If the question is asked at this moment, what is the number one priority in my life, the answer will not be a moment late: it is my physical fitness. Lets talk about my weight loss experience.
When the black cloud of despair surrounded me so mercilessly, when the yellow storm from all sides was shattering my dreams one after another, I wondered how to strike back?
I thought, to take back the control over my life, the first thing I have to do is to take control of my own body, my physique.
A former BMA cadet, Masruf Hussain, who received counter-terrorism training from army commandos, weighed over 100 kg. Looking at the once athletic body of six feet two inches in the mirror, it seemed that this guy had never walked two feet in his life. I didn’t realize when I turned my body from temple to dustbin while living on sushi, yakiniku, pizza, pasta, cheesecake and coke. As soon as he walked up the stairs, his tongue would stick out like a snake, fat would come out from the side of his pants, double chin under his neck – he looked like forty-three instead of thirty.
I decided at this time, enough is enough. My mind lives in my body, so to fix the mind, the body must be fixed in the beginning. The following steps were taken from 6th January:
(1) From the daily food list, first of all, I threw away sugar and sweets. Cheesecake, chocolate pie, dairy milk chocolate, pastries, Coke, Pepsi – everything.
(2) Avoid white carbohydrates altogether. Rice, pasta, bread, noodles – completely off.
(3) For dinner or lunch, I used to fill my stomach with a lot of salad (lettuce leaves, cucumber, chopped tomatoes), along with chicken or fish. Chicken or fish cooked completely without oil – if not available, I would take it out of the broth and squeeze lemon and then eat it. Salad dressing is accompanied sparingly, for flavor.
(4) I used to eat breakfast after waking up. After mixing two glasses of non skim milk with oatmeal, banana and apple in a blender, I did not feel hungry till noon.
(5) I used to eat two boiled eggs (whole with yolk) or one apple between breakfast, lunch and dinner.
(6) I used to drink more than two to three liters of water (ten-fifteen glasses) throughout the day.
(7) I used to sleep for six to eight hours.
(8) Six days a week I used to sweat my body for half an hour to an hour every day. Running, Krav Maga, free hand exercises, strength training – whenever feels good. But whatever I did, I didn’t stop until I was sweating profusely.
(9) What I do every day, I used to write in a book. How long I slept, what I ate, what I exercised, everything was written in brief. When the performance was a bit poor, I would look at it the next day.
(10) Banned junk food, fast food. No burgers, no french fries, nothing. Instead, I used to eat beef kebab (steak) sometimes, I used to eat the cheese that was available in three corners. There is no harm in eating moderate amounts of fat.
After following these rules religiously in the first month, I saw ten kilograms of weight disappear in four weeks! Four more kilograms in the next four weeks – a total of fourteen kilograms in eight weeks. Not only that, my whole day started to feel lively, it became easier to focus on studies, I started to regain my lost confidence one step at a time, I managed to deal with all the huge problems with an eye on them.
All of them were possible because I decided to become physically fit, literally.
As your fellow warrior, I want you to take back the lost control of your life, chase your dreams.
Here are some basic guidelines:
- The principles I follow are trial and error with a combination of methods from Gary Taubes (Good Calorie Bad Calorie), Michael Matthews (Bigger, Leaner, Stronger) and Arnold Schwarznegar (Modern Encyclopedia of Bodybuilding). There is no such thing as “one size fits all” in physical fitness. You have to find out what works for you. The key is to make a firm decision and stick to it. Body is a precious resource, if you take care of it, it will take care of you. Barack Obama played basketball regularly, Ravithakure wrestled, Bangabandhu played football. What’s your excuse for not taking care of your body?
- The picture you are looking at is the picture of my pot two months ago. This ugly, squishy thing makes you both laugh and vomit, doesn’t it? Now think, in just eight weeks I wiped that stuff out – just by force of will. Start by reading this article, from today! If you need any help, this poor person is there! Start today, take pictures, see in two months!
- Physical fitness is not for a month or two, but for a lifetime. Our body is like a machine, as long as we take care of it, it will give good service. Our Bengali diet is probably one of the unhealthiest in the world. If you want to live, change yourself. And let this change begin with this text.
