I am going to go a different direction today with the blog. I've been getting asked about my diet and workout routine over the past few months so I'll write about that instead.
But I will start off by saying Day 15 started off with going to the kitchen first thing in the morning, set up my Cosori and Chemex to make coffee out of Caveman Coffee grinds, working out later in the day, then ending the day watching "Dolimite Is My Name" for a Movie Monday homework my DEUCE Gym group was assigned to.
The Workout Of the Day was...
Progressive Volume Work:
Complete 6 rounds for quality:
12 Hollow Rocks
15 Push Ups
20 Squats
Progressive Tempo Run
Run 12 Minutes Out
Return with a Negative Split (<12 Minutes)
Moving onto with part 1 of 2 of the different direction blog that is going to be about my diet and nutrition.
Let's take it back to when I was in high school.
During my high school days, I weight about 160 pounds, soaked and wet, at the end on my senior year. After band or drumline rehearsal (yes, I was in the marching band, drumline and orchestra), baseball practice and/or games, I would go to the McDonald's next to my high school on my drive back to my house. I would usually just get something from the Dollar Menu, either a McChicken or a McDouble, maybe both if I was really hungry. Then when I got home, I would eat the dinner my mom had made before she left for work. I would eat whatever and whenever I wanted up until high school and I wouldn't gain much weight. Granted, I was always active with playing sports, riding my bike or skateboard (do kids even do that nowadays?) or making up activities with my friends.
After graduating high school, I would still eat whatever I wanted and not gain a pound, still fluctuating from 160 to 165 pounds. But this would be a turning point in my life.
I tried out for the local Community College baseball team, El Camino College, during the fall of 2008. I made it all the way until the last cuts, and the coach said I wouldn't be on the team for the season. However, his coach from his playing days at BYU was coaching in Barstow Community College in Barstow, California and was looking for players. Of course, I said yes, still then trying to chase what was once a dream.
Before I moved out to Barstow in the winter, I would hang out with a bunch of friends at one of their houses. Still I would eat anything I wanted and not gain weight. Around this time, I started to go to the gym religiously, where I got a membership at the local 24 Hour Fitness during my senior year of high school.
I started carefully started to watch what I ate being influenced by my friend, Lance, who tried out at El Camino College with me, and he was short, maybe about 5'9" or 5'10", but he was body was built like a bodybuilder. I went over to his house a couple of times and he was eating a lot of protein from what I remember. I thought man, I need to step it up a little.
While hanging out at my friends house before moving to Barstow, I was talking to one of the dads and told him I wasn't going to go to McDonald's with the others because I was watching what I was eating. I remember this conversation clearly because he told me, "Eat whatever you want. You're an active and growing kid. Go get a Big Mac. You'll be fine."
I didn't follow what he said that night but it made me think, and as days went by and instead of making food when I was hungry at home, I would go out and buy fast food.
When I moved out to Barstow in the January of 2009, I was doing great with my nutrition. This is the first time living out on my own and started to cook meals regularly for myself. Of course, during the baseball season, we would stop by some fast food places like Taco Bell and grab dinner from there from our road trip back from games. Some days, I would pack a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner.
If I remember the timeline correctly, the last game I started my freshmen season of college in 2009 was March 5th at Pasadena Community College. The starting job I worked so hard for was lost due to a nagging shoulder injury I was dealing with that started in the month of February and it got worse as the season went on (I had also rolled my ankle the first week of practice stepping in a hole on the baseball field round first base that sidelined me for two weeks). I had to give the bad news to my coach because it got to a point where I couldn't lift my right arm to throw a baseball. The last game I played more than one inning (again, if I remembered my timeline correctly), was March 14th. I was catching bullpens because we didnt have a true back up catcher, and our started catcher had injured himself so my coach called me in. I didn't feel my right arm after that game.
I didn't play the 2nd half of the season and I was pretty depressed having moved 2 hours away from home in a town that is known for building the first ever Del Taco, which I would have as a meal 3 or 4 days out of the week, along with the Five Dollar Pizza from Little Caesars as my to go meals.
About 7 minutes from my apartment I was living in on Yucca Avenue, right behind the Del Taco, there is the Barstow Outlets, where there is every fast food store you can think of. In-N-Out, Tommy's Burger, Carl's Jr., Chipotle. You name it. I would make my way and order food there if I wasn't feeling Del Taco or Little Caesar.
After the season came to an end, I made a decision to not come back to Barstow for my sophomore year and to try out again at El Camino College. The only physical activity I have been doing was physical therapy at the college before moving out. One day, I weight myself because I felt sluggish than before. I had gained 20 pounds in about 4 months.
I started to workout by doing crunches for the last two weeks thinking it would be the fast result to losing weight. Then reality hit as I was 180 pounds when I came back home to Torrance, California.
