My Warrior Diet

[Renegade]

I've decided to start a log so that I can keep check on how I'm doing over the next few months. My main reasons for starting were:

1) Give me more time in the afternoon before going to work (work from 12 noon to 9pm).
2) I was fed up with following the "6 meals a day" frequent feeding pattern. I decided this was totally unnecessary, not to mention inconvenient. Also, without a regular pre-breakfast cardio routine, I found it difficult to keep my body fat below 10%.
3) Try and get energy levels up for workouts.

I first read the book at the start of the year, but didn't go about things very well and went off the diet within a week. I was feeling weak, nervous and physically drained. These things all made me cautious about trying the diet again, but I finally decided to start again 3 weeks ago, and so far this is how it's been:

Week 1:
Jumped straight in at the deep end, undereating from 7am to 9pm, then overeating from 9pm until 11pm and getting to bed around midnight. During undereating I ate mostly fruit and occasionally yoghurt. Each undereating "meal" was separated by at least 3 hours. I had a cup of coffee in the morning, and another late afternoon. I tried to use up any foods not really suited to the diet, but didn't want to throw away either (e.g. grapes, noodles, nothing too bad). I found that I got quite bad indigestion after eating so late at night, and had difficulty getting to sleep, but this passed after the first week. Mentally tired towards the end of work, but told myself that this was to be expected during the adaption period. Workouts not really any different.

Week 2:
Pretty much the same as the first week, but easier to sleep at night. One thing worried me, and that was a lack of energy during workouts. My strength actually started to go down, so I decided to eat more carbs during overeating.

Week 3:
Mentally drained, I started to wander what I was doing the diet for. Told myself that it would get better, but one day at work I had really bad anxiety, on the verge of having a panic attack. I almost had to leave the room. The next day I couldn't drive my car for fear of it happening again! I suffered from panic attacks about 5 years ago, and it took about a year to get over, so the last thing I want is for them start again. Found myself having to eat at lunch time on a couple of days, so on these days I overate from 12 noon to 4pm an underate until the next afternoon. I found that I could eat much more in the alloted 4 hour time frame this way, and started to feel a lot better. Maybe afternoon overeating is the way for me to go.

Today- Week 4:
Back to regular night time overeating, but going to eat fruit whenever I' hungry instead of at set intervals. I just don't want to get in the same state I was in last week. Hopefully things'll be okay.

I'll give details of my overeating phase, workout routines and post-workout recovery meals in the next post.

Thanks.

[Renegade]

I was going to wait until the end of the week before writing again, but I've had such a good weekend I felt like doing it now! On my days off, the Warrior Diet gives me everything I was looking for when I first got interested in it; mental clarity, constant energy, a sense of freedom and a good reason for not wanting to eat mass produced junk. It seems like this weekend everything came together all at once. I got up early, around 6am, underate until around 6 or 7pm, then overate for the next couple of hours until I didn't want anything else. Today was a non-training day, and looked like this:

6:00am Woke up, drank around 1 litre of water in the foolowing hour
8:00am Ruby grapefruit, cup of black coffee, multivitamin, vitamin c
10:30am Banana
Drank lots of water and caffeine free tea from here until overeating
7:00pm - 8:00pm Dinner: a large sallad of cabbage and other veggies, miso soup, prawns stir fried with leafy greens, chicken curry with a large serving of rice, a couple of hard boiled eggs and a pack of natto.
9:00pm A small serving of yoghurt with blueberries, 1 tblsp flax oil and a drizzle of maple syrup. Multivitamin, vitamin c
It's now 11:00pm (Japan time), so I'll go to bed when I've finished writing this.

I took my daughter out to a nearby bird park, it's a really nice place where tropical birds are all freely flying and eat fruit from your hand. There's also an enclosure for owls, and we listened to a member of staff giving a talk as the owls swooped inches from our heads. One point he made really caught my interest. He said that owls, like many hunting animals, eat only once a day. When they eat, they eat a whole days worth of food in one sitting. For an owl, this is about 10% of its own bodyweight. The guy then made a joke about how many of us could imagine not eating all day, then sitiing down to eat 6 or 7 kilograms of food all at once. I don't eat quite this much during overeating, but I suddenly felt I had more in common with the birds flying around me than I did with the other people in the audience!

