Went to new york for an holiday. Couldn’t possibly eat healthy… all their food is high in fat or high in carbs, and I couldn’t find a supermarket to buy my some healthy food…
As I was staying in a hotel, I had to eat out every day. I’ve calculated, if I had eaten all the food I’ve had for breakfast, lunch and diner, I’d be totaling a massive 7000 calories a day… I just chose to eat only half of the food.
Nevertheless, I still gained 2kg…
Now weighing in for this month: 134.8kg…
I work a particular part of my body at once. But to ensure balance in strength development, I always start with the “opposite group” prior to the true workout. As the biceps is opposed to the triceps, pecs to upper back, abs to lower back, I make sure that I train both accordingly.
So when I’m doing upper back training, I’ll always do pecs-set too. So one set of 20 pushups to warm my body up for a full upper back workout. One set of 30 crunches, before I do my 3×12 deadlifts and 3×12, etc. And later in the week, it’ll be vice versa.
This means that I’ll train a bodypart extensively only once a week, albleit with a small “maintenance” set..
This is my usual schedule
Sunday: main course: upper back, casualty: pecs.
Monday: biceps, casualty: triceps. Abs-lower back
Wednesday: pecs, minor: upper back. Shoulders-obliques
Thursday: lower back-abs
Friday: legs, calves
Saturday: rest.
Sunday: one superset of squats, pushups, pullups and crunches
I noticed I’ve mainly logged my set backs and obstacles until now. I should write the positive things too.
I’ve thrown away two pants since I’ve started with this training. It was one pair of 44″-dockers pleated jeans, which used to be the only one I could wear for a whole day of office work without getting uncomfortable. Another one is a 42″ pleated pants. This one I dared to wear because it has 2 buttons. So even if one pop outs, I still have another one (Luckily I never had to use this plan).
Before I started this weightloss plan, I wanted to buy another 44″ pair. Because the old ones were getting worn out. Lucky for me, (or embarrassing enough), the girl at the dockers’ store said (with a surprised snug) that she’d had to order those sizes… I did not take this offer, and am glad I don’t need to.
Both became too big and would fall off when I walk. They’ve served me well, but I’ve ripped the 42″ one in two. To remind me that I can never go back. The 44″, I’ve hidden it, so I can see how far I’ve gone, once I’ve reached my goal.
I’ve re-ordered my closet too. There are a dozens of (never worn) jeans and pants in sizes ranging from 42″ (several models) to 36″. I’ve bought them during sales with the idea of “I’ll be able to fit into them when I’ve lost weight”. Never happened.
Now, they’ll actually be a good indicator for my progress. I’m now able to fit into 2 42″-normal fit dockers jeans (which are starting to get a tad too big already 
)
The same for my shirts. I have one very tight shirt I could not button down. Now I can button down 4 buttons. 3 left before it’s completely buttoned.
I’ve been doing butterflies and presses with dumbells of 15kg on the right and 18kg on the left (I’m a rightie, so I need to harrass my left side more for balance). One arm at a time to strengthen my core in the process.
Although butterflies and presses with dumbells actually develops more balance and control, I just found out that this is much lighter than doing actual push ups. Today, it was my resting day, but I wanted to do one set of compound exercises to “make it a day”. So I did 1 set of squats, good mornings, crunches and… pushups. However, I actually had a lot of trouble doing the 12 reps of push ups.
My scale told me why. When I’m doing pushups, I’m actually pushing a weight of 86kg. That’s more than 40kg per side, and therefor at least 2 times the weight I’ve been using.
Because of this, I’m going to integrate that session of compound excercises into my lifestyle. Each morning I’ll just do the single set of squats, good mornings, crunches and push ups. Starting with 12 now and increasing with 2 every week.
This week, due to unexpected extra workload, I had to do overtime at work. Which eventually lead to tiredness all week long…
Even though I still managed to squeeze in cardio, HIIT-cardiosessions and weight training the first 4 days of the week. But today, friday, I’m just too tired. And to make things worst, I could not gather up the willpower to keep an eye on my food intake.
Luckily, I guess because of the workout, I still managed to burn away 0.5kg, now weighing 134.5kg. Meaning I’ve lost 8.5kg so far in 8 weeks.
But from next week on, it’d be easier to stay on the food track, as my parents will be gone on a holiday for 2 months. Meaning no more “normal” food as diner for me. I’ll replace that with a preworkout and postworkoutshake. I’ll take the rest of my food during lunch at work.
I’ve been reading about two caloriecalculationformula’s.