Fast forward to 2011, I met Logan Gelbrich (as I mentioned din my other blogs), the older brother of my best friend, Taylor, and I started to take a fitness class that he called Functional Fitness On The Bluff, which was based off CrossFit workouts. Logan was someone I could relate to because he had a background in baseball as he was a former college baseball athlete at the University of San Diego and former MLB Draft Pick by the San Diego Padres (if you see him in person, one of kindest human beings but a specimen when it comes to training). This would be a 2nd turning point in my life.
Logan was training at CrossFit Los Angeles at the time and was competing in the CrossFit Games with the CFLA Team. He would talk to me about training and nutrition how they balance each other out, that you have to eat the right foods in order to be in the best shape as possible, which I started to slowly do with the financial situation I was in as a college student. One constant that stuck with me ever since I started attending class at FFOTB was drinking my coffee black, which Logan said he did. I think he told me, "The weak drink coffee with cream and sugar. Winner's drink their coffee black."
During my high school and college years, I worked at Curry House in Gardena, California, a Japanese curry and spaghetti restaurant. I would get a meal for as cheap as $1 per shift, which helped me save a lot of money on food and making meals on my own then. Like 99.9% of restaurants, Curry House had a soda machine. I would drink Coke or Sprite often for the 6 years I worked there from September 2005 to August 2011. However, for a period of a year at some point, I did stop drinking soda and saw a change in my body from not intaking all the sugar and didn't feel sluggish throughout the day.
In 2013, during my senior season at Mount Mercy University where I received an athletic scholarship to play baseball after making the El Camino College team on my second go-around (with one redshirt season) and had transferred to the school in Iowa in 2011. I was introduced to the Whole Life Challenge, a then 8-week challenge to help improve your health, happiness and overall connectedness but now a 6-week challenge today.
I signed up for the Whole Life Challenge in the spring of 2013, which was during the middle of my baseball season. The Whole Life Challenge provides tiers to the nutrition portion of the challenge, but in short, if you want to participate in the highest level of the challenge, you basically consume what hunter and gathers used to eat. I did the challenge for about 4 to 5 weeks and I was going strong. I must have lost about 15 pounds and felt my body transforming.
Then one weekend, during a road trip back from a doubleheader we played, as most collegiate baseball team with low budget does, stopped by Taco Bell for dinner. I was good about packing up snacks and food for road trips during this challenge, but I had forgotten to pack one this time around. After a game, I wasn't not going to eat since I just put my body to work for about 6 to 7 hours on the baseball field. So I caved in and had Taco Bell that day and stopped doing my Whole Life Challenge. I did however, sporadically throughout the years, based my nutrition off the Performance Food List they provided if I really want to get dialed in with my nutrition.
After graduating from Mount Mercy University, my nutrition came in waves. There would be a period where I would eat nothing but what we call in society "healthy" foods, but also there would be a period where I ate a lot of fast food and instant foods.
In 2015, while I had a membership to DEUCE Gym, I also had a gym membership at Hardbody Fitness in Gardena where I paid $100 dollars for a year. It was a boxing gym but had every equipment you could think of for lifting weights and had an underground feel to it, which I was a big fan of. One of my childhood friends, Brian, signed up for the gym around the time I did. He wanted to get in better shape so he asked if he could workout with me. I usually hate working out with someone else, because you get distracted in a conversation most times and you don't maximize the workout like you want to. But Brian has been my friend since we played Little League together and I wanted to help him out, though I am not in any shape or form of a nutrition or fitness coach.
I asked about what his goal was and programmed a workout that somewhat catered to him. But I also asked him about his nutrition. During this time for about a year, I decided to not include rice, bread or beans in my diet and growing up in an Asian household, telling my mom that I wasn't going to eat rice seemed like an insult. Nonetheless, I lost about 10-12 pounds and felt great.
Brian also bought in to not eating rice, bread and beans and lost about 15 pounds, which he was really proud of. And also, we were training for 5 months to get ready for the DEUCE Memorial Day workout, Murph.
Now fast forward to July 2016, I had gotten a new position at Fox Sports as a remote broadcast associate where I would be traveling for work to work live events and still have the same job until this day. 3rd turning point in my life. During my first assignment as a remote broadcast associate, I worked on a college football crew that consist of Joe Davis, Brady Quinn and Jenny Taft as our announcers. On most weekends, we would go to a steakhouse or Italian restaurant. 15 weeks later of working 7 days a week and not working out, I gained 15 pounds. I remember like it was yesterday, where after the season I was at my mom's house, getting ready to go into the pool. As I was about to walk out the door, she commented, "Jun, you gained weight, didn't you? I can't really see your neck."
