My name is Ruben and I am a triathlete that is always looking for ways to improve my life, health, and mental states so that I am better today than I was yesterday. I’ve started this site in hopes to encourage my family and friends to start eating healthier and living a more productive life. In the process, I hope to inspire to the universe and debunk the belief that we have to be born in to health or left with the physique we’ve grown in to. I’m here to inspire everyone that we can achieve all of our desires whether it be physical, health, wealth, or stronger relationships. I’ve come to the realization over the past few years that my discipline toward health and fitness routines are that of the 10 percenters of the world whom strive to become better and better as individuals. This site was started to give inspiration to those who think that we must be born in to a healthy family in order to live a healthy lifestyle or born with genes that grant a fit muscular figure. I’m on a crusade to dispel all myths that we cannot do anything about our own states of health, mind, and physiques that we were born with or in to. All of our lives and the environment in which we live in are the result of our own decisions rather than someone else’s. We are the cause not the effect.
This is my family on my Mom’s side: This is my family on my Dad’s side:
This is Me before: And this is me today after taking my health seriously:
Growing up, our family never discussed healthy eating habits nor was there a focus on exercise. I love my family to death but I also realize some of the health decisions my family made for me growing up weren’t always the most informative decisions. I never grew up as an athlete nor did I aspire to be one. My aspirations growing up were skateboarding and computer hacking. I grew up playing baseball as a competitive hobby but never really took a big attraction to it due to gravitating more towards skateboarding and falling in love with the adrenaline of learning new skateboarding tricks or just jumping down a flight of stairs. I skateboarded from the age of 10 until sophomore year of high school when I started getting into organized sports such as basketball and football. A small appearance in wrestling but it was mainly just to workout with the team rather than actually participate in any wrestling matches. I mention this mainly because I used to think working out and caring about your health was mainly reserved for the meat heads, douche bag gym rats, and unintelligent jocks that I never wanted to be associated with. While skateboarding, we always criticized the “Jocks” so it was a little bit of a surprise to my skateboarding friends that I lost 16 pounds in 30 days using a few tricks mentioned here. This was the beginning of my health and fitness awakening.
I started getting noticed more by girls because of playing football which motivated me to start watching what I was eating and strive for a leaner and more muscular body. Sophomore year of highschool was the year I started lifting weights and eating a diet which consisted mostly of pastas and chicken. I had no idea of the nutrition factors involved but I figured more chicken and pasta were better than eating fattening foods my family would eat such as cheese enchiladas, beans, greasy tacos, or pizza. After graduating high school, I started my college career and took my workouts much more serious. I was running daily on a treadmill and lifting weights at the local gym. Although I would see some results, they were never too dramatic but I do know they would boost the confidence I had in myself and my appearance. During this time, I started flirting with supplements such as Cell Tech and Muscle Tech which took my workouts to a new level. I was growing muscle and my workouts were lasting longer than ever but I still wasn’t achieving the six pack level of fitness that I wanted.
Once I realized how hard I was working but not seeing the results I wanted then I started looking into my diet. I started reading up on high protein / low carb diets which made sense due to our bodies running on carbs but when it runs out of carbs to fuel itself then it starts looking to our fat tissues to start burning as energy. This made a big difference on my goals and I starting seeing a big difference from just eating grilled chicken and brown rice every day for lunch and dinner. I wasn’t too concerned with my breakfast at this point so I would just eat nutrigrain bars as a quick and easy breakfast. Eventually I hit a plateau so I started to take the low carb high protein diet to the next level by completely subtracting out the rice and substituting for green beans. Although this worked decently well, it made me very tired and quickly fatigued. It was also very inconsistent on results since it had me craving every and ANY kind of carbs I could get my hands on! On social nights out with friends my adult beverage of choice was Bacardi and Diet Coke with lime since I figured it had low carbs and little calories. This diet lasted for ~4 years.
I came to the point where I started to feel that it was just in my genes and I wasn’t meant to have a six pack or a lean body with a muscular physique. Although, before I gave up I was going to take my cardio fitness to levels to a point I’ve never took them which brought me to the point of training for my first triathlon. I would bike 15 miles in to work on a fixed gear road bike and bike 15 miles back home two days out of the week. The other two days out of the week I would swim after work. The swimming sessions were with the Silicon Valley Triathlon Club and would last for an hour each. On the days that I wouldn’t bike into work, I would run around the office for 3.5 miles. If there were one or two days that I didn’t do any cardio either before work or after work, then I would go to the gym for a 45 minute weight lifting session. I was thinking since I was taking my cardio fitness levels to levels I’ve never taken them then I would lose some weight and shed some fat so that I could achieve the six pack abs I’ve always wanted. After consistently being on this routine mixed with a low carb / high protein diet for over 6 months, I only saw a 3 pound weight loss that would always go up and down or reset after a weekend.