Tomorrow's also a day off, so I can eat at around or 7pm again. I'll workout in the morning, so I expect the day to look like this:

6:00 - 7:00am Wake up, drink lots of water
8:00am Ruby grapefruit, cup of black coffee, multivitamin, vitamin c
9:00 - 10:00am Training (see below)
10:00am Recovery shake:- 32g whey protein, 30g oatmeal, 5g honey
11:00am Recovery 2:- 28g whey protein, 100ml plain yoghurt
12:00 If it feels necessary, another recovery meal (the same as 11:00am)
Drink lots of water from here until overeating
7:00pm - 8:00pm Dinner
9:00pm Snack if I still feel hungry, multivitamin, vitamin c
11:00pm Bedtime

My current training program is one I got from Mike Mahler's Kettlebell Manual, for building size and strength. It looks like this:

Saturday: Double Clean and Press 4x5, Alternating Renegade Row 4x5, Turkish Get-Up 5 reps left and right
Sunday: Double Front Squat 4x5, Double Swing 4x5, Double Windmill 5 reps left and right
Tuesday: Alternating Military Press 4x5, Double Bent-Over Row 4x5, Turkish Get-Up 5 reps left and right
Wednesday: Double Clean and Front Squat 4x5, Double Snatch 4x5, Double Windmill 5 reps left and right

All exercises are done for 4 sets of 5. I can't get 4x5 on the presses and double snatch yet, but when I can I'll then aim for 5 sets of 5. This is with two 24kg kettlebells (53 lbs). I weigh just under 70kg (around 150lb) an am 1m77cm tall (5ft 10). I used to rock climb a lot, but eventually found I was training far more than I was climbing, and while I could do fingertip pull-ups like a mad man, I wasn't developing any practical strength. I stumbled across Pavel and kettlebells via the Dragon Door website, and they fit the bill perfectly. I started late last year with a 16kg bell (35lb) and the Enter the Kettlebell! book, then bought two 24's and two 32's (70lb) bells this year. I'm making good progress, maybe because I've never done anything like this before (never stepped foot in a gym, ever ).

With days as good as today, I never want to give up this way of life. Hopefully I'll gradually be able to get used to my overeating not starting until 9:30pm on work days.

[fotakou]

Konbawa aniki!
Kimiga no log wa shugoi desu!
Gambatene!

Translation
Good evening bro!
Your log is awesome
Good luck
(or something like this  )

I am really happy that people are starting logs!We can get so many ideas reading others logs and we can incorporate their ideas in our program!

Hope that you will keep your log up to date 

[Renegade]

Arigato gozaimashita

Without this forum, I probably would never have tried the Warrior Diet a second time. Even though I'd read the book over and over, it wasn't until I decided to have another look on here and saw how well it was going for everyone else that I realised I'd given up too easily before. I think in the beginning we need all the advice help and support we can get, and here's the place to find it.

[Renegade]

Okay, to stop today's post from getting too long (and too boring!), I've decided to do it in two parts. Today I'll detail my nutritional progress, and in the next post I'll do my training progress. Before I get to the good stuff, I'll just recap how the first 3 weeks went:

Week 1: Great, full of positive feelings and excitement.
Week 2: Much like the first week, but a little worried about falling strength levels.
Week 3: Felt down. Negative thoughts started to take over, but two days of lunchtime overeating kept me on track.

So, here I am at the end of Week 4. What a difference a week can make! After a great weekend, things just seemed to be on a roll. Every day at work was great, brimming with energy and enthusiasm. Even though I couldn't start overeating until 10:00pm on a couple of days, I didn't feel overly hungry of short of energy during the evenings. In fact, I feel able to go for much longer now without even thinking about food. I make my evening meals calmly as I would usually prepare any other meal, not like a starved animal that hasn't seen food for a week! It looks like I just needed to give myself 3 weeks to adapt to this way of eating.

I can see now that all of my negative thoughts during the third week only appeared because I expected them to. I thought I might lose energy by eating this way, and because I was thinking like this, the result was I actually felt weaker. I thought I might feel tired at work, and this negativity manifested itself as anxiety and stress. No more negative thoughts for this warrior!

