Fat Watch 2019 continues apace.
I’m down to three areas: love handles, sides of my chest and my lower abs. Everything else is getting quite lean, especially my back. Starting to see that coveted separation between muscles in the shoulders and pecs and upper abs. I have further to go yet.
It’s true what they say though: there are costs to getting lean.
My strength is definitely going down. It’s a rep or two at a time, but I’m steadily falling in the weights I’m able to put up. My weight on the scale is starting to go down again, which means I’m losing body fat yes, but also probably some muscle mass as well. My calorie intake hasn’t really changed in months, and my protein intake is about the same as it has been. At this point in the fat loss phase, i think I’m now lifting to preserve muscle mass instead of increasing it.
Energy is also becoming an issue. It’s getting harder and harder to approach my workouts with the zeal I had a year ago. (Which, if you've been following what I'm up to, is less than it was when I started 2 years ago.) I get through them and give them my all, but it’s taking real willpower to do them consistently week to week now. It's rare that I go in to a workout amped anymore. More like I approach it stoically as something that has to be done. Steady. Measured. Even though I have body fat still to spare, my body is grudgingly using it to make up the energy deficit I’m running now that it knows there's far less of it to work with. As a result, I feel like I have less energy on average day to day.
Recovery is also slower, I feel like. I feel more beat up for longer after my workouts. Aches and pains seem to linger longer. In all honesty I probably need another week+ break, give my body back a few hundred calories a week through inactivity. But stopping working out honestly feels harder than continuing. Might it be worth it to increase the fat burning? Perhaps. But I don’t want to break my rhythm, not quite yet. I have a few more weeks until that’s scheduled.
Part of me feels that I should reverse course. But I started out on this originally to get lean more than anything, so changing course before I reach the leanness I want feels like giving up. I'm where a lot of people by now would have said "I'm good. My waistline is totally reasonable and I'm good to hold here." But I wanted something more, right from the outset. I wanted and still want to go beyond average in to "wow." I don't want to have put in this much hard work to only achieve "somewhat above average."
So I will continue to stay the course, until I start seeing the signs of overtraining like old injuries flaring up, sickness and the inability to get out of bed in the morning. I'm gonna keep chasing that dragon.
At this point it’s taken me an eternity to cut the way I’ve been doing things. Two years is a long time to stay in a calorie deficit. Maybe being super strict and eating super clean and really cutting back my carbs would have gotten me where I want to be faster. Just "getting it done." But I wanted a nutrition plan I could live with long term, instead of having to do specific things to cut, then stop doing them when I bulked, yadda yadda. So long as I keep losing body fat, I think what I’m doing is working, even if it’s taking much longer than your standard, aggressive diet plan. I think at this point I want what I want bad enough I could go to the lengths it would take to get me there quicker. No cheatmeals anymore. Totally eliminating sugar from my diet. Only slow carbs and zero highly processed carbs. But if I set that as the standard that got me the leanness I wanted, it's the standard I'd have to hold, and any "going back" to those other things would mean I couldn't hold that body fat level for any real period of time. Most fitness models stress that the leanness they get to for photo shoots isn't something they maintain year around. And I understand that. But staying somewhat just above "photoshoot leanness" and being able to get down there at will in a shorter period of time is my ultimate goal. Get lean, stay mostly lean while I eat more to build more muscle, do a small cut to get back to super lean if I so desire.
So if I can get lean under the plan I'm doing now, with its cheat meals and sugar in my coffee and not avoiding processed carbs, then all I really have to do is add a few hundred calories a day back through smart choices, and play with those extra calories when I want to back down my body fat levels.
That's the theory anyways.
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Topic: The Fitness Thread - THE RE-SWOLLENING (Read 62899 times)