I started getting frustrated with the lack of dramatic results I was not seeing so I changed up my weightlifting workouts to be much more intense and not include as much cardio. Instead of cardio before and after work, I decided I would workout two body parts in an hour gym session before work and two more body parts for another hour after work. These body parts would be worked out non-stop between each work out routine / set with no rests so that it made for a high intensity workout which would get my heart working over time causing me to burn more fat at a higher rate. For example, if it were chest day then I would do 1 set of 10 reps on the bench press then immediately go over to the row machine and do 1 set of 10 reps there. I would repeat this cycle for 4 sets on each routine with a 2 minute water break before moving on to the next routine where I would repeat the cycle again. The modification in my workout really helped increase my heart rate which had me burning the fat off my body much faster. This worked great and had me losing 5 more pounds but would still have me bouncing up and down on weight never to keep it steady at the place I wanted to keep it. It was also very time consuming since it would take out 2 hours of my day 6 days a week adding up to 12 hours out of my week being spent in the gym. This proved to take a toll on my sleep time as I was only getting 4 hours of sleep each night at this point. This way of eating also had me eating small meals every 2 hours so that my metabolism would always be working around the clock which, in my mind, I would think would equal to higher fat burn. I firmly believe the reason why the most successful people are such a success in achieving their goals is because they use the 24 hours we are all given each day more efficiently than the unsuccessful. This was not using my 24 hours in the most efficient manner. Side note: check out my friend Thanh’s awesome blog about time efficiency over at Asian Efficiency.
Enter 2014 when I felt that I had pretty much tried it all. I’ve always heard about this Paleo Diet / Caveman lifestyle. What really intrigued me even further was when a friend of mine had left behind a successful company he had built to pursue a Paleo Diet focused website due to the benefits he had received discovering the Paleo lifestyle. He even converted one of my close friends to start following the lifestyle with my friend seeing some great results with it. With all of these factors in place and being motivated to take my health and fitness to the next level, I decided I was going to give this Paleo diet a try since my friend had been ranting and raving about it for years but I thought it was just not for me and kind of hippy. Not really my style! February 2014 rolled around and I wanted to make a change in my life so I decided to give this Paleo lifestyle a full fledged try for 30 days. I completely cut out all regular eggs and went caged free / vegetarian fed / organic. All of my meats were vegetarian fed or free range organic. I started cooking with more fats and oils like Olive Oil, Coconut Oil, and eating more avocados. I used to think the higher fat we eat then the more fat we will gain. Boy was I wrong!! I started visiting my local farmers market every Sunday and picked out all organic vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, kale, salad, tomatoes, carrots. This new discovery of the local farmers market completely cut my grocery bill in half since all of the vegetables were half the price as I would find in stores and completely organic. This would make up for the higher prices I would pay for my grass fed organic meats and caged free eggs.
Initially this new way of eating took a lot out of me since my body was not used to it. The first week was the hardest one because within a span of 24 hours I stopped eating every two hours and would only eat 3 meals a day. I would eat breakfast which consisted of 4 caged free vegetarian fed organic eggs, an organically grown chopped tomato sautéed in extra virgin olive oil, and half of an organic avocado. This seemed like a pretty big breakfast but once 2 hours passed after breakfast I became hungry again since my body was used to the habit of eating every 2 hours. I was a soldier and really told myself to hold out on eating until lunch time which, at this point, seemed like a lifetime. Once lunch came around I would bake an organic free range chicken breast and roasted organic brussel sprouts tossed in extra virgin olive with sea salt. I never ate brussel sprouts before but I caught a good recipe on Nom Nom Paelo and gave it a try. Now I almost never go a week without having brussel sprouts! For dinner I baked wild caught Mahi Mahi and had more organic brussel sprouts tossed in extra virgin olive oil and sea salt. Even after dinner it felt like my insides were eating themselves and it was tough to survive passed dinner without eating anything but I still pushed through it. The food was great! One of the traits I love about myself is that I can eat the same thing over and over everyday for 7 days straight without getting tired of it. So that is exactly what I did. I ate the same thing for 7 days straight and did not give in to temptation. It proved to have a significant impact on my weight because over those 7 days my weight dropped from 168 pounds down to 162 pounds!! This was enough motivation for me to continue the same diet in to the second week. I started researching more recipes and found nom nom paleo, the paleo diet, and hungry caveman which gave me ideas to fight my food craving which were still paleo free. I would start fitting in healthy snacks in-between meals such as uncured bacon wrapped dates, uncured bacon wrapped apples, frozen organic grapes, Baked organic kale chips tossed in sea salt and extra virgin olive oil. I also started flirting with coconut oil which had a great taste to it and provided exellent results but was a little more of a hassle since it came in solid form and had to be melted down in to liquid form. Adding in all of these extra goodies between meals made me feel much less like my stomach was eating itself resulting in me going down to a weight I hadn’t achieved in over 10 years which was 158 pounds! I kept with the high intensity gym routines but completely cut out any and all cardio I was doing. Also, my gym routines were shortened to just one hour a day for 5 days a week. I noticed that my strength was also increasing from this eating lifestyle because I started lifting 5 pounds more than usual across the board. This was fantastic! Not only was I weighing the lowest I had weighed in 10 years but I was also lifting more than I had ever lifted! All of this happened so quickly and it was only the second week of staying consistent with this way of eating. By the end of week 3 and the end of the 30 days I gave the Paleo lifestyle I was sold and managed to achieve a body weight of 155 pounds and it felt like the weight was just melting off of my body with muscles now showing that I had never seen before. It was amazing and I was sold! Not only was my body making a complete change due to this new lifestyle but my energy increased, my skin improved, and my sleep cycles were longer with deeper REM being achieved.
I’ve been so excited about these results that I’ve started this site so that I can provide insights as to what has worked well with me and hopefully inspire my friends and family to lead a healthier and more productive lifestyle leading to all their dreams and goals!