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[nenjin]

Yeah I have to be very careful of my knees. I realized the other day that I can't do weighted lunges very well, my knees lack the stability I need to do the exercise correctly. So I'm doing single leg squats instead, it's way more comfortable and my knees don't feel like they want to go sideways on me after I'm done.

[nenjin]

Couple more informational videos:

Steady state cardio vs. resistance training for fat loss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c00UMl0t9no

(I like Mike Thurston's videos. I think it's probably the accent more than anything.)

And Insulin Resistance vs. Insulin Sensitivity Explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfrwYsrqo8I

More and more I'm glad I started doing cinnamon on a regular basis. It kind of helps ensure your body is responding to calories in a fat-friendly way. It's not a magic cure or anything if you don't have your nutrition squared away. But I think it does help your body's response to incidental calorie intake. (For example, the sugar and cream in my morning coffee I usually have several hours before I eat.) And if you're going to be eating carb heavy, helping your body store less of it as fat can't be a bad thing.

[nenjin]

Well I've hit around 15% body fat. So I think I'm officially at a healthy weight. It's a little hard to tell exactly where I'm at with body fat since everyone is a little different.

So I generally measure it by the handful. 2 months ago I could grab an entire handful of belly fat by my belly button with some to spare. Now I have to really grab on to get an actual handful, a normal grab can't fill up my hand anymore, and there's nothing really left to grab around the sides of my stomach anymore. I can still grab a handful of love handle fat from my back......but it's a smaller and smaller handful every time I try. Torso and ab muscularity around the sides is starting to come in. I've been able to see the top of my abs for a month or two now.

So I'm still going for the shred but tbh....the wait is difficult. I still see myself losing fat every week, it's just way slower than the fat loss I was seeing above 15% body fat. The changes aren't seismic so much anymore.

But I've been able to stick to my nutrition plan and it so far has been going well. I'm not tracking my macros aggressively, I'm just trying to eat a lot healthier than I have in the past, eating smaller meals and cramming down some greens and like a carrot while my main course cooks. I basically eat two meals a day, with a protein bar at either end of the day and a little healthy snacking a few hours after dinner.

I haven't been to a fast food restaurant in about 4 months now. I still eat out at "restaurant" restaurants on a daily basis but I keep the portions small, try to include veggies where possible and I'm avoiding fried foods and heavy carb-based foods in combination with other stuff I don't need atm (for example, Fettucini Alfredo is great but between the carbs, the dairy, the fat and the salt there's just too much there for one meal.) And I'm still keeping my sugars to ~25 grams a day or less. (About 50% of my sugar comes from my morning coffee, and pretty much the rest comes from protein bars and yogurt.) 25g of sugar is, generally speaking, about 1 soda a day worth of sugar. I'm still letting myself drink about 1 soda a week as my "cheat food". But I'm generally finding I drink 2/3rds of it and toss the rest. I *could* finish it but I don't *need* to finish it so I don't.

I do find myself vaguely hungry more often, especially in the last hour or two before bed. I'll usually do a protein bar, some greek yogurt, some summer sausage or peanuts, maybe a carrot for that late night hunger, and just to give my body something to work with while I sleep. But appetite control hasn't been too difficult to manage, nor have cravings. I did have a moment of weakness the other day when my roommate brought home his birthday cake and I stared at it for a good 30 or 45 seconds and almost, almost broke down and took a slice. But I didn't. I bought an oven pizza planning to have a cheat meal and I ended up pushing it back 4 days or so from when I'd originally planned to eat it just because....I didn't really feel the need to cheat.

On the workout side....I've started upping my weights where I can. Got work to buy some heavier dumbbells and at home I'm substituting my heavier kettle bell for my dumbbells where I can do a single arm or leg exercises. I'm a liiiittttllllle worried about jumping up weight 25% to 30% in some places but that said, I'm sick of feeling like I'm getting nowhere at the current weights I use. I'd like to do progression properly at home but I simply can't afford to go spend another $30 to $50 every time I need to increase my weights. And variable weight dumbbells are kind of sucky. I hate those plastic, sand-filled pieces of shit.

I'm also starting to experience some joint pain, mostly in my shoulder joint. My shoulders seem to do a lot of the work during my workouts, more than they should be. The other day I was doing resistance band exercises for probably 30 or 40 minutes when I felt legitimate pain in my shoulder joint and decided to stop. That's a first since I've been working out.

Sometimes it's hard to be patient, when you've got the will but just need to put in the time. I feel like I've made good progress in the last 6 months of working out (4 months if I'm counting from when I got serious about it), but I kind of got addicted to watching my body change so rapidly. Now that those changes have slowed down I'm starting to get anxious. Have I plateaued? Can I actually reach shred levels the way I'm operating, or am I going to have to work even harder and eat even cleaner?  Chances are, it's just a matter of time rather than effort.