During November of 2019, I decided to take my nutrition a little more serious. In 2017, I was asked to work on a NFL Crew and the Golf Crew still as a remote broadcast associate which, involved a lot more traveling. I needed to make a lifestyle change, and especially after my mom's comments.
I was looking at ways to take it to the next level. During this time, the NBA season was going on and I was scrolling through my Instagram feed and came across a picture of Dwight Howard, once known in the NBA world as "Superman". I was fascinated by his transformation of his body.
Howard, a specimen of a human being, was consuming two dozen chocolate bar's worth of sugar, per day! For about a decade! Of course, his profession is playing basketball at the highest level so could burn everything off during his training and during games.
But before this upcoming 2019-20 season, he changed his habits of eating and did a 30-day fast, eating one meal a day while following a strict running program.
In an article from Men's Health Magazine, he said, "It was really good, it was something that really tested my mind and body...Fasting is not east and when you only have one meal a day - especially how I was training - it's like 'Man, what am I doing?.. But it really helped me get over a lot of mental barriers that were in the way of me getting to where I need to get to as a person."
When I read the article, I, myself, was going through a rough patch in life and with working non-stop 7 days straight for 17 weeks, I needed something to keep my mind off of those things. So I decided to do the 30-day fast as best as I can and also committed working out everyday on Monday through Thursdays when I was at home in Los Angeles (I would be traveling and working in another city on Friday through Sunday).
I was looking at ways to take it to the next level. During this time, the NBA season was going on and I was scrolling through my Instagram feed and came across a picture of Dwight Howard, once known in the NBA world as "Superman". I was fascinated by his transformation of his body.
Howard, a specimen of a human being, was consuming two dozen chocolate bar's worth of sugar, per day! For about a decade! Of course, his profession is playing basketball at the highest level so could burn everything off during his training and during games.
But before this upcoming 2019-20 season, he changed his habits of eating and did a 30-day fast, eating one meal a day while following a strict running program.
In an article from Men's Health Magazine, he said, "It was really good, it was something that really tested my mind and body...Fasting is not east and when you only have one meal a day - especially how I was training - it's like 'Man, what am I doing?.. But it really helped me get over a lot of mental barriers that were in the way of me getting to where I need to get to as a person."
When I read the article, I, myself, was going through a rough patch in life and with working non-stop 7 days straight for 17 weeks, I needed something to keep my mind off of those things. So I decided to do the 30-day fast as best as I can and also committed working out everyday on Monday through Thursdays when I was at home in Los Angeles (I would be traveling and working in another city on Friday through Sunday).
- For my one meal on Monday through Thursdays would be either a mixture of ground turkey or chicken and broccoli florets or green beans after I worked out. I didn't count calories or macro nutrients for those meals. I just put an amount in a bowl of how much I think my body needed. For the rest of the day, I would drink coffee and water.
- On Fridays, I wouldn't eat until dinner as I would be on a plane traveling all day. Most of the time, I would eat at a restaurant with my co-workers and I would try order some sort of protein entree and a plate of vegetables.
- Saturday was a tricky day as one of my co-workers loves all sort of food as I do and we would get something usually quick for lunch. I would also eat dinner on this day as we had a meeting every Saturday night. I would order a soup and/or salad, depending on how I felt. I treated this day as somewhat of a "cheat day"
- Sunday is NFL game day. I would wake up around 6:00 am, depending on what city I was in, and wouldn't eat until I got back home to Los Angeles. All I would have is couple of cups of coffee and a lot of water, if I remember to drink it. So for an NFL game on the east coast, I would wake up at 7:00 am ET for a 1:00 pm game. The game would end around 4:30 pm, go straight to the airport and land in Los Angeles around midnight, which would be 3:00 am in the east coast. So if you think about it, I didn't consume food for 21 hours. That's how my Sundays usually went even before I did the fast.
After the 30-day fast, I stuck with the plan on most days and ate one meal a day. By the beginning of February I had lost about 15 pounds, from 184 lbs to 169 lbs.
One of my friends, a coach at one of the DEUCE Gym locations, told me I look skinny and sick. I did lose mass on my body but this is the best, not just physically but mentally as well, I ever felt in my life. I didn't know if this 30-day fast was going to work for me, but it did. When people asked me how I got so lean, I tell them about the fast I did. But I always tell them, "It's whatever works for you." Everyone's body is different.
What I learned over the years is how the food you eat affects not just your body, but your mind as well. When you eat more natural foods or food YOU cook, I feel you become mentally stronger versus ordering from (fast food) restaurants.
Yes, it's hard to get and stay committed to a strict nutrition plan. If you really want it, you'll sacrifice some things to make it happen, just like you would in a relationship.
I hope I didn't bore anyone, or for the maybe 2 or 3 people that have been reading my quarantine blogging. I see 9 views total so far so thanks for tuning in!
Jun
