. During my break i did cardio and abs to give them lots of dedication because they were still really soft after being stretched out from two pregnancies. They’re alot firmer now (through the fat!) than they were a month ago, so I still gotta keep at it.
HOWEVER.. that does add another 10-15 minutes to whatever workout…so Monday I didn’t do it at all because of time limitations (and it wasn’t required in the workout), but today I did.
But its also very good to stick to the book for your first challenge. You start making your own rules and you don’t want it to snowball the wrong direction.