My plan was to start by cutting out 1 meal a day for 3 days. Day 4 I would add it back in and maybe a little more because my training program was also pretty intense and I didn’t want to feel really beat up all the time.
I did this for 3 days and as you can see on Day 4, I was down 2.5lbs from my high of that week. I added in the meal as planned and my weight went back up. The good part was that I saw some initial success which motivated me to keep going. The next week was a little better. The 3rd week as you can see, was a complete reversal of the first 2 weeks. Now I knew what worked and what didn’t, and executed my plan with adjustments. The last 3 weeks showed consistency.
The breakdown of each week:
The 1st week was HARD!!
Cutting out a meal made me feel like I was going to starve by the end of the day. If I hadn’t seen progress on the 3rd day, there was a 0% chance I was going to continue.
What does 1 meal look like?
A staple meal is ground beef, sautéed onions, red peppers and 1/3 baked sweet potato. Sometimes it had some cheese melted on top or BBQ sauce in it. A serving is about 2-3 cups. This could be anywhere between 300-600 calories depending on the serving size.
I was so ready to add it back in on the 4th day! As I kept doing this though, my appetite started to change around the beginning of the 2nd week. I wasn’t as hungry.
3rd week-What happened!?
I was tired from the week before and thought I was eating the same amount of food, but actually I was eating a little more than normal. Unconsciously, my portions were a little bigger and I was justifying having a snack at night. As you can see, the numbers went back up. Even though I was still hungry in some cases, I was making up for it somewhere.
4-6th week consistency returns.
I accepted being a little hungry at the end of each night. I also knew that when I started to feel my hunger cues in the middle of the day to stop and eat my lunch slowly with a good amount of water. This left me feeling like I could still eat, but I was okay because I felt there was enough in my stomach to hold me over.
Biggest difference makers?
Using caffeine.
I don’t drink coffee or use caffeine ever. I don’t metabolize it well which means I have a huge energy jump and then a very fast crash. I micro-dosed this in the morning with a powdered drink and only used ½ the serving size at 8am and the other half around 1pm. This helped tremendously throughout the day with keeping my appetite pretty easy to manage after the 1st week.
Planning my meals.
Having everything mapped out made it easy to know that this was what I was having and all that I was having. If I was going to have more, I had to make a conscious effort to get it.
Having a conversation with my girlfriend about not buying or having treats available in the house was huge.
This was tough because it was Girl Scout cookie time! She had already bought them and was nice enough to hide them so I couldn’t easily access them.
Getting out of the kitchen!
Rather than hang around in the kitchen searching for things to eat when I was feeling that sense of wanting something after dinner, I had a huge glass of water and went into the living room and kept myself busy until it was bedtime. Sometimes that meant actually going to bed 30min earlier than normal just so I wouldn’t have to use more willpower to avoid the kitchen.
So was it worth it?
6 weeks for 6.5 lbs and 2% body fat.
Yes. I don’t think the metrics accurately describe what has been gained. I have a new appreciation for how much food I actually need each day.
I feel better.
I am starting to see muscles that I haven’t seen in a long time. I feel like I am way more in tune with my body and have control over what I am doing with it rather than mindlessly trying to satiate an emotion. I will say that I as started to see some drops in weight and inches I thought I would look like the cover model of Muscle and Fitness in no time! Not the case. We have to appreciate that people that have physiques very outside the norm(fitness models) weren't built on a 60 day program. I also have this understanding that if I keep this up for another 6 weeks, I will be back at the body fat percent I was when playing soccer in college but close to 15lbs heavier. That would be really cool.
Nutrition is hard.
There are tons of things that make it easy to get sidetracked. High-calorie foods, hyper-palatable food, people in our circle of influence, our own biases and rational, the environment we live in and dealing with our own emotional challenges. Each of those can be really tough on its own. Don’t beat yourself up if you aren’t where you want to be right now. You are going to miss some steps and that’s okay.
Sustainable change is not a fast process!
Become your own scientist and run an experiment and make your adjustments as you go.
In our next newsletter we will go over what I actually ate, you might be surprised (Part 2). Then we will look at why keeping metrics is super helpful in streamlining the process and how it shaped my behavior (Part 3). What did I learn from my training (Part 4) and finally how much weight do you have to move in order to see a training adaptation (Part 5)?
