My Healing Transformation: Diet and Exercise Program

To lose all that weight the right way I knew would take a while in order to make it truly effective. There is that temptation to go for the quick fix and we tend to fall into that instant gratification conditioning. My program I carefully crafted from over 20 plus years of experience in diet, nutrition, and fitness that I did not apply to myself in the last decade. No, the key to success would lie in proper preparation.

You also need to make that internal decision to stick to the program no matter what. For me it was a matter of survival and wanting to live a productive and happier life free of pain, lack of energy, and mental malaise.

Now before anyone sets forth to start on any exercise program consult a medical professional to determine your capacity and ability to do so. This is even more important especially if you have existing medical conditions and under medication. In my case I was a type 2 Diabetic with hypertension and high cholesterol and triglycerides. For my program I had to start with the following 10 major dietary changes below.

1. Reduction or elimination of white rice, enriched white flour, pasta, fruit juices, sodas, diet sodas, and pretty much anything with a high glycemic index.
2. Inroduce more low to medium glycemic foods with high fiber content like yams, sweet potatoes, leafy greens, avocados, quinoa, steel cut oatmeal, brown rice, agave nectar, coconut sugar, and cruciferous vegetables.
3. Make sure to drink at least ten 8 oz. glasses of water daily. Rule of thumb for me was to drink 16 ounces of pure fresh clean water upon first getting up in the morning.
4. Do not skip breakfast. Make breakfast your heaviest meal of the day and let that fuel you properly. Typical breakfast for me would be a bowl of oatmeal with a splash of almond or coconut milk with half a banana plus a 4 egg white omelette of mushrooms and minced garlic. I would wash that down with 1 scoop of whey protein isolate powder blended with 8 oz. of water and crushed ice.
5. Reduction towards gradual elimination of processed foods and fast food. Yep, if you want to do it right no more McDonald's, Burger King, Taco Bell, and KFC on a regular basis. You can have your one cheat meal or cheat day of the week of your choice to keep your sanity. But if you have the willpower to keep it to one cheat meal that would be even better. One thing you will notice is when you reduce this aspect of your diet over time your body will not like it being reintroduced later on. For me a cheat meal from any of those fast foods would induce a nasty stomach ache and made me lethargic. For me I'd say that the percentage of these meals for the entire year was about 5% overall. The last part of the year I had weaned myself of them.
6. I made sure to eat 5 to 6 smaller meals during the day and that my dinner was the lightest one and very minimal carbs after 7 pm! By feeding your body smaller portions throughout the day you will fire up your metabolic furnace over a longer period of time.
7. My ideal protein choices were organic free range eggs, lean beef cuts, turkey breast, skinless chicken breast or thighs, fresh wild caught salmon, red snapper, sole, mahi mahi, tuna, and sardines. My cooking oils of choice were extra virgin olive oil and virgin coconut oil. I made sure that I would eat 3 tablespoons of virgin coconut oil daily. My doctor was not a big fan of it and kept saying saturated fat was bad. To me that was a bunch of hooey. Get yourself a book about virgin coconut oil by Dr. Barry Fife and read up on what it's really all about.
8. Before going to bed I would blend 1 scoop of whey protein powder, 3 teaspoons of greens plus, and 6 oz. of unsweetened almond or coconut milk and crushed ice a half hour before going to bed.
9. Check your food labels and avoid anything with high fructose corn syrup, anything with the word hydrogenated, corn, soybean, canola oils, any margarines aside from Smart Balance, white sugar, aspartame, acesulfame, and saccharin. There's a bigger list you will learn to avoid but for now start with these.
10. Since I was lactose intolerant I avoided as much dairy products as I could. I love cheese but I had to cut that down too. The kind of saturated fats in dairy products are the ones that clog up your arteries and give you that fatty belly.

Exercise program:

Nothing fancy for the first 3 months for me. I knew that at my starting weight of 280 pounds the stress on my joints and cardiovascular system would be dramatic. So I started the first month like this:

Month 1: 10 minutes on the stationary bike to warm up then move on to the treadmill for 10 minutes at a pace of 2.0 and zero incline. I would finish off with 10 minutes on the Apex elliptical. Have your gym help you figure out the best comfortable pace for you. Make sure to stretch 10 minutes each before and after your session. I would do wrist circles, arm circles forward and backward, ankle circles, knee bends, side bends, and neck circles. I would do this for 5 days a week. If you can't do it 5 days straight don't force yourself. Get in a day of rest after the first 3 days so your body recuperates.