My undereating seems to have found a natural rhythm on both training and non-training days, where I find myself feeling hungry every 3-4 hours. A piece of fruit is now plenty to satisfy this hunger, and I've started to limit my intake of dairy to training days only:

Non-Training Undereating:

8:00 Fruit, black coffee or green tea
12:00 Fruit
3:00 Fruit, black coffee or green tea
6:00 Fruit
9:30 Start overeating
12:00 Bedtime

Training Day Undereating

8:00 Fruit, black coffee or green tea
10:00 Training (1hour)
11:00 Post workout recovery meal
12:00 2nd Post workout recovery meal
1:00 3rd Post workout recovery meal
3:00 Fruit, black coffee or green tea
6:00 Fruit
9:30 Start overeating
12:00 Bedtime/tall glass of milk

This gives me enough energy to get me through until the overeating phase, and on training days gives me a significant amount of calories in the hours post-workout without upsetting my insulin levels. On weekends I start eating earlier, at around 6:00 or 7:00pm, and this is like a real treat, where I can actually eat throughout the whole 4 hour hours (if I want to).

The part of my day that's seen the most transformations is my post-workout nutrition. This has been constantly evolving, in part due to all of the pre-conceptions I already have of what a post-workout meal should look like. I think that if you start this way of eating (I don't like to call it a "diet") without any previous experience of training or no knowledge of sports nutrition, it must be much easier to follow Ori's guidelines. Those of us whove read all the "standard" advice over the years find it contrasts sharply; "Spike you insulin to the max after training", Get most of your daily carb requirements in the hours after training", " Use the highest glycemic foods available within 1 hour after training", the list goes on. Trying to forget all of this and just believe something different might work took quite a lot of effort. After all, I'd been having high glycemic shakes after workouts for the past few years with good results. But what if I could get better results with Ori's way of doing things?

For now I'm just going to try a little bit of blind faith. I trusted in Ori's ideas enough to get me on the Warrior Diet in the first place, and now I feel much more alive and have more vitality during the day than ever before. In my next post, I'll write about how I oproved to myself that my dwindling strength was just a figment of my imagination, and accomplished a long standing goal in the process!

[Renegade]

In my last post I went over how my nutrition and general well-being both seemed to fall into place during the fourth week on the Warrior Diet. The week prior to this was pretty dire, both in terms of how I felt and the effect this was having on my training. I felt I needed to do something to prove to myself that I wasn't getting weaker, and to regain a positive mental attitude. I decided to work a heavy kettlebell "checklist" into the end of my regular workouts.

Using the training routine that I outlined in an above post (4 days a week, 4 sets of 5), I usually finish my workout within 20 minutes, especially if I superset the exercises and compress the rest periods. I've got to the point now with my 24kg (53lb) bells where I only need to take about a minutes' rest between most of the sets (the exception being double military presses and double snatches), so I'll start adding another set to every exercise at the start of next month (5 sets of 5). I always do 10 minutes of jumprope sprint intervals at the end of my training session (20 seconds forward, 10 second rest, 20 seconds backward, 10 second rest, repeat for 10 minutes), with a 2 minute warm down at the end.

I like to train for around an hour, so this leaves me with about 30 minutes to try more difficult exercises with my 32kg kettlebells (70lbs). I do this after my regular routine, but before the jumprope sprints. During the third week on the Warrior Diet, I became convinced that my one arm military press with the 32kg bell was going downhill rapidly, or not happening at all, so I set myself a list of different exercises to do to make sure I wasn't losing strength. I noticed a big improvement in all of the folowing exercises:

32kg Bent Press, left and right: Much smoother now than ever before, both arms.
32kg Turkish Get-Up: Got 5 reps left and right, alternating sides each rep. My previous best was one rep per side!
32kg Swings: After getting ready to do 3 sets of ten swings each hand, I ended up doing 3 sets of 8 snatches each hand instead!
Double 24kg Snatches: Got 4 sets of 5 for the first time, and felt like I could have got more.
USSS Snatch test 24kg: Up to 168 reps in 10 minutes from 149 reps the month before.
Tactical Pull-ups with a 32kg bell attached: 4 reps
112kg (246lb) kettlebell deadlifts, 5 sets of 3: This was done holding a 24kg and a 32kg kettlebell in each hand. You have to squeeze the handles together really hard to stop the bells from sliding around, a great grip workout! I actally did 4 reps on the first set, and I'll try to add a rep to the next set next time and then keep adding reps until I can get 5x5.
Jumprope interval sprints went up from 55 reps per 20 second sprint to 62 reps. I felt like I was flying!

