Congrates!
Welcome to training in the martial arts. It is a wonderful experiance. I can empathize with some of your situations about what you perceive of as your “weaknesses”.
The biggest problem people have in martial arts, and with a poor health seems to stem from lack of discipline. You have started to change that with martial arts classes. Keep it up. It is well worth it.
–Let me address diet first. Most Americans have a horrendous diet.
–My first recommendation is to try to increase the amount of healthy whole foods in your diet. Replace refined sugar with real maple syrup (from Vermont of course) or honey. Use real butter instead of margarine. Most store bought bread is very poor quality and unhealthy. Lots of veggies, and minimal fruits. Fruit is mostly sugar, so think of it as candy.
–Second, (and sure to eventually get a negative response from some one), is to cut back on simple and complex carbohydrates. The reason is this. Carbohydrates basically are sugars or very close to sugars. When you digest food, the nutrients first go to where they are needed. If you digest sugars and do not burn them in a short amount of time, they are stored as reserve energy in the form of fat. So, if you eat two big bowl of pasta, and sit down for a few hours after that, then go to sleep, you did nothing to burn it off, and it becomes fat. So, if we consume more calories in a day than we need, it is stored as fat. Thus we gain weight. Carbohydrates digest quicker than any fats or proteins. Additionally, large amounts of tasty food in our diets is packed with carbohydrates. So, start to cut these out of your diet.
–When most people go on a diet, the first thing they loose is water, then muscle mass (muscle protein), then fat. Then they are always wondering why they gain weight back when they break the diet. Muscle fibers are what burns energy in the body, but they are also proteins, so they burn up as well. So if you loose muscle mass, then you will not have as much stuff to burn the energy. So you become even less efficient. It is like trying to run a v-8 on seven spark plugs, it might limp a long, but it is not going anywhere fast. So the solution is to make sure that you consume a sufficiant amount of protein so that you don’t burn muscle proteins for energy. My personal recommendation from my personal experiance is to try to eat at least one gram of protein per pound of ideal body weight. This means lots of meats, soy, eggs, cheese, etc. Dont worry about the cholestoral unless you have a high cholestoral level already. You will find your cholestoral level will drop when you cut out sugars and flours etc… An interesting side note is that soy protein has a tendency to increase estrogen in the body and beef protein will increase tetosterone.
–Fat consumption is a concern, but not as much as the media has hyped it to be. If you dont follow a good diet it is very bad. But dont worry too much about it right now.
–Eat five to seven small meals a day instead of one or two big ones. If you are brave and can handle the taste, protein bars or protein shakes are good to have. If you keep your stomach full, you will be less apt to binge or snack on candies and sodas. A car runs best if it always has something in its gas tank. It will not run at all if you have no fuel.
–I hope that helps for simple dietary guidelines. I use that formulae along with my work out and have dropped 27 pounds and four percent body fat in a short period of time.
–For strength and conditioning, the key is not so much what exercises you do, but CONSISTANCY and disciplin in doing them. For at home general overall conditioning I think push ups and sit ups/crunches are best. Along with your stretching and stance work. Set a goal and a time frame to achieve it and work for it.
For instance. If you can do 25 pushups, set the goal to be able to do 50 push ups in four months. Then add a few each week. Dont set a goal that is so big it seems impossible. Dont say that you want to do four sets of 1000 push-ups in a year unless you are real close to that already.
(I think a nice mid term goal that will give you some decent upper body strength is 100 minus your age for push-ups, then do multiple sets.)
Finally, dont torture yourself because you dont make the progress you want. It all goes back to discipline. I found that there were a large number of areas in my life that I was not please with. Each of these could relate back to poor self discipline. Everytime I said “I will improve” or “I will do this and this and this” and I failed to do those things, I felt worse. Each failure would re-enforce the thought process that I could not succeed in all those areas, and I would give up for a while. Finally, I broke it down. Instead of tackling all the areas at once, I would do one at a time. I started off with watching my language, discipling my tounge. When I found that I was no longer swearing, I felt good about myself in succeeding in that area, and used that to say, “I can cut out sodas from my diet.” The success in this area enabled me to start to wake up earlier. I could go on and on about this but I hope you get the idea.
Enjoy yourself and keep working on each of these things, and dont get discouraged. Develop the self discipline and you will succeed.
I hope that this helps. If you have any questions, please contact me.
Peace,
yi beng, kan xue 
)