The most practically used is probably the Harris Benedict formula, which takes your sex, weight, age, height and activity level into account to calculate your caloriesneed. For men, it’s like this: 66+(13.7*weight in kg) + (5*height in cm) – (6.8* years) *
There is a flaw in this formula though, fat percentage and lean body mass. It simply assumes the average bodyfatpercentage.
A 120kg bodybuilder with 10kg fat would surely burns more calories than a 120 guy with 50kg fat.
A formula which does takes lean body mass as an equation is Katch-McArdle ( 370 + (21.6 X lean mass in kg) * )
Two problems though.
1) You have to know your exact body fat percentage to know your lean body mass. Besides underwater analysis, there are no good ways to measure your exact amount of body fat.
Bio Impedance (scales with bodyfat sensors) are inaccurate depending on your hydration level. Skinfold calipers can only measure subcutaneous fat. Fat between organs (the dangerous one) is not being counted.
2) It does not takes your weight into account. A person with 100kg lean body mass and 10kg fat will use less energy, compared to a person with 100kg and 50kg of fat. Hey, he doesn’t needs to lug that 40kg along with every step.
I’ve decided to use the average between the result of these two formulas to get my caloriesneeds.
According to Harris Benedict, I need 4052 calories a day to maintain weight. According to Katch-McArdle: 3215. (I’m using the lowest exercise multiplier 1.55 as I workout 6 times a week)
The average= 3650.
I eat about 2400-2800 calories daily (depending if I drink a protein shake after weight training), so that’s 1250-850 calories less than maintenace daily.
Since 1kg of fat equals to 7000 calories, I can indeed lose 1kg of fat every week. If HIIT or Tabata is indeed pumping up my caloryburn then it’d be even faster. The problem is, for each kg I lose, my calorieneeds will be lessened, so I have to keep an eye on that.
Actually, I believe that most people gets into a plateau is because they maintain their diet, even though they’re losing weight. They just forget that the less you weight, the less calories you need. Although if they manage to keep their lean body mass, they can in theory still continue to lose weight. It’s just that it’s almost impossible to lose weight without losing muscle mass. Even with sufficient weight training and high protein diet. If you weigh less, your body needs less strength to tally you around daily, so it will get rid of the expensive muscle mass.
I’ve done another session of tabata training, even though I’m not sure if it’s true tabata. I’m less dead than yesterday, so I probably couldn’t bring out 120% of power during the 20 seconds of all-out cardio. And I was only able to do 16-18 seconds instead of the full 20.
Nevertheless, it was a very intense interval training.
After resting for awhile, I was able to do another 8 minutes of normal cardio, with 10-10 interval training in between. I hope that’s enough to get rid of today’s feasting….
I’m fed up with my old scale. I weigh myself 5 times and gets 5 different results. According to it, I’ve lost 3-5kg in a day… absolutely impossible of course. Even with the tabata protocol I did last night.
I’ve went out and bought a very expensive tefal bodysignal scale today.
What a pleasure to use. It’s much more accurate (as in, I now know how much my boxershort weigh) and the weight it tells is stable too, even after 10 tries.
But according to it, I’m 137.5kg now (at night). Of course, I’ve put on a bit of weight, because today I’ve ate quite a feast due to festivities. According to my schedule (with my old scale) I should be 136kg at the end of this week, and I believe I can still do that.
This was what I was training for last month, to be able to do high intensity interval training (hiit-training).
I “chose” one of the hiit-variants, tabata-training. The good thing, you only needs 4 minutes a day to get better results than 60 minutes of cardio. The bad, it’ll probably kill you in 2 minutes.
The training is like this: you go all out for 20 seconds. Then rest, completely rest for 10 seconds. Then you do 20 seconds of full power again. Until you’ve done 8 sets, totalling 4 minutes. And after a week or so, not only will your cardio-performance will improve (giving you larger lung capacity) as well as your anaerobic performance (good for catching the bus)
Nice theory, but in practice, after one month of training and able to do 60 minutes of cardio and 20 minutes of weight training, I only manage to do 3 real sets of “all out”. The rest of the 5 sets, I could only cheat out by lowering the intensity or doing 10-15 all out.
Let’s see how I’ll improve this month.
start of a new month, so i’m going into another training stage: cardioloaded. I’ve been doing 45 minutes to 1 hour cardio sessions on the elliptical. Using this little trick, I’m able to keep it up. After an hour the soles of my feet usually starts to hurt, so I have to stop though…