All of these new personal bests show that I'm definately not getting weaker. In fact, without the impetus from this diet I might never have decided to push myself on these feats. I think the problem with the 32kg military press is that my form has improved, so I'm not getting as much leverage as I was before.

As happy as I was with all of this, the best was still to come. After almost a year of training, I finally mashed the Iron Mind Captains of Crush #2 gripper with my right hand (albeit from a near parallel set). I'd set myself the goal of doing it by next January, and now it's done! I was even more surprised as I haven't done any grip training since starting the diet, I'm now too busy overeating when I used to be grip training. Maybe it was a break that I needed. I'm now closing the #2 a couple of times a day.

I can't wait to post more personal bests as I check them off my list of goals. All in all, an absolutely awesome week!

[Renegade]

Week 5

Well, how can I best describe Week 5 of my Warrior Diet? I could be negative and say, "A total disaster!" Or, I could try to be a bit more positive and call it "a learning experience." I'll try to be positive!

A couple of things happened this week that I wasn't really expecting. First of all, from the start of the week I found that I was hungry ALL THE TIME! I was training as usual, but my post workout meals just weren't enough to keep the hunger away (nor was fruit alone during undereating). I would have expected this in the first or second week, but not during the fifth week. The only reason I can think of is that I've gone up from 4x5 (sets/reps) to 5x5 on all exercises, and also increased the weight on a couple. Still, I doubt that this would have such a big effect on my appetite.

The second thing only made the first problem worse. My work schedule has undergone a few changes this week, and I'm now not able to get home before 10pm a couple of nights a week. This means it's 10:30pm by the time I start overeating, then have to be in bed soon after to be up again at around 6:30am the next day. This sucks, and I was so hungry that during my break at 6:00pm, I found myself in the nearest covenience store buying egg sandwiches and a carton of milk. The next day I went all out, and ate three regular meals with two smaller snacks in between, for a grand total of FIVE meals. Definately not the Warrior Diet.

The next day I was so angry with almost giving up, that I decided to do the lunchtime overeating thing again to try and avoid giving in to hunger again. It worked, at least for most of the day. But by the time I got home at night, I was actually hungry again and found myself eating more non-WD snacks. Now I'm really in a state of not knowing what to do next!

Undereating from 6:30am to 10:30pm and then stuffing my face before jumping into bed just doesn't work, at least not for me. Likewise, if I overeat at lunch time, I can go all day without eating anything else, but find myself snacking again when I get home. Also, although I feel fine for a couple of hours after eating during the day, I then start to feel very sluggish and tired, something a lot of people on here have mentioned. There is one final option, but I don't know how it'll work. This will be next week's experiment.

I have a break everyday from either 6:00-7:00pm or 7:00-8:00pm. If I can start overeating during this period, then continue eating when I get home from work, I think things might just work. The problem is, I don't really know how to do it. I think I'll put a post on the QandA page and see if anyone has any suggestions. I'm thinking of having maybe a few eggs and a few bits of salad, cucumbers and the like. The eggs can be boiled at home before I go to work, so they would be an easy option.

Apart from all of this, training's been going well. Today looked like this:

Double Military press (2x24kg kettlebells): 5 sets of 3
done back to back with
Renegade Row (2x32kg kettlebells): 5 sets of 5

Turkish Get-Up (32kg kettlebell): 5 reps per side, alternating one rept at a time left and right
Double Front Squat (2x32kg kettlebells): 3 single reps, resting between each
Snatches (24kg kettlebell): 25/25, 15/15, 10/10 (total 100 reps)

Hopefully, this is not the end!

[Renegade]

Week 6

After posting a question on the Q&A page to check that what I wanted to do was okay, I spent last week eating two evening meals. The first was a packed lunchbox I took to work and ate at around 6:00pm, the second was a smaller snack at around 9:30pm. It seemed to work, but felt more like something I should be doing only when there really isn't any other choice, and not everyday. I think the whole "one meal a day" concept loses its appeal when all you're looking forward to is a reheated packed lunch! I still felt full when I got home after work, so the second meal was really only a handful of walnuts and some yoghurt on most days.