Months 2 and 3: After the first month I was able to begin on a more moderate approach. I would start with 10 minutes on the stationary bike using the weight loss setting. Then it was on to the treadmill for 15 minutes using the weight loss setting and finally another 20 minutes on the Apex elliptical using you guessed it the weight loss setting. Not too many people are aware or familiar with the different settings on these machines but it takes the guesswork about when you ease up or kick it up a notch. It follows the principles of H.I.I.T. or High Intensity Interval Training. What that type of training does is kick up your metabolism and keep your body burning fat longer over a 14 hour time period.

Months 4 to 6: Now I was ready to bring more fuel to the fire and so I did. After warm ups I would get on the Apex elliptical for 45 minutes and just crank it. I love this machine because it did not place any stress on my knees . Weight loss setting on level 2 was the ticket for me. For my concentration and visualization I had my iPod shuffle cranking my favorite workout music. For me I loved playing the music from all the Rocky movies and added my favorite 80s mixes. It's really up to you how you want to move but I found that music allowed me to enter into azone of visualization and concentration.

Months 7 to 12 and onwards: By now I was in pretty decent shape and down to 235 lbs. and now was the time to sculpt. This meant introducing weight training to the equation. After a decade of not touching a barbell or dumbbell I knew my strength and endurance levels would be compromised and I was right. To adjust to this I made a basic program of relearning all the compound multi-joint movements and revive muscle memory. I would work different body parts based on major and minor muscles and split them up over 5 days. I would highly recommend you find a good personal or fitness trainer to guide you especially if you have not done anything like this at all.

For me it was a matter of applying my knowledge from the different training programs I learned in different sports like baseball, basketball, swimming, and of course weight training. I may not be a certified trainer but I learned all these principles way before fitness trainers became really fashionable and a great career choice.

Your program may have to accommodate your own particular individual knowledge and experiences so be open to learning new things.

Here's my Phase 1 program:

Mondays- Leg day- since our legs are our largest muscle groups you have to devote it to this and focus on your quads, hamstrings, and glutes. I worked calves separately because after you go expend everything on legs you may have to crawl your way out of the gym. But as they say no pain and no gain.

3 sets and 3 different exercises for quads, glutes, and hamstrings with a rep count between 8 to 12 only.

My exercises would be leg presses, leg extensions, romanian deadlifts, lunges, squats, side lunges, lstanding leg curls, lying leg curls and deadlifts.

Tuesdays and Saturdays- Chest, biceps, abs

3 sets of Nautilus or Machine Bench press- 8 to 12 reps

3 sets Dumbbell Incline presses- 8 to 12 reps

3 sets Pec Dec flyes- 8 to 12 reps

3 sets of Crunches- 25 reps each

3 sets of Leg raises- 15 reps each

3 sets of Reverse crunches- 25 reps each

3 sets EZ Barbell curls- 8 to 12 reps

3 sets seated Incline curls- 8 to 12 reps

3 sets Preacher machine curls- 8 to 12 reps

Wednesday- Rest day from weights. Cardio for 30-45 minutes if I felt like it.

Thursdays- Back, Triceps, Traps

3 sets each for 8 to 12 reps

Lat Pulldowns

Pulley Rows

One armed dumbbell rows

Bent over barbell rows

Barbell Shrugs

Upright Rows

Triceps Pressdowns

Reverse Cable Pressdowns

Overhead dumbbell extensions

Fridays- Shoulders

3 sets each of 8 to 12 reps

Standing Military Barbell Press

Dumbbell Overhead Press

Dumbbell Front raises

Side Lateral Raises

Bent over Rear Lateral Raises

Overhead Bench Presses

So there you have my Phase 1 Transformation Program. It took a year to do it but its the best gift I ever gave myself. Now in Phase 2 you will see and learn an even more dramatic transformation. Chase your dreams and keep moving forward.

My Healing Transformation

There comes a time in one's life when you just get sick and tired of being sick and tired. In my case I just wanted to have a life where I didn't feel so sapped of energy, motivation, desire, and happiness. Everything had gone a downward spiral for me and the only way out was to make that final decision to just turn my life around. I look back at pictures of myself from 2006 weighing in at a whopping 297 pounds and remember the extreme struggle it took just to get down to 275 pounds by December of 2010. Type 2 Diabetes or Adult-Onset diabetes is a insidious disease that slowly destroys your body from the inside out.

