D.Alan’s BodyBlog

I got caught up on the workout routines through the week after getting off track a bit with my vacation last weekend.  Also bought a pair of dumbbells in a weight that I didn’t have so now I can up the ante a bit on some of the exercises.  Did that tonight with the biceps exercises and think I had best bicep pump to date.

Weight has held steady.  Nudged down just a bit to 174, but at least it’s not rocketing upward.  Had a picture commenter say this week that my progress is not enough for the five months I have been at this.  I am going at this at my pace, and am very pleased with my results so far, thanks.  Yeah, if I were more anal about the diet and actually did some cardio I could probably drop the weight a bit faster, but geez, at over 40 I’ll be left looking like a sharpei wrinkle dog if I lose the weight too fast.  Already I can see some of that over my abs; there’s a hint of it over my navel in my current avi pic.  I’m trying to replace the fat with muscle…  Oh well, there’s always a detractor in the crowd.  That’s one of the reasons I haven’t joined a gym… there’s always going to be someone who thinks they know more/better etc. than you.  Sometimes they do, but it seems like more often they don’t.  I have seen comments about that in a number of other blogs.

I’m getting confused/frustrated on the body fat measuring.  I have been doing the five pinch kind (triceps, chest, abdomen, oblique and thigh) and using a chart I found on another web site.  I thought I was getting results that made sense.  They say the love handles disappear around 15% and my love handles are significantly reduced and I have been getting results around 15%.  Then I got looking around on bb.com and came across this one page: http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/drobson98.htm and got really confused.  They have an online calculator where you punch in your weight, age and three pinches and it computes your BF %.  OK.  I did that and it came out to 9.8%  You gotta be kidding me.  I know I am no where near 10%, much less below it!  Then there’s the videos on that same page that show you how to do the pinches.  Yeah right.  Everything says the abdomen pinch should be a vertical pinch one inch from your navel.  Uh huh.  The video shows the guy taking a horizontal pinch almost on the the guy’s oblique, both on the fit bodybuilder and the chunky average guy.  Must be their inch is bigger than mine, or something.

I also have the tables for the military "quick" method, where you subtract your neck measurement from your waist measurement and look it up on the table based on your height.  When I first started all this both the five-pinch method and the military one agreed, I was at around 23%.  Now, it’s a completely different story.  The pinches are telling me around 15%, the military tables are saying 19-point-something%.  That doesn’t seem right since, as I mentioned, the love handles are almost gone, so that would indicate something well below 19%.  Then there’s that stupid web page I cited telling me I’m at 9.8%.  For now I am sticking with my pinches.  It’s only a number anyway.  If nothing else, the changes in the measurements tell me my progress.

Keep liftin’.

Into Week 24.  Couldn’t post my Saturday update for Week 23 because I was away visiting with friends for the Easter weekend. Not that I didn’t have Internet access, I was able to keep up somewhat with BodySpace a bit, but I didn’t have a lot of spare time.  It was my first away-from-home trip since I started seriously into the BBing… could I manage to stick to the diet and maybe squeak in a workout?  Seemed like fat chance.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my friends dearly, they’re a couple I met in college and we have stayed in close touch ever since.  They, however, are both endomorphs and pay lip service to wanting to reduce and get in shape, but go about it all wrong, especially for their body types.  The wife of the pair is extremely opinionated and jumps on every diet fad that comes along.  She told me ahead of my arrival that they are "now eating healthy" primarily because their one daughter has a yet-unidentified food allergy, despite a lot of testing.  So "eating healthy"  really meant that they are eating a lot of organic and no added preservative stuff, which of course isn’t a bad thing, but good grief, how they eat!  Meal times are completely erratic… I tried to eat every three hours but eventually gave up.  The meals include a lot of cheese, one breakfast had copious amounts of bacon… meanwhile the Mrs. is being pious about how we can’t have a particular vegetable with dinner because we are already having enough starch… hello!  I don’t think the starch is your problem!  She thinks she’s micromanaging the meals for the better, but I don’t think she’s succeeding.

There wasn’t a bathroom scale to be seen… so I was fretting about how much weight I may be putting on since now my eating schedule was out of whack and with what we were eating.  The Mrs. claims she is into cardio, saying she walks a lot several times a week and I spotted a "Curves" tag on her car key ring, and she was bragging about how she has dropped 27 lbs.  Good for her if she has, but I sure can’t confirm it… and I haven’t seen her in a year and can’t honestly say I see a difference from last year.  She’s about 5-5 and maybe about 240 lbs.  As I said she’s an endomorph so I know she has a rough road for weight loss.  But she just isn’t doing it right!  The concept of adapting diet and workout for her body type never crossed her lips.

I didn’t say a thing about any of the weight loss stuff.  For one thing, there was never a comment in my direction about the 15 noticeable pounds I have dropped.  In fact the one day as she was going on about cooking "so healthy" she made a comment about "Oh, you’ll go home nice and lean" because of spending four days with her cooking.  And I am not now?  Also I didn’t say anything because when she has her mind set on something, you can’t tell her anything, so I didn’t even try.  She later made a comment about my new appearance — sort of — at one of the meals.  I politely declined sour cream on the taco salads we were having and she said "Oh, that’s why DA looks like he does: no sour cream and no butter" as I had declined butter on my waffles that we had earlier in the day for breakfast.  Um, it’s more than just cutting back on the fats, dear.  And thanks (I think) for the off-hand comment, but I kept my mouth shut.