Despite feeling full in the evening, I was still hungry during the day, from the morning right up until overeating. I decided to look into why this might be, and on a couple of days I wrote down exactly what I ate and calculated as closely as possible the total calories and nutrient breakdown for each day. I was surprised to find that even though I was really going for it during overeating, I was barely making 2000 calories per day. On non-training days when I didn't have post workout recovery meals, my calories were even lower, and my protein intake was very low. I train hard, weigh around 150lbs at the moment and stand just over 5ft 10inches tall, so I could instantly see what the problem was. I needed to EAT MORE!

It seems very hard for me to get enough quality calories during one or two sittings, even when I consume 5 or 6 whole eggs, avocados, walnuts and other calorie dense foods. It just doesn't come naturally, so for the meantime, I've decide to ingest more calories during the day in order to meet my daily requirements. I know that this may take me outside the boundaries of the Warrior Diet per se, and probably negates the detox side of things, but after just two days of doing this I already feel much better, and the hunger during the day has vanished.

I've been eating eggs, cheese and other dairy products whenever I feel hungry, as well as fruit and other healthy foods. I tried some bread in the morning the other day, but it really slowed me down, so I tried some oatmeal instead and felt fine. My workouts are still going strong, too. Today I did 5x5 double front squats, double swings and double windmills. The first two reps of each set of squats was with two 32kg bells, the following reps done with 2x24s (total of 10 reps with 2x32kg, 15 reps with 2x24kg). The swings and windmills were all done with double 32s. I'm really happy with this progress, when I got my kettlebells at the start of the year I couldn't even clean two 32s. When I first tried double windmills with 2x24s a few months ago, I couldn't get 5 reps. Things just seem to be getting better with every workout!

[Renegade]

Week 7

One step backward, two steps forward. That seems the best way to describe how my Warrior Diet's been going since the start. Last week I wrote how I was trying to increase my caloric intake by eating some small meals during the day, considerably more than with regular undereating. It didn't take long before I had to question what I was doing.

Before I started WD, I never noticed myself feeling tired or sluggish during the day. After returning to daytime eating after a few weeks on WD, it really hit me, and HARD! I just wanted to lie down and sleep, not good when you've got a full day of work ahead of you. Eating breakfast before workouts also caught up with me. I always used to think that pre-workout meals were an essential part of my training, and always ate a banana before training even after starting WD. I then had a week or so training on nothing but a cup of black coffee, which was great. I then had a few days when I ate regular (big) breakfasts, which was enough to make me say I'll never eat pre-workout again. My performance went way down, and I didn't even attempt my post-kettlebell jumprope sprints. I didn't really get it when I first read the book, but now I see why people who go off the Warrior Diet for a short time always seem drawn back to it, it's like an addiction! Try it for yourself, just for a few days. You'll never want to eat throughout the day ever again!

So the problem still remained about which was the best way for me to fit overeating into my busy daily routine. I've tried WD from every angle over the last 7 weeks, and I now know that there isn't just one best way, but a flexible approach makes it all possible. On days whenI'm going to be home by 8:30pm, I just wait until I get home, then do the regular overeating thing. When I don't finish until around 10pm, I'll have a salad and small meal at work during my evening break, then continue when I get home. And weekends and days off, well, they're just treats when I can really enjoy cooking in the evening and eating for the full 4 hours .

I'm determined not to let my caloric intake drop too low, so I'll monitor what I'm eating every now and then, and maybe cut down on the amount of jumprope I'm doing (getting plenty of cardio with the kettlebells). Having a bowl of muesli at night instead of just yoghurt should bump the calories up a bit, and I think that most of my evenings will be high carb rather than high fat. I don't want to lose any more weight as I'm already slim. It just feels great to be back on track having tried all of the options and now knowing what to do to make great progress.

Today I also achieved another goal I set a while back, a 2 Hands Anyhow with a 32kg and 24kg kettlebell (total 56kg/125lbs). I bent pressed the 32, and at the same time picked up the 24, stood up and military pressed the 24. One rep each side . (P.S: Sorry if this sounds like gibberish to those who don't train witth kettlebells!)

