Spread the love

Reshaping requires Rethinking

Wow! Yesterday was an excellent start to my reshaping journey using the Herbalife nutrition products. If you have read yesterday’s post, you would know that I was 17.5kg’s over budget! And yes, I decided to go “debt free”.

To reshape your body, you have to reshape your mind first. Why is this? Well, your mind, conscious and subconscious, produces your thoughts. Your thoughts creates your habits and your habits creates your life. So, if you find yourself a few kilograms in debt like I do, then it simply means that your (bad) habits led you there, like it did with me. Step one for me is to replace my bad eating and drinking habits with good habits. My nutritional habits should feed my body all the nutrients it needs on a daily basis and in perfect balance. It should serve my body, not harm it.

So, without further ado, here are my Day 1 results according to my Tanita Body Scanner, who claims to be entirely objective (and brutally honest):

Weight 102.1 kg (down 400g)
Body fat percentage 31.5% (down 1.1%)
Body fat mass 32.1 kg (down 1.4kg!)
Visceral fat 16 (same as yesterday)
Body water percentage 48% (up by 0.5%)
Muscle mass 66.4kg (up by 800g)
Metabolic age 68 (still the same)

[Compulsory legal disclaimer: My above results are not typical. Individual results will vary.]

Okay, so let’s talk about yesterday. What went well, what did I struggle with and what must improve?

The standout from yesterday for me is that I managed quite easily to stick to my Herbalife nutrition program without feeling peckish or the need to snack on anything. In retrospect, I believe that one of the main reasons for this was that I focused super hard to make sure that I get all my required daily protein intake in my diet for the day.

Now, as you may know, our protein needs differ from person to person. As a general guide you can do the following to work yours out:

If you live a sedentary lifestyle, take your body weight in kilograms. That will be your body’s protein needs for the day. So, if you weight 77kg, you need to consume about 77 grams of complete proteins per day.

(A moderately active person should multiply their weight in kilograms by 1.5 and a professional athlete, gym junky kind of lifestyle person, should multiply by 2.)

Let’s just focus here. In the above example you need to eat 77 grams of complete proteins, AND those proteins must all be digested, absorbed into the bloodstream and assimilated into the body cells, without losing any along the way. Houston, we have a problem. How do we do this???

Well, for starters you need to consume what is called complete proteins. This means it contains all the amino acids that your body cells need to function properly and at an optimum level. Rice, for example, is not a complete protein. Quinoa is also not a complete protein. However, if the nutritional scientists combine these two proteins like the Herbalife nutritional scientists do with the Formula 1 Select Nutritional Shake mix (vegan) shake, it turns into a complete protein.

All Herbalife’s shakes, the normal Formula 1 Nutritional Shake Mix, the Herbalife24 Formula 1 Sport and the Formula 1 Select Nutritional Shake mix, contains complete proteins. One serve 28g of Herbalife shake, delivers 9 grams of protein and because it has a protein score of 1 (or above) all of the protein gets delivered to your body cells.

Here is what wikipedia says about protein scores:

Protein digestibility-corrected amino acid score (PDCAAS) is a method of evaluating the quality of a protein based on both the amino acid requirements of humans and their ability to digest it.

The PDCAAS rating was adopted by the US FDA and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations/World Health Organization (FAO/WHO) in 1993 as “the preferred ‘best'” method to determine protein quality

Okay, back to yesterday. I realized that one normal Herbalife shake, prepared with 320ml of skim milk as per the label recommendation, delivers about 19 grams of protein to my cells: 9g from the shake powder and about 10g from the 320ml skim milk, which by the way also have a protein score of 1. So I realized, if I wanted to hit my protein intake target of 150 grams for the day, I need to load my shakes up with more protein. So I added 4 serves of Personalised Protein Powder to each shake. Each serve is 6 grams (one desert spoon) and it delivers 5 grams in protein! So with this product, I was able to add 20 grams of protein to my shakes, knocking it up to 39 grams of protein per shake. I drank two of those (one for breakfast and one after my workout and then I made a third shake in the afternoon, but instead of the skim milk, I used water. Yes, this did cut 10 grams of protein, but it also cut about 117 calories from my daily intake.

The family dinner supplied the rest of the protein I needed for the day. Mince with lentils and a lovely satisfying salad.

Maybe this is a good time to look at some of the nutritional qualities of protein:

Protein can improve your appetite by reducing the levels of your “hunger” hormone ghrelin and increasing the levels of your “satiety” hormone leptin.
Protein helps you to feel fuller with less food and stay satisfied for longer while also reducing cravings and late-night snacking.
Protein can boost your metabolism, increasing the number of calories that you burn each day and helping with weight loss or healthy weight maintenance.
Protein not only helps you lose weight in the first place, but more importantly, it helps you keep it off in the long-term.
Protein forms the building blocks of muscle, helping you to build muscle and strength. It also helps to prevent muscle loss while dieting or as you get older.
Protein can improve your bone health by helping to reduce the risk for osteoporosis and fractures. It’s been shown that people who eat more protein tend to have better bone health as they age and can stay fitter for longer.
Protein has been shown to lower blood pressure and possibly reduce other risk factors for heart disease.
Protein helps the body repair tissues and organs, speeding up recovery after a workout, illness or injury.

No wonder that protein plays such a pivotal role in healthy weight loss and healthy weight management.

Right, so what did I do wrong yesterday, and what needs to improve?

Three things jumps out at me. Photos, Measurements and Water.

Firstly, I took my before pictures incorrectly. Apparently I should not have worn black or navy clothing as that tends to hide your current body shape. So, this morning I wore the lightest color clothing I could find that still sort of fits me, and commandeered my son to re-shoot my pics. Here they are:

Okay, so the lighting was not the best. Natural lighting would obviously work better. But, I think you can see where the major problem lies…my belly and my torso! Not to mention the tube around my waist!

So, I forgot to take my measurements yesterday. Apparently three measurements are key: chest, waist and hips…and if you have my current body shape…”the roll”! So here are my measurements as taken this morning, 24 January 2023:

chest (over the nipples) 117 cm
waist (over the navel) 116 cm
hips (20cm down from my navel, legs together) 114 cm
the roll (5cm below my navel) 116 cm

What struck me was the fact that these numbers are pretty close together. I think we can safely say that I’m currently “a block of a man”. 🙂

The third thing that stood out from yesterday, is that I neglected to drink enough water. I was so focused on my protein intake that I forgot to drink the amount of water that my current body requires.

So, how much water should we drink? The rough guideline is about 1 liter of water for every 30 kilograms you weigh. So, for someone like me, still well over 100kg, that means about 4 to 4.5 liters of water per day. It sounds a lot, so I broke it down. One glass of water is 250ml. Since I wake up until I go to bed, I need to drink about 18 glasses of water. I’m already behind schedule, hang on while I get a glass….aah, that’s better. I find it easier to consume water by the glass, as I can gulp it down, rather than sipping it out of a bottle.

Here is a water chart that I found to be very helpful:

Okay, so now there remains 59 more days in my challenge. I’m pretty sure that every day’s results will not paint the rosy picture that I want. Surely the “dark days” are still lying in wait for me. I will face those days with your support (encouragement) and my belief. Failure is not an option. Until then, ponder this:

Some people take better care of their pets than they do themselves. Their animals can run like the wind and they can barely make it up a flight of stairs.
Jim Rohn

~ Will Kilian

Tags: complete protein, herbalife shake, lose weight with complete protein, lose weight with herbalife, reshape with complete protein, reshape with herbalife, Weight Loss