Hubby is also an endomorph.  He’s about 5-8 or 5-9, probably about 250 or 260, and has been rather overweight most of his life.  They have this nice home gym machine that they bought more than a year ago and he claims to use it at times.  I was looking forward to getting in a couple of workouts on it during my visit only to find it has been dismantled for the moment because they are in the middle of redecorating the family rumpus room where the weight machine and other recreational stuff is.  Great.  They also have a NordiTrack and hubby has spent a lot of time on it over the years to no avail to his weight.  Hubby and I are very close and I have talked with him on email what I have been doing since October and giving him hints on what he could maybe try differently but the committment for both of them just isn’t there.  So I don’t push it.

Got back home late last night and jumped on my scale and was surprised to find that I hadn’t gained or lost; I was right where I was when I left four days before.  Woo hoo.  I guess I have successfully cranked up my metabolism to deal with burning off nearly all what I eat  … even on an erratic schedule and no workouts.  I was relieved.

Now I am a bit out of sync with my workouts, but I will get things going.  I did do an abs routine at my friend’s as I don’t need any equipment for that other than a DB for the side bends, so I just didnt do those.  Just now at home I did my biceps and back and did my monthly measurements… more good news.  Yeah, I know you shouldn’t measure right after a workout, but that’s what I have been doing so let’s keep it consistent.

BF% is down another 3mm from last week and has dropped me down into the 14% range… cool!  Biceps are up another quarter inch.  Chest dropped some, but I knew that would happen because there is still the jiggly stuff on my pecs to melt off.  I need to take some monthly progress pix.

Overall I am really pleased.  I "survived" a trip/break away from the eating and workout routine and didn’t screw up my progress, and my monthly progress is still cranking along.  Oh, and before I left for the trip I used it as an excuse to do some clothes shopping and it was GREAT to buy some pants that were down a size from what I have been wearing, as well as buying some new smaller belts… proof positive that I am getting somewhere.

Psyched?  You bet!

Week 22.  Weight held around 175, bf% is unchanged from last week.  After my arm workout tonight it looked like I had the best pump so far in my arms, which was really cool.  Tried to take a few pix, but as usual my lighting or whatever isn’t quite right and it just doesn’t come through in the pix what I think I see in the mirror.  The guns at least look like they’re maybe a bit bigger.  Measurement night is still another week+ off and I am resisting temptation to check now.

Overall my definition seems to be a bit more noticeable, at least to me.  I find myself by a mirror for some other task and I’m suddenly saying to myself, "Wow, look at those pecs" or "check out the bis!"  Certain ways I move I think I can see my adonis belt trying to show through the fat… but maybe it’s my imagination.

Gotta keep at it.

Week 20.  A better week than last!  My back has gotten nearly back to normal so it doesn’t hurt to move certain ways, or get stiff if I sit or stand too long, and have no problems doing any of the lifting that I do.

Figured out my sudden weight gain last week… Ibuprofen causes water retention.  Look it up on the Internet.  I was taking prescription strength Ibuprofen for my back pain, and the weight gain coincided with when I started the IB.  I stopped taking it last weekend when my back was getting better and my weight got back to where it was before my back went out… and I peed a lot for a day or two.  Gotta remember that.

So, my weight made it back down to 175 later in the week, which is my latest low.  Also took my weekly BF% pinch tonight and it’s down another 5 mm, so that’s another % or so… awesome.  I am now in the 15% range.  Ultimately I would like to get to around 10%.  I am not looking to do any kind of bodybuilding competing or anything like that so I can’t see going below 10%.  We’ll see.  To be 10% by summer would be great.  The way things have been going so far, I just might make it.

Week 19.  Not a great week.  Tuesday my lower back went out on me and by Tuesday night I was so uncomfortable that I couldn’t sleep in bed.  I was flat on the floor with my knees up and a heating pad under me and barely slept… great.  I have no idea why it went out, it’s been over a year since it happened last.  I didn’t do anything "stupid" moving somehing heavy, and didn’t try anything new in the lifting that could be to blame.  Really pissed me off because another one of the reasons I started lifting seriously was to strengthen my core and hopefully prevent these lower back episodes.  I have had them off and on in the past.

Wednesday morning it was some better.  I figured out how to do some stretching to get things sort of back in place and with some Ibuprofen I was good to go, mostly.  I could function well enough to go to work.  It was still sore Thursday which was supposed to be my leg and abs day.  Did OK with the leg routines, but all I could manage with the abs was regular crunches, and that was pushing the envelope.  I didn’t dare try reverse or double crunches or v-ups… makes me cringe in pain just to think about it.  It’s been getting progressively better, and I did OK tonight with biceps and back, I could do bent over rows, so I guess there’s hope.  Tomorrow is supposed to be abs alone, maybe with luck I can do some more of what I need to.

The other downer to the week was my weight again.  Yeah, I said I would ignore it, but Monday I weighed 175, a new low for me, and then it shot right up again the next day and has now hovered at 178 for a few days.  WTF?  Oh well.  I checked the bf% mid-week and tonight and it’s no different from last weekend, so I am not going to worry too much about the weight… I guess.  Still trying to trim off some more flab around my middle and on my chest.

Hopefully this week will be better!