I'm thinking I'm due for a week of rest though, some time soon. My energy levels feel like they've been falling steadily for the last couple months. Even though I've recommitted to doing fuller workouts than before (3 sets no matter the exercise, trying to get in as many exercises as I have energy for), I feel like I'm having to work harder to find the energy and motivation to finish. Which is probably a sign I need a real break. I haven't taken one since I started other than forced breaks due to work trips. I'm thinking I should take a week sometime soon though, where I have no physical or mental stress and see if I come back rejuvenated.

[SalmonGod]

About 50% of my sugar comes from my morning coffee

I don't think coffee is nearly so large a portion of my sugar intake, unfortunately.  But it was easy to cut out.  I use Splenda in my coffee these days, instead of sugar.  Can barely tell the difference anymore.

[nenjin]

I avoid artificial sweeteners like the plague. I don’t even do Stevia even though everyone says it’s ok. Then again, the same thing was once said about Nutrasweet, Sacchrine and all the others.

[SalmonGod]

I avoid artificial sweeteners like the plague. I don’t even do Stevia even though everyone says it’s ok. Then again, the same thing was once said about Nutrasweet, Sacchrine and all the others.

I went through a similar phase.  But over time I found the paranoia about them to be more and more questionable vs the science on refined sugar being dead certain that it's horrible for you.

[nenjin]

Refined sugar isn’t good for you, true. But the real devil is high fructose corn syrup. Compared to drinking 40+ grams of sugar via HFC a day, a couple spoonfuls of refined sugar ain’t that bad.

[Reelya]

Fructose is the bad shit because it's the part of table sugar that must be first processed by the liver (into glucose) before you can use it, and can cause liver disease similar to being an alcoholic. Sucrose (table sugar) breaks down into one fructose molecule and one glucose molecule (which is already in the form as blood sugar) when you eat it. Fructose syrup is basically drinking slow-acting poison.

Ironically, the sugar they used for brewing is pure glucose and if you substitute that for regular sugar then you can avoid the liver strain from the fructose. That's why bodybuilders prefer glucose to recharge their post-workout carbs. It's faster and less damaging. Also, people concerned about their liver could use glucose too.

[nenjin]

Wouldn't be the New Year without some fitness resolutions, right?

My resolution is just to work even harder in my workouts!

I feel like I passed an effort plateau. I'm losing weight consistently again. I took a week off from all my workout over the holiday because I figured after 90 days of training hard I needed a real rest period. And despite some holiday eating, I feel like I actually lost weight that week.

That, and I've found a couple workouts that helped me break some plateaus in a couple specific areas.

I have a devil of a time training my biceps. They're small and not super strong to begin with, and I struggle to get a good contraction. Eccentric overloading is basically the only thing I can do that I feel the next day. Well, for the whole time I've been doing standing bicep curls. Great for working your whole body while curling but makes it difficult to isolate the muscle. So I decided to try sitting decline bicep curls and....holy shit. The difference it's made is incredible. I went from going all out on my biceps and basically feeling the burn go away mid afternoon the next day.....to three freaking days of aching biceps! Finally I'm getting the overloading and tearing I associate with really having worked the muscle.

I've also started training my back a lot more and seeing some actual gains there, which is probably a testament to how weak it is given how often I sit.

Lastly, I've found an ab exercise that puts the work back in to the situp. I haven't been doing situps or crunches at all. Mostly because they're just too damn easy and I prefer either planks of all kinds or leg-based ab workouts.

But I bought a thing from a friend for ab work, and situps have gone from needing to do 75 to even feel something....to wanting to die after doing 40.



You don't need to own one to do this sit up hack though. Let me explain. You place the mat under the small of your back and lay across it, such that someone coming up behind you would read "Rogue" oriented toward them. What this does is spread your ab muscles open while laying in the extended position.

Next, lay across the mat and put the soles of your feet together and pull your heels toward your crotch like you're doing a butterfly stretch. It can feel a little awkward to do while laying down, especially if you don't have the flexibility, but stay with it. The reason you do this is because it disengages your hip flexors, which often end up doing 80% of the work when doing sit ups or crunches. This is where the magic hack happens. With no hip flexors engaged your abs will have to work like never before.

Next, put your hands together and raise your arms back behind your head. You do this simply to get them out of the way and, if need be, provide a tiny bit of momentum for the sit up.

You can replicate what the mat does with a pillow placed beneath the small of your back, with the folded side facing inward toward you.

Do a few sets of sit ups like this, and you will feel each one of your ab muscles in the rectus abdominus burning the next day, I guarantee it. Add a little twist at the end, to bring the opposite wrist to the opposing leg, for a little oblique work while you're up there.

With all these improvements in front of me, and a brand new weight bench for my home, I'm going in to 2018 more confident of getting shredded than ever before. If you're trying to lose weight and not seeing changes as often as you like, sometimes you just gotta keep doing what you're doing and be patient.

