Tuesday July 26th 2011 – Brother Gym lands in Dubai! Cue excitement, sunnies, factor 2000 and a sweatband.
Having grown tired of Britain’s rather lackluster attempt at a Summer Season, yet again, I decided to hop aboard my own private jet – which looked oddly like a KLM Airbus – and take a jaunt over to Dubai. I wonder how all those other people got on my aircraft? Hmmm, baffling.
It had been a strange month already, with my beautiful fashionista sister (check out her fabulous fashion blog here) getting married in typically understated style in Marrakech. Ahem. Actually, scratch that – understated it was not. Having three wedding ceremonies in a week, two of which are in a foreign country, is not quite normal. But fabulous it was. In preparation I had spent 3 months getting into tip-top shape.
Or so I thought. It turns out that looking like a mini-hulk as opposed to a lithe Clark Kent is not exactly the ‘in thing’ at the moment. Plus, it meant I needed assistance to get my Indian ceremonial garb over my head… and a lot of acrobatic maneuvering to get it back off again too! Cool…
Things took a turn for the good though; in wonderfully unpredictable fashion. Basking in the adoration of after-speech glory (raised my own eyebrow at that too), I was rather stunned to see myself being approached by the most beautiful lady at the party. It turns out she was after my father, but noticing the busy night he was having – you know, at his daughter’s wedding – I took the dutiful step of intercepting this lovely ladies’ path. Two hours of excited conversation later, and the rest, as they say, is history.
It turns out, though, that Lady X is not a fan of the muscle-on-top-of-muscle look. So I’ve taken the rather drastic step of leaning back down to my natural size and shape. This is not as easy as it sounds…. If you go from pounding the iron like a beast to laying back and waiting for the muscle to disappear you are likely to end up looking more like the Michelin man than you did before. And so after racking my brain a little I decided to do two things….
1. Lower the weight, up the reps… and start using my whole body to perform ‘functional’ movement patterns. That’s rather a misnomer… after all you don’t exactly see many people performing multi-planar lunges and plyometric jumping kettle bell movements in the middle of the mall. But there you go, I now look like a monkey on acid in the gym rather than a gorilla on ‘roids. (For the record, I’ve never been anything but natural). ‘Check your ego at the door, right…’.
2. And I’ve gone Roman too… having heard the buzz about the Warrior Diet for some time, I decided, against all my professional instincts, to give it a go. And boy does it do something… I lost 12lbs in 2 weeks and looked leaner than ever. It just shouldn’t work. This ‘diet’ goes rather against the scientific eating approach that I have been so used to.
The Warrior Diet 101.
The warrior diet follows an under eat/overeat process. This means grazing on small portions of fruit, nuts, perhaps a boiled egg or some tuna during the day. This supposedly allows the body time to stabilize hormone levels and ‘detox’. I wouldn’t exactly buy into that… but that’s the ‘scientific’ advice given. At around 7 in the evening, though, it becomes a foodies dream. One is supposed to prepare a feast - raw salad first, steamed veggies second, protein third and some carbs if you are not yet quite keeling over. Just to give you an idea, my protein element has been as large as a full chicken and a half… or around 30 oz of steak. And that large salmon sitting in front of me… that’s just for afters.
I must say, you do feel fantastic at this point. Your body feels like it’s guzzling down on this fuel like a supercar being driven by, well, let’s say Jeremy Clarkson, ie pedal to the metal, screeching, drifting…the Daily Mail sentiments are optional however.
Success so far, and after a week back on my standard diet, I am going to launch into another warrior week… I’ll keep you updated. I would suggest you go ahead and check out the Warrior Diet site to learn loads more about how you can make a quick and drastic change.
My next post will be on how to optimize your workouts in a gym so under-equipped it looks like the fitness section of the Argos catalogue…
