Our Healthy Transformation (Part 1 of a series) - She blinded me with(junk) science...

My fiancee and I have been on a truly remarkable journey these past six months. The results are - frankly - so astounding to me that I want to stop strangers on the street and share the revelation. Somehow, I think that sort of 'evangelical' approach might backfire. But our health is so vital that I just can't in good conscience keep it inside. I will post this series in my social forums. I hope you find it interesting and - most of all - helpful in your own goals.

To say that I was following the conventional wisdom would be an understatement. After 20 years in the military, filled with annual PT tests, weigh-ins, and all the plain vanilla guidance you could imagine, I was AWASH with it. Watch your calories, watch your fats, perform at least 20 minutes of cardio at least three times a week, and eat lots of grains. Oh - and the big one - lower your standards as you age. I was never overweight - the military saw to that - but I never had the healthy body that might be associated with a career military guy. More importantly, as a supervisor, I had a duty to keep my supervisees within standards as well. I dutifully recited the same guidance I had been given. And I lost good troops to the scale.

My fiancee and I left service about the same time. Like many veterans, we enjoyed the freedom from weigh-ins and PT tests and we languished happily for about a year. She was the first one to kick us off the couch and back into the gym.

We started off applying the same formulae that we had been initiated with for two decades. A nice, moderate, well-rounded set of exercises that, of course, included the obligatory 20-30 minutes on the treadmill. We settled in for the long haul of gradual and marginal weight loss.

Then came the first in a string of transformative moments. You see, my fiancee HATES running. With a burning passion. Nothing could be more boring or pointless to her. So, she hit the internet to see what else might be out there. She came across a white paper that she shared with me about High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). The article showed two pictures side by side: a long distance runner and a sprinter. The author asked the obvious question: which would YOU rather look like? The emaciated marathoner or the buff, powerful sprinter? Umm - duh!

The article also revealed a very powerful point about the different mindset between the ubiquitous steady-state cardio world and the sprinting world. "It's not okay to SUCK at sprinting!" Fun-runners, and the avid cardio crowd tend to promulgate a "you're okay, I'm okay" mentality, both in terms of social culture and in individual effort. Just look around you at your fellow treadmillers - how many of them look measurably better than they did six months ago? How many of them would you hold up as your personal standard of peak fitness? Isn't that we really all want?

Think about this: how many people do you actually know that have had a total body transformation following Weight Watchers or similar? Calorie counting? A particular workout routine you've seen pitched as the "next great thing"? The diet/fitness industry is replete with self-sustaining, profit-continuing failure. Yet we are surrounded by examples of athletes who constantly work to improve their bodies, following workout and nutritional plans. If you're looking for the best, why not start with those who have demonstrated world-class success?

Well, we are both hopelessly results-oriented. We couldn't help but be compelled to change our thinking and behavior. We started doing HIIT workouts on cardio days and LOVED it. But, more importantly, we started looking more at athletic science (coaches and trainers of world-class athletes) rather than the conventional diet/exercise/fitness scene. After all, if you want results, shouldn't you pattern yourself after the very best example of your personal goal?

From that moment, it was like waking up from a bad dream. It led us to start thinking critically and finding our own answers to our questions about fitness, nutrition, and health. In the last six months, we have gotten smart read voraciously, made a lot of incremental changes, and now are in the best shape of our lives. To be specific, we've both cut our body fat percentage in half, gained lean muscle, look better, sleep better, and LOVE eating.

In the next installment, I'll talk about the next step in the thread: approaching our nutrition.