- Let’s dream, the slander of weak and weak Bengalis will be removed, the shapely bodies of the young women of Bangladesh will be the envy of the whole world. Sushikhor, if the human version of the hippopotamus Masruf can change in two months, so can you.
Almost all the books I’ve read on physical fitness and diet have one thing to say – 80 to 90 percent of your fitness depends on what you eat. The remaining 10 to 20 percent is exercise. And yes, rest is very important!
It took me four to eight weeks of strict diet control, five to six days a week of physical exercise to get from an ugly 14 kg unfit to a fairly fit state (eighty six kg). Today I will share my experiences about food.
Many people who follow this Facebook profile know how much I love to eat. Until January 6, 2016, I didn’t eat to live, I lived for food. God gave birth in a common house but gave the tongue of a king – I love to eat and all food is “rich food”. In the country, there are polao, kacchi, mostakim pressure, black roast beef, as well as Ammu’s chocolate cream cake, custard, Rajshahi Misthanna Bhandar’s pandasandesh, Satkhira Ghosh Dairy’s sarpuria or Comilla’s rasmalai – ugh, the tongue is watering! And you have seen my sushi and yakiniku description pictures in Japan!
Another difficulty I have in expatriation is that I don’t know how to cook at all, so I have to rely on the supermarkets below. I bought coke, kitkat, snickers, tuna sandwich, cream cake etc from there. After coming to Sunny Bhai’s biryani shop next to the university, I think I ate biryani three times!
My biggest obstacle in getting down to eighty-six was this huge addiction to food. An hour punching bag workout here in a self defense class called Krav Maga will pretty much kill you, I don’t think it’s such a tough training in an hour even with army and police training combined. However, I say with responsibility, that training is much easier than handling the cravings for biryani.
It’s been a long time, I went in front of the biryani shop at noon – I smelled it, then I slowly bought salad and tuna fish from the shop next door. I went to Seven Eleven and picked up a KitKat bar, then I put it down again after seeing the 412 kcal written on it. These things may seem silly, but those who haven’t done it will never know how hard it is to do.
There is an exercise method called High Intensity Interval Training (I’ll write about it in detail in the next episode), which will get your tongue out in ten minutes to half an hour. First two minutes of slow jogging, then one minute of all-out sprints, then another two minutes of slow jogging – interval running in this way.
I did it occasionally on days I missed Krav Maga class. Twenty minutes on the treadmill is like running three kilometers, and burns a little over two hundred calories. And when you’re done, you feel like you’re going to die – your heart rate goes through the roof. After working out at this level, only two hundred calories are consumed, and eating one KitKat chocolate bar fills my body with more than 400 calories, eight hundred to twelve calories in a plate of biryani in one sitting.
A person of average height needs 1400 calories a day, and a plate of biryani contains over a thousand. The calories that are left over after your body needs them are stored as fat – this is the conventional knowledge. I’ll waste all my hard work on just one KitKat – when I thought about it, that chocolate no longer tasted good in my mouth.
Even if you exercise 24 hours a day, there is no benefit unless you eat right. I went to a two-week counter-terrorism short course in Sylhet with a weight of ninety kg. All the instructors of the Bangladesh Army Special Force completely destroyed us in two weeks – we were unrecognizable by the color of our skin. When we came back, we measured our weight and saw that we had not lost even one kilogram.
Do you know why? After thinking a lot, after training, I used to eat seven or eight glasses of special lemon juice with lots of sugar in the dining hall, as well as three to four plates of rice. I couldn’t remove the effect of that extra rice and sugar even with inhuman efforts, the weight remained at one place – Some even gained a kilo or two. So, as tempting as it may sound – consider sugar and carbs the enemy.
In the words of Thomas Moffett, “Don’t dig your own grave with your teeth.” Today only twenty-five-thirty-year-olds die of heart attacks, hypertensive/diabetic youths in their thirties. Most people age prematurely. Almost all types of diseases are closely related to poor weight control and unhealthy eating habits. So, keeping your weight under control and exercising regularly is not a luxury – it should be part and parcel of your life like eating and sleeping.