Good luck on your fitness journies in 2018!

[JoshuaFH]

I've made quite a lot of progress this year, so I hope that next year will be just as productive. Thanks Nenjin and everyone.

[JimboM12]

happy new years y'all. i've been keeping the diet but without working out, but now that im back to work in a week i'll actually be able to work out if my schedule stays the same (it's corporate so the chances of that are very high)

good luck with them body goals, bros and sisters.

b o d y g o a l s

[nenjin]

I just had a food epiphany. Once you start working out and ween yourself off of cheap, crap food....

Actual food tastes so much better. I just made 3 eggs scrambled with garlic, salt, pepper, some spinach and a little bit of cheddar cheese, a bowl of Cheerios with just a sprinkle of sugar, 3 pieces of bacon, a Baby Bel piece of cheese and a glass of milk....and I feel like I just had a banquet.

Just like anything you do hedonistically, binging on junk food tends to turn down the volume on the rest of food in life. After years of eating pizza, wings, cheese steak hoagies, rich pastas, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Arby's, candies, sweets and all this fast food....I was kind of getting desperate. Everything I was eating made me feel both guilty and bored, yet at the time I didn't have the motivation to cook except once every couple of months to make my favorite meals. Committing to cooking instead of just going out to get what's easy, or putting together a crap load of finger food to make a meal, has really reconnected me to the joy of cooking and flavor. The eggs I just made were incredible and so simple. The natural flavors really come out and come back to you once your mouth and taste buds detox off of all the oils, fats, sugars and artificial flavorings in the food we eat.

That said, I'm not sure eating real food is any more cost effective than eating cheap fast food. My grocery bills are regularly $60 to $100 and that will maybe last me 3 to 4 days of eating just dinners at home and incidental snacking. At ~$20/day for fast food, it doesn't feel a whole lot cheaper. But at least it feels better, in general. It's weird to get excited about cooking again. Even though its a wee-bit stressful trying to figure out meals (because to be honest, meal prepping seems soulless and boring to me), but after a good hard workout, OMFG real food that's carefully and flavorfully prepared is so good. The hardest part is slowing down enough to actually enjoy it.

[Reelya]

Also, if you budget right you can eat pretty well even if you don't have a lot of money, i have only a student allowance and i still can eat vegetable and protein rich meals 90% of the time.

One thing you can do is to make mixes. You can make your own cup-a-soup type mix for a ridiculously cheap amount per cup. If a sachet of the store-bought one costs 50 cents, well I can make that for a few cents per cup, basically it's 60% milk powder, 40% flour plus some flavor / seasoning, which can include chicken stock, curry powder, onion/garlic flakes, salt/pepper etc. Basically the price is more or less the price of the milk powder/flour, and the other advantage is knowing exactly what you're putting in the stuff, controlling the amount of salt etc.

(EDIT: I just weighed and priced the ingredients in my homemade chicken-curry-noodle soup mix plus seasoning), and it's 72 cents for 190g of mix per batch, or $3.70 a kilo. Continental's equivalent cup-a-soup is 50 cents a cup, and each one appears to have 10 grams of mix in it, the listed per-weight price for that is $50 a kilo, and from the looks of it, most of that weight is crumbled up noodles, so you're effectively paying $50 a kilo for some crumbled up instant noodles and seasoning. Store-bought instant soup mixes are a colossal waste of money, considering how easily you can mix in some cheap ingredients and get basically the same thing).

[nenjin]

Rice and beans are both really cheap sources of the three macros too. A little heavy on the carbs and fats, a little light on the protein, but you can make a $5 bag of rice last weeks. Same with beans. I've already made 4 meals with rice and barely used 1/4 of the bag.

Now only if meat protein were so cheap and easily prepared. I'm currently eating a lot of Summer Sausage for that. Lots of protein and fats. Good but doesn't really hold a candle to actual freshly cooked proteins though.

[Gentlefish]

New year, new goals. I remember seeing an older thread (I thought) a while back, but this one looks deliciously new.

Leaving HS, I was 150 pounds, 6'1". Now, five and a half years later, I'm 235 (down from 250 due to various reasons such as being broke-ass). Aiming to get back to 200 (with 180 as a stretch goal as 150 was beanpole). Preferably by July, making that five pounds a month of weight loss. And since this is my going from zero to working out and eating right, hopefully pretty achievable.

Now, since I've lost gym membership from the University as I'm taking the Semester off, and it's dead winter, SSC is going to be a little difficult, though calisthenic work shouldn't be too hard (on my abs, and I can cardio out some bicycles and flutter kicks; Probably going to do milk-jug-and-water weights for my arms for a while).

Since my folks got me a rice cooker from Christmas, rice and beans and frozen veggie meals are in my future. Chicken, too, as I can afford it. Chicken is lovely.

Glad to have a group to be held accountable for!