[Renegade]

Week 8

This week was great. I had no problems with hunger during the day, and my energy levels were fine. My daily eating was as follows:

Sunday: Day off work. Training 9am-10am, Four recovery meals between 10:30am and2:30pm. Overeating from 6pm-10pm, bed around 11:30pm.
Monday: Day off work. No training. A couple of pieces of fruit during the day, overeating from 6pm-10pm, bed around 11:30pm.
Tuesday: Work. Training 9am-10am, Four recovery meals between 10:30am and2:30pm. Salad and four eggs followed by packed dinner at 6pm, continued overeating from 9pm-10pm when I got home. Bed around 11:30pm.
Wednesday: Work. Training 9am-10am, Four recovery meals between 10:30am and2:30pm. Had enough time to go home for dinner between 6pm and 7:30pm. Continued overeating from 9pm-10pm when I got home. Bed around 11:30pm.
Thursday: Work. No training. A couple of pieces of fruit during the day, salad and four eggs followed by packed dinner at 6pm. Continued overeating from 9pm-10pm when I got home, bed around 11:30pm.
Friday: Work. No training. A couple of pieces of fruit during the day, salad and four eggs followed by packed dinner at 7pm. Continued overeating from 10pm-11pm when I got home, bed around midnight.
Saturday (today): Work/training. Should turn out the same as last Tuesday, except overeating will be from 7pm-11pm, the same as yesterday.

Every day I had a cup of black coffe at around 8am, and another between 3pm-4pm. Fruits eaten during undereating were mainly apples and pink grapefruits, but also some persimmons (they're in season here in Japan at the moment, and a friend gave me a big bag full!). My packed dinner's were usually a small piece of salmon, vegetables and around 350g of white rice mixed with sesame seeds ans seaweed. My packed salads were topped with sesame oil and sesame seeds. I think my daily caloric intake is still a little low, but I feel fine and am trying to eat more calorie dense foods.

All in all, this is what I was waiting for, the feeling that what I'm doing is as normal as brushing my teeth and washing my face. I'm not spending all day thinking about what and how I'm going to eat, and now the initial excitement has gone, I can just get on with it.

Training's going well again, this week I tried the new RKC 5 minute snatch test and got 104 reps (24kg).

[racer]

Thanks for the log Renegade.  I started my log today, thanks a great deal to your log and its inspiration. 

I am impressed with the gains that you are making with the KBs.  I am starting to bump it up some.  Since I injured my shoulder several years ago, I have really lost strength.  I had to give up lifting when it was really bad.  Thankfully, I was introduced to KBs last year and it has gradually helped me build strength...but I have been very slow and ginger about my training.  I believe I have enough strength and rotation now to start adding sets to my circuits.

Best of luck and try to remember to post here with updates in the future.

[Renegade]

Hi Racer,

Thanks for the kind remarks. Like I said at the start, I started this log so I could keep track of my progress, but when I see that it's actually helping others then it feels really worthwhile. I hope that you succeed in reaching your goals, both with the Warrior Diet and elsewhere. I know that injuring yourself in the past can make you weary of pushing too hard again, I've had my fair share of injuries but always seem to come back stronger afterwards. The funny thing is, all of the worst injuries happened when I was doing things well within my limits. A few years ago I gave myself a hernia pressing 20kg overhead with BOTH HANDS due to fatigue and bad form. Luckily, this was slight enough to correct itself within a year. I also broke my heel falling less than 1 metre warming up for rock climbing, but the worst was damaging the median nerve in my wrist doing some stretching exercises which were supposed to improve flexibility and resistance to injury! Although it's slowly getting better, this has left me with loss of feeling in my right hand for almost a year now. However, rather than take the doctor's advice and just do nothing, I set myself the goal of closing the Iron Mind Captains of Crush #2 gripper. I closed it during week 5 of the WD.

I think it's necessary to push yourself both mentally and physically if you want to make any real progress. When my 32kg kettlebells were delivered in April, my first thought was, "Oh no, I've just wasted a a whole lot of money buying these!". I could barely clean one to my chest, never mind two. That was just 7 months ago, and now I use them for something every workout. I uploaded some training clips to YouTube this week, so you can check out how I'm doing there (double 32 work, 2-hands anyhow, etc):

http://jp.youtube.com/user/pyonpyontobu

I do, however, always make sure I train outside. Swinging huge lumps of iron about indoors with children about is just asking for trouble! Now, to this week's progress:

Week 9

Not much to tell this week, just that my hunger during the day has now got to the point where I have to remind myself to eat some fruit now and again. This is the total opposite of where I was during Week 6, when I was hungry all of the time. I don't want to skip eating completely during the day, as when I do, I tend to drink more tea and coffee instead, which is just dehydrating. I've also started to take body weight and body fat measurements since last weekend. At 33 years old and 1.77m tall (just over 5'10"), I'm just under 70 kg (around 155lbs). My body fat is a little over 7% (measured using Accu-Measure calipers). This has remained the same since last week, so I'm a little happier now that I'm getting enough calories during overeating. I'm happy with these levels, although I expect to put on a little weight if I keep up the heavy kettlebell work and start eating more.

