19 - Body for Life review & cleaning up Windows
Body for Life
I read this book after hearing Jerry Seinfeld praise it. Bill lays out a program for better fitness and it’s split into three components described below.
Mindset
Bill spends a chapter about goal setting and future visioning. He recommends writing out 5 goals you want to accomplish in the next 12 weeks and reviewing them twice daily in the morning and night. This reminded me of Kim Perell’s advice in her book JUMP about writing her goals on a sticky note and putting it on her bathroom mirror to see each day. It reminded me too of The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran.
Bill describes how there’s a difference between perceived and actual limitations and how perceived limits are usually well short of what we could achieve.
A third point Bill makes is that we should always aim for progress and not perfection. Our goal should be to move forward and not worry about if we’re doing everything perfectly.
Nutrition
Bill recommends a lower-fat, higher-protein diet and wants you to eat SIX small meals a day. In each of those meals you’re supposed to eat one portion of protein with a portion of healthy carbs. At least two of those meals, you should eat a portion of vegetables.
A portion is about the size of our palm for protein, the size of your fist for carbs, and a loose handful for a portion of vegetables. The link below is a list of approved and unapproved foods described by Bill.
https://static.abbottnutrition.com/cms-prod/us.bodyforlife.com/img/BFL-APPROVED-FOODS-LIST.pdf
You’re allowed one “Free” day a week to eat whatever foods you want. Keep in mind, it means whatever you want, not everything you want. I could see binge eating becoming a risk.
Bill recommends you plan out your next day's meals too, so you know exactly what and when you eat things. You can print out the forms here: http://www.naturesnuggets.net/bfl_charts.pdf
Training
Bill recommends working out SIX times a week alternating day between weightlifting and intense cardio. The weightlifting days alternate between upper body exercises and a day for lower body exercising.
On the cardio days he recommends an intense high interval training of 20 minutes where you ramp up every minute and go through a cycle of different intensities four times before you end in an all-out sprint.
To do the exercises described in the book you will have to join a gym to have access to the equipment. A lot of the recommended exercises are dumbbells and there are a handful of machine workouts too. There’s a long appendix in the book where Bill walks you through how to do the thirty-six different recommended exercises.
Like the eating log, Bill recommends you plan out the next day’s workout plan each evening using a form. You can print out the forms here: http://www.naturesnuggets.net/bfl_charts.pdf
While the book was inspiring and the before/after shots of successful participants are amazing (Google “body for life before and after pics”), I found my experience with this program was difficult. After a couple of weeks of daily exercise, I just lost gas. I even purchased a copy of Bill’s Success Journal to see if it’d help me get on track.
Bill recommends you do your training first thing in the morning before eating anything for the most effective fat burn. I am NOT a morning person and it’s hard enough for me to wake up to get coffee and do chores. You then must wait another HOUR after the workout before you can eat. Fitting all these criteria with my schedule was challenging and I sometimes didn’t start eating until late in the day.
I did make some diet tweaks to get closer to his approved list shared above, but I couldn’t get myself to eat six meals a day. I’m just too busy or distracted to stop and eat something every few hours. In our home we don’t do any meal planning at all. It’s improvised day-by-day so I can’t predict exactly what I’m going to eat the next day and exactly at X time. This plan feels too inflexible.
Another concern is how much this diet plan could potentially rely on whey protein shakes and dairy products. I’m not sure if my body responds well to a diet bulked with dairy products. While it’s tasty and convenient, I have concerns it could be inflammatory.
My last concern on this is sustainability. How many of these participants stayed with the program after 1 year let alone 5 years? What was the long-term success rate on it? There are many people who can get fit for a year and then slide back over time. Life happens.
It felt like a full-time job on top of my already full-time job making everything work. The general principles are sound, but I need a baby-step version of this program and preferably something I could do at home with kettlebells or with minimal equipment.
This Amazon review describes several of the concerns I shared here. Below is an excerpt.
My problem was that I just couldn't stick to it. I did Body for Life for probably 4-5 months, looked great, but I was always hungry, was tired of working out 6 days a week, and was tired of having to plan out my meals far in advance. Plus, the "free day" where you don't have to exercise and can eat whatever you want...turned into a complete free for all. I looked forward to it so much, that was all I could think about, and I'd consume about 3,000 calories on my free day! In the end, the program was just too much for me to keep up. So now I walk uphill on a treadmill 4 times and do some quick weight training for my arms 3 times a week. Do I look nearly as good? Nope, I don't. But it's what I've found I can do, and still keep my sanity at the same time.
Cleaning up Windows and making it better
After several years of using my Windows 10 desktop, a LOT of junk piled up in various places. The Windows clean manager doesn’t do a thorough job of handling it, so I found two alternative and FREE programs that helped clear out 50 GB of junk.
BleachBit
This small program will go through and shred all sorts of left over files and junk in many different programs. I’m not doing a step-by-step guide here but one suggestion I have is to turn on the community cleaners in the preferences because it will cover a lot more things and clear more out/
BCUninstaller
I use this to remove programs that are no longer needed and remove the leftover files associated with them. It can remove multiple programs sequentially which makes a large cleanup easier. Again, I’m not going to do a step-by-step guide (unless someone asks) but one tweak I found helpful was adding my AppData folders in the settings, so it’d remove those leftover folders too.
Turning off web search
One feature of Windows that annoyed me was how it tried to web search for things when I’m just looking for a file or folder 99.9% of the time.
Fortunately, there’s a way to turn it off by adding a registry key. I followed the instructions here https://www.bennetrichter.de/en/tutorials/windows-10-disable-web-search/ under the “For Windows 10 version 2004 or later:” section. In less than two minutes I had a more functional search on my desktop.