Week 3: Decreasing at a Decreasing Rate

The numbers for this week:

Bodyweight: 171 lbs.
Bodyfat percent: 15.2% (26lbs of fat)
Total pounds lost this week: -.5 lbs.
Total fat pounds lost this week: 1lb (about .8% bodyfat)

I don’t understand this diet. When I lost weight before, I would still eat pizza 3 times a week, visit Taco Bell twice a week, and I’d sometimes even keep drinking Pepsi. I would always have more than 2200 calories average per day; and my fat, carb, and protein ratios were WAY higher on the carbs and fats. Yet the fat would melt off quick!

So why is it that I’m having so much difficulty losing fat? The biggest difference between my old ‘losing weight diets’ and now was that in the past, my ‘diet’ was more heavily an exercise regiment and less of a ‘diet’. I’d workout at a gym pretty hard 5 days a week for about 90 minutes. Now I’m working out maybe 4 times a week for about 30 minutes at a time just doing pushups, sit-ups, bodyweight squats, etc…I guess it’s not enough.

It’s not that big of a deal though, because I’m still just experimenting with the diet/exercise setup. I purposely increased my daily calories from last week so I could try to keep (or gain) muscle, and that part worked. Though I only lost 1lb of bodyfat this week, I went up 1/2lb of weight for a total of about 1.5lbs of muscle gain, which I was happy to have.

However, a consequence of my diet change may have also been a decrease in the amount of fat I could lose in a week. This is a problem because now I have to lose more fat in the next 5 weeks (about 1.5% fat per week vs 1.25% per week) in order to reach the 8% bodyfat goal. So to be able to still meet this goal in 5 weeks I think I’ll try the following:

1) Don’t get too crazy on the cheat days: On my last cheat day I ate over 4100 calories, and it was mostly junk: 

I purposely wanted to increase my daily calories last week, and if it weren’t for this cheat day, my average would have been about 1810 calories a day, or a 3% increase from last week. However, because of this huge cheat day, it brought my daily calories to an average of 2132 per day, or 20% more calories since last week. I think that if I’m going to have a cheat day from now on; I can eat more but it maybe shouldn’t be as crazy and it shouldn't be all junk. 

2) Better workouts: Or at least added cardio to the workouts. I was actually thinking they should be harder and more intense though. It’s ironic that the workouts I’m doing now are lighter than the workouts I was doing last summer BETWEEN visits to the gym, so I must have really got weak. For example, last summer I was at 100 situps a day, 150 pushups, and 150 bodyweight squats. Again, this was BETWEEN my 3 days a week at the gym. Now I’m lucky to reach 2/3rds of those numbers on my real ‘workout’ days. So this next week I’ll really try to amp up my workouts to the point where I’m in danger of puking. That would be some good intensity.

3) Drink more water: I’m off and on with this but they say increased hydration is important for fat loss. I know a lot of gym enthusiasts will drink a gallon of water a day, and from what I understand it’s perfectly healthy to do so. In fact, if someone can drink a gallon of ice-cold water everyday, they can burn around 860 extra calories a week: http://www.buzzle.com/articles/drinking-ice-water-burns-861-calories.html

This is because your body has to burn calories to raise the water temperature up to your body’s 98.6-degree temperature. So basically that’s drinking 8 (16oz) bottles of water a day. Very doable, it just will (most likely) mean more trips to the bathroom too.

4) Fat burning pills: I’m really reluctant to do this because I hate how they make me feel. In fact, I’ve tried them a few times but never could even finish half a bottle because I’d stop taking them. I hate having the shakes. However, after this next week if I’m not losing fat like I was hoping, I’ll go ahead and buy a bottle of these and start taking them for the last month of this diet. Hopefully it won’t have to come to that; but I’m willing to do it if it means reaching the goal in the allotted time. 

So that is the game plan going into this next week. I’m sure there might also have to be some additional changes before I get to the end; but judging how things have been going, I think these new changes will mostly be good changes. Let’s see how it goes.