CN: weight, diet, fitness, &c.
I’m about four weeks into what I’d tentatively call my first serious cut. I’ve barely missed a weigh-in (I only bother in the morning, right after I’ve gotten up) and I’ve tracked my food every single day. I’m down a smallish number of pounds, outside the noise threshold but fewer than I’d like; but this is sort of exciting in that the process feels like it’s working. I haven’t dropped much weight because I’ve eaten a little too much food, I can see what the patterns are in the too-muchness of the food, and I can see how to shift them to dial the deficit up a bit.
I’m setting this down not to launch a new career as any kind of fitness influencer, but maybe as just a sketch of an approach in case anyone’s interested in trying to do this in a way that’s relatively low-effort.
- I do lift reasonably heavy three times a week.
- I do walk about 10,000 steps a day.
- I do prioritize protein, including supplementing with protein powder. I don’t know if it’s practical for me to consume the broscience consensus of a gram per pound of bodyweight every day; at 6’3″ and a bit above 230 pounds, a typical day is 160-180g of protein.
- I do weigh myself almost every day.
- I do try to track 95+% of what I eat. I’ve definitely spotted myself a couple of mouthfuls of things that are absolutely not calorie-free, but I don’t let too much of that stuff go untracked.
- I do evaluate everything based on seven-day trailing averages. Way easier to see trends through the day-to-day noise.
- I don’t sweat precision in food tracking. I don’t weigh food, I eyeball measurements, I quickly look for the closest analogue to what I’m eating in the MyFitnessPal database. Completeness > precision.
- I don’t sweat macros other than protein. This means I generally eat more fat and less carbohydrate than the fitness YouTubers recommend. So far this hasn’t resulted in a ton of hunger but has resulted in low energy; I’m not sure if nudging the macros toward carbs would improve things, but some folks certainly think it might.
- I don’t categorically avoid anything: carbs, fats, alcohol, dessert. (This would probably be working better if I did categorically avoid alcohol and dessert.) But I absolutely do check my day’s calories in making decisions about whether to eat or drink a given thing. I don’t always make the right decision, but way more often than I would if I weren’t checking.
- I don’t plan to do this for much more than 8 weeks straight, regardless of where I end up. The plan after that is to try to figure out what maintenance looks like and coast for a little while, then try another cut.
- I don’t have a six-pack, and I doubt I’ll achieve one at the level of effort I’m describing here. That’s fine. I have a goal weight, which I won’t hit by the end of this cut; also fine.
I can see myself tightening up various aspects of this business as the cut goes on. But most of what this is about is doing it at a level of seriousness that allows me to assess how much control I have over my weight. And the evidence appears to suggest that, at least for now, around my current weight range, I do have a good bit of control — conditional on knowing how much I’m eating and managing toward a moderate calorie deficit. Knowing that I have some control is honestly a huge step into actually putting more effort in, because I have some expectation of return.
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