For months now, my friend and previous weight-loss challenge opponent – Tyler Cruz – has been virtually begging me to do another weight loss challenge with him.

Why?

Because just like me, he’s been gaining weight ever since we finished our previous weight loss challenge in September of last year.

As I previously wrote in my “Fat Again!” post a few months ago, my central focus since completing last year’s challenge has been on my businesses and on building my income.

Weight loss, fitness and eating healthy have not been on my priority list at all – except for a short 9 day cleanse I did in February of this year.

Being Honest About My Weight Gain

When I wrote the “Fat Again!” post back in February, I received some comments and emails from people saying how disappointed they were in the fact that I gained the weight back and how I let them down etc.

One of the reasons I started this Blog was to share my personal development journey in life, and to me that includes sharing my successes as well as my failures learning experiences.

There are a lot of “gurus” out there who only Blog about their success in life and never admit the challenges they go through.

When things are going well for them, they Blog and Blog about how awesome things are going, but when things aren’t going as well in a particular area of their lives, they conveniently switch topics to something else.

This is of course done on purpose to build up their exaggerated “Perfect Guru Persona” which many people are drawn to as they start to “worship” their larger than life hero.

I’m not here to try to be a “Guru” to anyone.  I’m a human being.  I make mistakes.  I succeed.  I fail.  I lose weight.  I gain weight after losing it.  I’m not perfect.  I’m human.  I keep getting up and trying again.

On this Blog, I prefer to be honest, and share my “learning experiences” and not just my successes, as I believe that can help people just as much (if not more) as sharing my successes alone.

I realize that this means that some people, who are probably more used to reading the Blogs of “Perfect Gurus”, will be disappointed by me admitting that I’m not perfect and may stop reading my Blog.

Oh well, to those people I say “Adios.”

They were never my target audience anyways, so no big deal.

My target audience are those people who are also human, who are also not perfect, and who may gain some value not just by learning from my successes but also from my failures learning experiences.

That is why I decided to do yet another public weight loss challenge with my friend Tyler Cruz, and to publicly share my results with you guys.

Tyler has decided not to Blog about this challenge on his Blog at this time.  I will, however, be sharing both our results here as he will be updating me on his progress.

The Challenge

This is going to be a similar challenge to our other challenges, with some modifications.  Here are the specifics:

Money on the Line: $675 / each

Start / End Dates: Jun 16th – Nov 16, 2012 (5 Months)

Paul Starting Weight: 227.8 lbs

Paul Target Weight: 189.0 lbs (36.8 lbs — 17% of starting weight)

Early Completion Clause: Yes

Tyler Starting Weight: 210.8 lbs

Tyler Target Weight: 179.2 lbs (31.6 lbs — 15% of starting weight)

Early Completion Clause: No

Penalties: If I don’t reach my target weight, and Tyler does, I have to pay him $675.  If Tyler doesn’t reach his target weight, and I do, he has to pay me $675.  If neither of us reach our target weight, we have to donate $340 to BCSPCA.

As you can see the specifics of the challenge are similar to our previous challenge.  We are betting more money than before, and we are targeting a longer time-frame (5 months) and more weight to be lost than last time.

There is also one rather MAJOR difference in this weight loss challenge.  Well, at least it’s a major difference for me.

Unlike last time, I am allowed to hit my target weight at any point on or BEFORE the end of the challenge date.

This may seem like a trivial point, but for me this is going to be a huge difference.  Putting this little detail in was the only way I would agree to do the challenge with Tyler, and it’s the reason why I agreed to lose an additional 2% of my weight compared to him just to get that “clause” put in on my side.

The reason I wanted this part of the challenge put in place is because this time I plan on losing fat AND gaining muscle over the next 5 months and beyond.

This time my plan is to lose a certain amount of fat (approx 40-50lbs, but at least 36.8 lbs to make the challenge), and then to start focusing on building muscle.

In our past weight loss challenges I was really only focusing 99% of my efforts on losing fat, because our weight loss challenges were strictly based on “weight loss” and not a change in body composition.

So in the past challenges for example if our target weight loss was to lose 30 lbs of “weight” and lets say that I lost 30 lbs of fat, but gained 10lbs of muscle by the end of the challenge – I actually would have lost the competition since then my weight would only be at 20 lbs less than my starting weight.

Ideally it would be awesome if we could do these weight loss challenges based on true body composition, similar to the weight loss challenge I did with Dr. Nima in the past, but the problem with body composition is that you need access to a DEXA scan machine and it can be rather expensive to get  your scans done.

This is why Tyler has always wanted to just base our competitions on “weight loss” and not body composition changes, as those are pretty much impossible to track yourself accurately at home.

So my plan this time is to kind of take a multi-phase approach to my weight loss.

Firstly, I’m going to focus mainly on “cutting fat”.  My target goal being to lose at least 36.8lbs but ideally around 40-50lbs of excess fat.

After the “cutting fat” portion of my program is completed, I can do my weigh-in video showing that I have lost the weight I needed to lose and that basically locks in my weight-loss amount for the challenge.

From that point forward I can focus on building muscle, without worrying about whether or not my weight goes up due to muscle mass gain.

Meaning, if I can lose the fat in 1-3 months, then I can focus on building up muscle after that without worrying about losing the weight loss challenge due to muscle gains.

Tyler on the other hand does not get this option (by his own choice).  He believes it’s better for him to just focus on losing the weight slowly over a 5 month period of time and I don’t think he’s interested in muscle gains.

So for Tyler, he has to actually weigh in at his target weight specifically on November 16, 2012 otherwise he loses the challenge.

My Plan This Time

I have many options to choose from available to me this time around, since this is not the first time I’ve had to lose 30+ lbs of weight.

I’ve got the Bernstein diet option available to me, which helped me lose quite a bit of weight last time.  I’ve also got the awesome line of Isagenix products which is also great for weight loss – and even more so for maintaining weight once you’ve lost it.

However, this time around I’m going to be tapping into my GIN (Global Information Network) member training to help me choose the best method for accomplishing my goals.

There are a lot of member only resources, training, seminars and experts that I get access to within GIN as a member which I plan on tapping into this time around.

Since becoming a GIN member in November, I’ve mostly just been going through the training in GIN that focuses on building wealth and making more money.

That training has been absolutely amazing and it has definitely helped me in those regards.

Now I’ll be turning some of my attention towards all the resources that GIN offers its members related to health, fitness and weight loss.

I’ll have more updates specifically related to exactly what I’m doing soon, along with some progress updates.

Stay tuned.

Weight In Video