Finally, I'm off to Tokyo tomorrow to attend a kettlebell workshop with the Iron Tamer himself, Senior RKC Dave Whitley. Should be fun!

[Renegade]

Week 10

Last week had it's ups and downs, but was basically another good week. I woke up on Satyrday night before heading up to the kettlebell workshop with a really sore throat and bad catarrh, then didn't sleep well for the rest of the night. Sunday morning I got out of bed at 6am and caught the bullet train to Tokyo at 7am, feeling tired but excited about what the day would bring. Four hours later I arrived in Tokyo, then spent a couple of hours in the city before heading to the workshop. All I ate during this time was a couple of bananas and a couple of cups of coffee. I think this is where I made things worse. Although everything went well, by the end of the day I was thoroughly exhausted, more mentally than physically. Four hours of kettlebells on two bananas isn't a good way to get rid of a cold! Still, I wouldn't have missed it for anything. I learnt a lot, and even managed to bent press an 88lb (40kg) kettlebell on my third attempt, having never touched one before. I owe that to big Dave Whitley, Senior RKC. Thanks Dave!

Back home the next day, I was feeling pretty worn out, and didn't start to feel much better until this morning (Saturday). I didn't do any training at all last week, just lots of rest and plenty of food during overeating. I think that when you first start the Warrior Diet you tend to blame it for every time you feel a little under the weather. Now, after 10 weeks, I find that I'm not really thinking about it at all. I always used to eat a lot more than usual when I caught a cold, and have to say that I did feel hungry a lot of the time last week, but I stuck to undereating as usual throughout the week. The one exception was yesterday. As I haven't been training or having any protein during the day for a whole week, I thought it might be a good idea to try and eat something around lunch time, just to increase my caloric intake. I ended up having a sandwich and a big glass of milk. Whatever the reason, I feel much better today and am back on regular undereating.

Again, as my caloric intake was lower than usual last week, I expected this morning's bodyweight measurement to be lower than last week. I was pleasantly surprised to find it had actually increased by almost 1kg! On top of that, my bodyfat reading was slightly lower than last week. I always weigh myself on Saturday morning, after first going to the toilet and then drinking a glass of water. Today was no different, so it looks like my body responded well to the enforced rest .

[racer]

Please keep up the log.  It is educational and motivating for us newbies!

[Renegade]

Week 11

I still can't shake this cold! After a couple of days feeling slightly better last weekend, it then came back even worse than before. This is probably because after taking a week off I was too eager to get training again. On the days when I felt okay and should have still been resting, I was busy testing myself with kettlebell snatches . Oh well, I've learnt my lesson! Hopefully it won't last too much longer.

Following the Warrior Diet, I never normally have anything more than a piece of fruit to eat in the morning. However, one day last week I made the mistake of finishing my daughter's uneaten breakfast. "Just one slice of toast, what harm can it do?" I thought to myself. Quite a lot of harm, it seems! After eating the toast, I was then struck with an insatiable hunger for the rest of the day. I won't go into details about what I ended up eating, just to say that it definately wasn't WD approved . I've made this mistake a couple of times since starting WD, and it really does seem that simple carbs during undereating spells disaster for the rest of the day. Again, another lesson learnt, and back to apples and oranges from now on .

This one day binge is probably also responsible for what came next. After my surprise bodyweight reading at the end of Week 10, I decided to check my weight on a few different days during the week, just to see how it fluctuated. The results were not what I was expecting, and my weight went up and down between 69.4kg and 72.4kg, all within the space of a week! That's a difference of 3kg, or 6.6lbs. Keep in mind that these measurements were all taken at the same time of day and under the same conditions. I'll check again this week to see whether or not the same happens with constant undereating and overeating.

I think that's about it, apart from a little nail bending and buying a copy of "Dinosaur Training" by Brooks Kubik.