It is a disease that affects every major organ of your body from your brain, your heart, liver, kidneys, stomach, pancreas, your blood, everything. It affects your sleep, your libido, your mental capacity to think and concentrate, your vision, and disrupts your life like no other. The sad thing is I let myself slide into that situation by having the disease of denial. The prescription drugs that my doctor advised me to take didn't help matters any further. It's like a catch-22 wherein you take medications like Actos, Metformin, Lipitor, Zestril, Glyzzheride, and other tongue-twisting drugs that in their own right also have side effects on your kidneys, liver, and heart. It also slows down your metabolism and causes water retention and weight gain. Basically I was fat and sick in my body and mind.

The only thing I had left was my spirit. The one last remaining aspect of me that was still in there fighting the good fight. Never surrendering to the walls of doom that was my body slowly closing in and try to snuff whatever was left deep inside. Years before my spirit was what carried me to rise above tragedies and misfortunes that life threw at me. This malaise, this rut I was in because of this disease was affecting every aspect of my life and I finally said to myself enough was enough. This was the deepest hole I was ever in and I did not want to go out like this. No, I did not want the light that shone so bright years before be dimmed simply because I gave up on myself. It was a cry for help from my soul that resonated to my mind and my body.

The injury I suffered on my right elbow is what I look at as the unseen hero in all this. At first I was very bitter about the whole thing. Racked with pain all day and all night, drugged up with painkillers for the first 6 months I was not a happy camper. I think that when your back is truly against the wall that your survival instinct kicks in and you just say enough is enough. Time to will myself back into the game of life. I was in such a dense fog that I had lost myself in a morass that I didn't even recognize myself anymore. But the human spirit is quite unique. It finds ways to tell you in a language wholly its own that all is not lost. That this is not the way destiny was meant to be.

When I told the rehab doctor back in August of 2010 that I was going to stop taking the painkillers they were giving me every week he looks at me incredulously. I said I was going to tough it out and suck it up and that I was not going to let those painkillers put me into a further stupor. This was my way of beginning to fight back slowly but surely. I had to concentrate and reconfigure my brain to awaken the left side of my body and condition it to be the dominant side. Being right handed I had lived practically all my life being fully dependent on my right side for everything I did. After it was determined by MRI that month that I indeed had a torn ligament and tendon I knew that surgery was going to be next. It didn't matter that they tried acupuncture and rehab exercises beforehand. I just had to get myself in the mindset that I would face that down the road.

I was placed on temporary total disability and I had to go through the process of recovery. But before I went on disability I was working on a project with a friend setting up the Internet sales department and network for a major car dealership. He had noticed my bitterness and anger and as a friend he slowly started to share with me snippets of wisdom gleaned from his own fight with his own demons. At first I resisted but as time passed I saw that his spirit had faith and strength that kept him together. I had that before and I let it hide deep within me. After I was notified that I had to go on temporary total disability I had to let go of that project and begin my journey. That was that fateful month of December 2010 and this is where the healing began.

Obviously I had to start somewhere and I found my epiphany not in the traditional way that it had presented itself to me in years past. I didn't feel the joy and happiness of the Christmas season at that time. It made me feel really alone like I had always felt ever since I was a kid . It reinforced my mindset that this was a battle that I would wage on my own under my own terms. It further got reinforced on that New Year's Eve with a brief conversation with a good friend of mine who was a brilliant neurosurgeon Dr. Joel de Ocampo. He told me that if I did not make any immediate changes to my lifestyle that the metabolic syndrome I was suffering from would be what I needed to understand.

And so I did start that journey on my own after mapping out my plan for transformation. I knew that I would have to do this in stages and that this would be the longest battle I would wage against myself. I needed healing inside and there was a lot of stuff festering inside of me. I just had to really internalize everything and envision myself down the road a transformed and vibrant man.

When I joined the gym in January of 2011 I knew that my physical condition was at the bottom rung of the bottom rung. And it was for the first week. I felt like giving up those first days. I could hardly finish the first 15 minutes of the treadmill and the resulting soreness the next day made me feel even worse. I knew I had to be in better shape to get ready for my surgery in March even though it was a relatively minor procedure according to the surgeon. No more excuses I say to myself. I could feel the spirit in me being revived. That very same spirit that carried me through previous life battles was resurfacing and I felt that spark.

