Whooo hooo!!! Almost...

Got the screws taken out and spent the Memorial day weekend in bed on a double dose of Vicodin. For the most part my diet has been good, been staying away from fried food, experimented with different ways to cook veggies and am currently trying out ways to cook Quinoa and brown rice.

I'm Filipino and I've grown up with the mindset that if you don't eat rice you haven't eaten a complete meal, so I'm hoping the Quinoa or Brown rice can replace the white rice. In the past I've done some weird diets, compliments of the wife, and we'd found that cutting down on white rice actually helped us lose a good amount of weight. She's always on a trip about her weight - I think she looks fine - so she's trying new things out and I go along with it to support her. So far she's tried South Beach, Perricone, I forget the name but it was a silly spicy lemonade diet, another silly cabbage soup diet and the famous Atkin's diet.

I've got a friend who is a nutritionist and he said that out of all the ones above the South Beach and Perricone diet were the most decent. But he mentioned that the best way to lose weight was to just eat with portion control in mind and to avoid fatty or processed food. Simplest advice ever right! Well in this day of convenience food, long work days and short week nights we've found it hard to feed ourselves and our kids proper meals and it shows, in us. My mom also helps us out but she keeps getting microwave pizzas, pizza rolls, pizza pockets and pizza bread - my son likes pizza, can you tell who she has in mind when she gets us food? I'm pretty stubby for my size and my wife isn't happy where she's at so we're finally trying to do things different.

For the past 2 weeks, right after grocery shopping we've started cutting up the veggies and storing them in containers for pre-planned meals. Meats basically get the same treatment but gets pre-spiced before storage which also helps the meat become more flavorful when cooked. We've swapped out ground beef for ground turkey, breakfast Sausages are not those little Morningstar veggie patties and bacon...sadly..has been swapped with turkey bacon. I'm gonna get some maple syrup to maybe paint a little onto this new 'bacon' to make it more tasty.

With the changes we've made I've secretly dropped 10lbs and am now floating at 198 to 201. I say 'secretly' because I didn't share the info with my wife in case she hasn't seen any changes since we've changed eating habits. Considering I've only been doing limited workouts I can attribute the loss to the change in diet, can't wait to see what happens when I'm able to get back to class again :)

Recovery looks to be progressing well since Friday, the limp is almost gone from my walk, I get to take off the bandages tonight and within the week I'm hoping to get the stitches removed and let the cuts fully heal before heading back to class. After all this drama it would seriously suck to get infected by something due to an open wound, so I'm taking no chances.

Staying motivated to return to doing Jiu-jitsu hasn't been hard at all for plenty of reasons.

Happily, I've seen my nephews a few times these past weeks and they love showing me what they're new subs, grips and throws that they've learned in class. These 3 boys are hilarious!

Watching my daughter progress in her Judo classes and then wanting to play Bullyproof with me and her sister when we get home. In class she goes for full mount to arm bar instead of a pin, this happened after she'd been hanging out with her cousins in the garage for hours. My nephews version of 'playing' is rolling and it looks like my daughter is 'playing' now too! Last night she mentioned she wanted to start getting medals like her cousins! :O Oh the tears of joy! LOL

Along with the motivation given to me by my family, reading online about the trials and tribulations that others are going through with their training is also helping me out. Thanks to Dolph at BJJBlues, Liam the Part time Grappler, Mike's Formative Years and to Stephen Kesting for his many informative emails!!!