In the first episode of this series, what to eat and what to do are roughly told, you will find it in my time line. To those who have already joined me on this thirty day diet and exercise journey – keep fighting!
I am with you, with my little knowledge and ability. A favorite quote – Suffer the pain of discipline or suffer the pain of regret. The choice is yours, O dreamer!
How to continue a fitness program? And double chin, reduce belly fat!
There is a simple way to do any difficult task. Start by breaking the task down into small manageable chunks. When I weighed over 100kg, on January 6th I decided – ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. Do you know what my first step was? Get up early and have breakfast.
I never used to eat breakfast in the morning – if I felt hungry in the afternoon, I would go to Sunny Bhai’s biryani shop and eat two plates of biryani in one go, followed by ice cream or lachi. And I used to spend the whole day thinking about the food court, researching what to eat next after a meal. I would read descriptions of food from different countries on Wikipedia and think in my mind where these things can be found in Tokyo.
For the first seven days I took one new step every day towards physical fitness. Describe the seven days:
- Day 1 – Having breakfast in the morning, which I never used to do. You also should not do.
- Day 2 – Eggs and milk instead of KitKat/Snickers bars for breakfast, take the stairs to the train station instead of the escalator.
- Day 3 – Eat Japanese bento box instead of biryani for lunch, which is much healthier.
- Day 4 – Exercise for an hour in a martial arts class.
- Day 5 – Drink water without coke after dinner. Must do it.
- Day 6 – Strength training at the varsity gym for the first time (only squats with barbells, twenty-two sets)
- Seventh day – No coke/chocolate of any kind throughout the day.
Eat two meals instead of three meals. In this way I took small steps every day for eight weeks. Over time these small steps combined to shred my unsightly pout, reducing football-like cheekbones to a tolerable level.
Forget about getting physically fit by hitting the gym for two hours in one go and not eating anything for seven days. Take a look at these small steps. Drink three glasses of coke every day? Have two glasses today, one glass the next day. There is a proverb in Japan: A big shot is actually a small shot who keeps shooting continuously.
This is the overall strategy. If there is even one small victory throughout the day, that too is a big deal. On my desk, there are two pictures of bodybuilder Jason Whittock and Bollywood’s Hrithik Roshan side by side, and in the middle there is a picture of our Mr. Bangladesh Hitman Hart Swapan Bhai. I look at these pictures while reading.
A Japanese girlfriend saw these pictures on my desk and said, What’s the matter – have you changed your orientation? I smiled and said, “No, I want to have a body like these one day”.
When craving biryani/cake/pasty/butter chicken – look at these pictures. Then I say to myself: “Some day my picture will inspire others too. By refusing to take that chocolate cake, I am taking myself one step closer to that glory.”
What is your “glory”? Six pack abs? A great lovemaking session? Selfie of a naked body on the beach? The best player’s crest in office football? Gaining fitness like Hercules from thirty kg over weight??
You can do each of these, and small daily steps will get you there. When you see the plate in front of you, eat the pieces of meat and the salad and remove the rice and potatoes. Remember, athletes struggle for fifteen years for just fifteen seconds of honor. And you will reap the benefits of physical fitness forever.
Now let’s come to the strategy to reduce double chin and lower abdomen. So far, all the books you have read, all the ads you have seen where it is claimed that it is possible to reduce fat in a particular place (spot) of the body – throw them all in the dustbin.
Separately, cheek fat (like I had) or lower belly fat will never go away. As the overall fat decreases from your body, these will slowly disappear as well. So, control your diet to reduce your overall body fat, do half an hour to an hour of sweaty exercise every day, drink two to three liters of water and sleep for six to seven hours – you’ll see magical results within a month.
Again, there is no way to naturally reduce body fat individually. From Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Encyclopaedia of Bodybuilding to the latest research-based books – all of this information is available. If someone promises a spot reduction, assume they are cheating.
You will see in the picture of the cover, my cheeks are gone. I didn’t need to do separate exercises for the cheeks at all!! “Brother my hips are fat, Thai has more fat, the solution to all this is to reduce the body-fat percentage of the body. You know how to reduce in the previous episodes of this series!
Know my 14 kg weight loss experience in just 8 weeks. (Part 2)