The other thing I needed to fix was my diet. After researching about metabolic syndrome further I knew I had to deal with the unholy trinity of high blood sugar, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol and triglycerides. Those three deadly conditions were fueled by the wrong food choices which happened to be white rice, white flour, and white pasta. It was all coming back to me now, like a fog slowly lifting. The years of knowledge I had accumulated while working at GNC was coming back. I found my old books of nutrition that I had kept in the back and turned to them once more. The insidious cravings for sweets, salty, and fatty highly processed foods was killing me and I let myself fall into that trap. It was a vicious cycle that needed to be broken and it was my very life at stake. I did not like envisioning myself twenty years into the future in a wheelchair, blind in one eye, missing a limb, and waiting for a nurse to change my senior diapers. No, I would not go down like that. That was not life, that was a death sentence of my own making.

Days turned into months and the weight slowly dropped off and by the end of April I had dropped down to 255 lbs. In years past I couldn't get past the 260 pound mark and by hitting this threshold it emboldened me. I still hurt from the surgery and could not use any weight beyond 3 pound dumbbells and so I focused on the cardiovascular aspect. I knew that the traditional low and slow method of cardio was not what would burn off the fat surrounding me so I adjusted my training. I went back to the principles I had followed in 1998 when I did Bill Phillips' program called Body for Life. I remembered that what worked for my body was doing cardio following the High Intensity Interval Training or H.I.I.T. principles. I went back and readjusted in May and that's when everything took off.

Now it was September 2011 and everyone noticed the transformation I was going through and congratulated me on my achievements. I had brought my weight down to 235 lbs., lost 6 inches off my waist, and more importantly my mind and spirit were a lot clearer than it had ever been in a long time. I had made a transition into really focusing on social media with my friends at MIH Marketing and I was moving forward. I was also voted in as the new Treasurer of the Filipino American Chamber of Commerce of Orange County. For the first time in years I felt joy and happiness start coming back to me and my attitude and mindset were definitely a lot more positive.

That same month I would attend an event at the W Hotel in Hollywood and meet someone that would forever change my life. I didn't know at that time that she was a healer or anything like that. Her name's Radhaa Nilia and she's one of the most genuine, generous, and compassionate persons I have met. I guess you could call it fate or destiny but all I know is she helped unlock and unwrap so much trapped negative experiences, pain, heartache, grief, anger, despair, and set me on the path of healing. I learned that energy healers like her do make a huge impact in healing us and setting us on the path to be our true selves. She is half-Filipina and comes from a long lineage of healers in the Philippines.

My spiritual healing officially begun on November 22, 2011 and in that span of time until now I have made a quantum leap in every aspect of myself. It came just at the right juncture where I was trying to figure out what my next Phase would be. I have learned so much about myself in the past 128 days and it has reflected outward in my physical appearance and inward in my mental and spiritual attitudes.

It's like having so many intricate locks releasing and I see myself as free and un-encumbered by my previous programming and conditioning. That is why I call this a Healing Transformation and this is just the start of another journey wherein I am cognizant of what I want for my life and to achieve my true dreams. I am very thankful and grateful for what she has done for my life and joyful in the fact that I have found my true self.

I continue on this journey with an open heart, mind, and soul and know that she is there to hold open that space of healing. Through it all her pure unconditional love, generosity and concern for all her friends and clients is what I believe sets her far apart from most people. For everyone out there that is in need of healing and not sure where or whom to turn to then Radhaa is that genuine authentic person to be your healer. Everyone needs a spiritual tune up. When you do that you set your mind and body free to be at its very best. Anything is possible if you truly believe.

Now I have just finished Phase 2 of my Healing Transformation and I have accomplished so much already. Just look at my pictures now. As of April 23, 2012 I'm at 191 pounds and 11.6% bodyfat. I'm 45 years old and in the best shape and feeling of my life. That is priceless.

I recognize that life will try and throw more challenges ahead for me. But I know that ever since I started facing life with a consistent positive attitude that the manifestations of positive results have become more common than ever before. We become what we think and we can only begin that journey when it truly comes from deep within.