Telling the Truth About My Weight & Showing Evidence of Progress - My Ultimate Black Belt Test Journal

My weight. It's been on my mind as long as I can remember.

First of all, I'm going to say this: I am very healthy. Physically. This is not about the physical. This is not about my physical health. This is about what I see when I look in the mirror. This is about how I think I appear to others. That struggle is so old and familiar to me that it's often hard to recognize which makes it difficult to change.

I identify with overweight and out of place. Even now. I'm not overweight or out of place. I maintain a healthy weight and have certainly found my place. Even though I've lost (more than once) a bunch of pounds and transformed my body from weak to strong...I still struggle. I've realized that I keep myself here because of fear. I'm afraid of not knowing who I am if I let that part of me go. It is what I know.

"You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down."  -Toni Morrison

I've resisted this part of the Ultimate Black Belt Test for the past two years and it's time I let go. I posted about my weight before, but I waited until I was happy. Until I felt ready. I didn't include any photos or what I was eating or how I was exercising, really all I was doing was talking the talk. No evidence. Since then I've gotten clear on what I want from this test: discipline and telling the truth.

So here's the first of my REAL progress posts.
In these photos (that I took today) I weigh 162.2 with 18.6% body fat.

Not bad...but it's not my ULTIMATE either.
It's like this is my off season condition, and game day is coming. So I'm going to get ready...and I'm going to keep you posted on how it's going and exactly how I'm doing it.



What I'm eating: mostly Vegetarian. Not strict. I just like vegetables more and I like meat less. No added sugars. I started this again a few months ago and I really like it. It helps me stick to eating simple, minimally processed food.

Short term food goal: meal prepping

Today's workout: I used my TRX to do 30 (10-10-10) rows and ass to grass squats then ran up and down my street. I'm not sure how far it is, but I ended up with around 13,500 steps for the day. The main idea was to get my heart rate up and move me towards my goal of at minimum 10K steps daily. I did that twice. I also did 50 push ups and a 200 rep ab workout.

Short term workout goal: be consistent