D.Alan’s BodyBlog

Week 18.  Measurement and pix night!  Weight has been nudging around 176 all week (started at 190 back in October).  Good results were observed formally in the measurements this month: biceps are up a quarter of an inch, waist is down another half.  Lost a little in the chest, but that was to be expected since my pecs are still rather flabby.  There’s some nice hard muscle under there, I can feel it, but they’re still well obscured by the fat.  Body fat % pinches were down another mm or so in total this week.  Not enough for another percentage drop, but I’ll take what I can get.

Took a round of progress pix and will need some time to make a couple of comparison montages to post.  Darn arms are hard to photograph.  They look great to me in real life, but I just can’t get the right pose for the camera to see the same thing.  Oh well, guess I just have to keep making them bigger!

Motto this week: stick with it.  I did all that griping in the last couple of posts about my weight and this week it slowly came back down again and appears to be staying this time.  It is discouraging when it pops back up, seemingly without reason, but rather than give up and go stuff myself with chocolate (major cheat food for me: give me all your chocolate and no one will get hurt), I kept plugging away… and am rewarded.  I also got some encouraging feedback from the bodyspace folks, which always helps.

Did a bf% pinch tonight and am down another couple of mm and thus another %, woo hoo.  Now I am down in the 16% area… far cry from the 23+% I started at a few months ago.  The best part is I am having fun with this and haven’t starved.  If you do it right you don’t starve.  I still have a ways to go with the bf% as there is still a fair amount of fat on my pecs and around my midsection.  That’ll be the next thing I’ll be griping about, my chest size will be falling

Just had a session with the mirror after my biceps and back routine and am lovin’ what I am seeing.  No pix yet.  Next weekend is the month mark for full measurements and pix.  Meanwhile I will be keeping at it.

Stupid weight.  Bounces around like a ping-pong ball so I never know where I am at.  Got down to 177 mid-week and I get all psyched and excited, and two days later it’s up nearly three pounds; I almost got back to 180 again.  It has settled back at 179 the last few days, sigh.  I don’t think I have put any fat on, I did a bf% pinch last night and it is down another mm or two, nothing earth shattering, but also not up, either.  So I guess I should just ignore the weight for the most part.  Well, no, not ignore it, just not get too excited about it.  Maybe I am *finally* adding some muscle weight?  I did some incline and decline chest flyes and presses this week… maybe that helped.  As I have said before, I have never done this before so I have no idea what is going on!

In the positives, I got looking over the record keeping on this BB project and see that I am down 23 mm in the bf% pinch totals since mid-October when I started all of this.  My waist is down two inches.  I’ve gotten some comments from friends an coworkers about how good I am looking.  The feedback from BodySpacers is positive and encouraging.  I am doing OK… the progress is just so seemingly and often frustratingly slow at times.  My right elbow continues to be sore if I train too heavy so that is also holding me back some, I have to be careful not to aggravate or injure that.

Just gotta keep plugging away…

BF% is unchanged this week.  Pinches are exactly the same as last week, but the oblique was down 1 mm.  Better than a gain, I guess!  All the little changes add up to big changes. 

It was a so-so week in the BBing.  Still sticking to the routines and my weight was down to my current lowest ever (178) earlier in the week but then it starting creeping up again at the end of the week, and as far as I know I wasn’t doing anything any differently.  Could be a slight muscle gain, could be some water gain, who knows.  It gets discouraging at times and I can see how people end up quitting the quest for their goals because this is a long, hard road and there aren’t too many places that tell you that up front.  Also the BF% is a more telling number than the weight alone, esp. with doing the lifting because of course your weight is going to yo-yo around between the melting fat and the gaining muscle.  Just gotta keep focused on the long-term goal and keep plugging away.