D.Alan’s BodyBlog

BF% is down another %!  Measured that tonight and found that little fact… too cool.  Actually I am down enough in the weight and bf% that I really need to look at getting some new clothes, which is kind of cool.  I always wore XL shirts because I didn’t want things too tight on my overbulked frame and now the XL stuff is just too big.  Time to drop a size.  Also my pants are getting way too loose.  Though I don’t understand how the pants that I have that say they’re for a 36 inch waist and my hips measure 36" and my waist is currently 37" can be so loose.  It’s like the pants are 38" or something, but the tag says 36".  Whatever.  Some of the pants were snug before, and now they’re loose, that’s the important thing.

Measurement night.  Time to celebrate!  A number of notables: namely the size loss in my arms seems to have stopped; I have no loss from last month to this month.  Maybe I have stopped losing fat from them, and now I can FINALLY see some gains in the muscle…  Waist is down another half inch, chest is up another quarter inch, and the best measurement: the body fat is down another 2%!  I have finally broken the 20% mark and am down to 18%!  Psyched?  You bet!

Took a bunch of pix, too, but will have to go through them and see which are worthy of sharing and get those posted over the next day or two.  The pix will look a bit better, too… I have finally conquered the white balance setting in my camera so now I won’t look orange in my pix taken under the incandescent lights.

Motto this week: stick with it! My weight finally broke the 181 mark and got down to 180.  One pound doesn’t seem like a lot, and it isn’t, but one look at my weight chart will show that this IS a big deal.  I have been hitting 181 on and off since Christmas week, once getting down to about 180.5, but never going any lower.  I’d get to 181 and then bounce up to 182 or even 183 and slowly go back down again only to hit 181 and bounce back up again.  It was frustrating and was leading to discouragement and was even the subject of my last blog entry.  But I kept at everything thinking if I stick to the diet and lifting, it will come.  And it did.

Now to shoot for 175… I’m trying to get that bf% down.  It’s stayed at 20% the last two times I took it, so at least it hasn’t gone up again.

I seem to have hit a plateau in my weight loss.  My weight hasn’t been below 181 so far and bumps around a bit and goes back down, but so far not below 181.  Kind of discouraging, but it’s also some impetus to keep at it, maybe changing something… something in the diet, something in workout routine, something.  Now it’s a challenge to get it below 181!  Of course, I may be actually adding some muscle mass which would counteract the weight change vs. fat loss, but it seems like I haven’t been hitting things hard enough to make a difference in my weight.  But, never having done this before, how would I know? The last time I checked the body fat % (a week ago) it was down a little, so if the bf% down but not the weight, maybe I am adding some muscle… cool!

Learned the importance of taking pictures this week.  I had no idea that I had made the progress I have so far until I got looking at some pix I snapped trying to get a shot or two of my still-too-small-but-growing traps.  The trap pix didn’t show anything worth sharing, but the front relaxed pic I snapped just for the heck of it (I am taking my progress pix around the 20th of each month) and put against my previous progress photo really opened my eyes.  Wow!  This diet-minding and working out stuff is really working!

I looked at my photo from October when I started into this seriously and saw, perhaps for the first time, how fat/chubby/tubby/overbulked ;) I really was.  That was an eye-opener alone.  I always knew I was carrying more than I should for weight, but always thought "it wasn’t much" over what it should be.  Wrong!

My weight has been nudging 180 the last couple of days.  Like 180.5, so I am not reporting it as 180 until I really hit 180.  Years ago when I wanted to reduce a bit (and was weighing around 205/210, there was a time I was nearing 220) I always thought 180 would be a good weight to get down to — not knowing anything about body fat percentages.  Now that I am there and still have a flabby belly and no visible abs I see that I need to trim yet more.  I also now know that weighing 180 with 10% bf is far different from 180 with 20% bf.

Bottom line: take good pix from the same angles periodically to keep track of your progress!  You see yourself everyday and don’t notice the subtle changes, but the camera does!

I managed to get through the holidays with no appreciable gain (or loss for that matter) in my weight, which I guess is a good thing.  My weight did take another funny jump up a few pounds and then back a few days later like happened last month.  I think I know what it is… too much pizza on Saturday night and the salt causes me to retain water.  I figured this out by peeing endlessly on Sunday and Monday and then my weight was back to where it had been.  The last time that happened was over a weekend…  Moral of the story: back off on the pizza!  Shouldn’t be eating the stuff anyway.

I also managed to stick with the lifting schedule through the holidays, carefully putting "rest" days on days like the 25th and the office Christmas party and so on and I never missed a workout in a given week.  I was just doing some posing in the mirror (tonight was chest and tris) and I see that I suddenly have traps!  I’ll have to see if I can make the camera see them… I have bis and tris, too, but the camera doesn’t see them as well as I do!