Like I said, I'm on a diet...

It's kind of a pain being on a diet because I really enjoy food. In fact, one of my favorite shows is about food - "Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern." Top that off with how picky my kids are, and I end up preparing two meals every sitting.

I don't mind eating the same thing constantly, so I took a shortcut and smoked 20lbs of chicken. It gets tiring eating it, but I've got a lot of different sauces and salsas. Plus, with the light Miracle Whip, I can make chicken salad and eat it without borking my taste buds or my fat-loss plan.

You won't find a scale in my house; I go by body-fat percentage. When I started, I was at 23%, and I'm trying to get to 12%. When I hit 12%, I may go lower, I may not. It depends. Right now I'm at about 15%, which is pretty fair. I want to see how low I can get it though, so I'm going to keep aiming at dropping a percent or two a month. Any faster than that, and I lose muscle and not fat.

I really wing it on my diet plan, but the thing I watch out for is carbs. If I go over 1800 calories a day on protein, it's not an issue - but when I go over on carbs, it's a big deal for me. It's just how my body works. Another reason I have to wing it is I tend to sleep-eat; I try to keep track of what I ate then and adjust for it the next day.

You can't just diet and expect to lose fat, though. You've got to exercise too, and that's the part that gets me. My back is messed up (blown discs, pinched nerves, compression fractured my L1 and L2 in February), and so is my right shoulder. So, I have to be a bit creative and not go overboard. I break up my routine: one day I'll do heavy isometrics (hard qigong), next day I'll do 300-500 squats, then 300-500 pushups and pullups the day after, then I do a depletion workout on my arms for the final day. Every day, I do light but extended cardio, shadowbox with weighted gloves, and iron palm training, plus a warmup routine designed to strengthen my rotator cuffs and spinal erectors.

You may be thinking, "Hey, he didn't say anything about abs in there!" Well, there's a simple reason for that - if you do isometrics on your abs while you're doing all the other stuff, you get a better workout (and safer if you have a bad back) than you do if you do 1k crunches or leg lifts. The trick is to just hold your abs as tight as you can while you're exercising. Qigong helps with that.