It’s a quarter past seven in the morning.  Ruth is on the machine right now.  I thought I’d take a few minutes to introduce you to my weight loss guru, Yvan Cornourier.  Here he is.

Yvan is a professional body.  If you want to know about losing your body fat, you should talk to a guy who has made losing fat and shaping muscle a profession.  I was fortunate to work with Yvan about ten years ago when I cast him in a movie about tree planters.  That movie forced me into bankruptcy and never got completed.  Yvan and all the other actors were participants who never got paid.  Life is tough sometimes.  I can only hope the experience had some value as scene studies and acting exercises for the cast, and life lessons for me.  One great value it gave me was the lasting benefits of meeting and talking to Yvan about health and fitness and fat loss.  Here’s what I looked like after eleven weeks on Yvan’s program, the same program I’m following now:

The after picture is a bit of a cheat, in that I don’t think I ever achieved the six pack and certainly didn’t get a body like Yvan’s.  But the improvement was dramatic and well worth eleven weeks of following a not unpleasant regimen.  And the improvement lasted for some years. It’s just time to do it again.

Okay, time to get on the elliptical.  I’ll be back when I have my morning numbers.

631 calories in 31 minutes.  Feeling good energy this morning.

I’m now sitting down to what has become my standard breakfast on this program.  A fist sized blob of pre-cooked brown rice with a shredded skinless chicken breast,  a small handful of Chinese greens, all steamed together with a bit of the juice from the chicken breast.  Toped off with a large tablespoonful of cottage cheese.  If I wanted to get fancy I could sprinkle on some chopped green onions, but I’m not feeling fancy this morning.  Must get this breakfast eaten and hit the shower.

Lunch today again was soup and brown rice.  I think I may be eating too many bananas.  Three today, if I haven’t lost count.  But I also burned off a lot of energy today, with very active classes that kept me on my feet and moving around.

Ruth has been making a batch of skinless chicken breast strips, which she marinades and bakes.  Good lean protein snack.

Dinner was a rather nasty experiment – mushrooms, bamboo shoots (from a package that had them soaking in liquid, possibly pre-cooked), some left over cooked broccoli and a very small package of shredded beef.  I also nuked a small potato for each of us, and a section of squash with juice from the chicken bake.  Again a dab of cottage cheese on the potatoes.  It was an acceptably tasty meal, but I didn’t enjoy the bamboo shoots as much as I expected to.  I much prefer them fresh.

I just poached up some chicken breasts for breakfasts.