New Diet, New Training, New Person
I was dieting since March 1st for a show at the end of April. For the first time I failed at my goals. I couldn’t lose the weight as planned. I dieted for six weeks and lost only 5 lbs, when I had planned on losing 2 lbs per week. It could be because of a few things, but diet was not one of them, as I used the same diet I’ve used before to drop fat.
1) I was convinced to try a 3X a week full body workout plan. Each day had 4 exercises, 1st day 5 sets/5 reps, 2nd day 3 sets/9 reps, third day 2 sets/20 reps. I was convinced for a couple of reasons, one being that several prefessional figure competitors used this and succeeded before a competition. Of course the plan was backed by logical reasoning and a guy with a legitiamate experience in the fitness industry. The claim was that I would drop massive bodyfat and gain muscle (neither happened). But sometimes I’ve realized Doctors don’t even know what they’re talking about. This plan didn’t work for me. I can say I at least gave the full body thing a try. Now I know I’ll never do it again.
2) My sleep patterns. I got switched to night shift and was losing sleep. I was only sleeping 2-3 hours at a time. My hormones were all screwed up as I stayed up until 8am on the nights I had to work and switched back to normal on my days off.
Now that it won’t be feasible to compete when planned, I’ve picked a new date of August 15th. This is a week before my birthday, and enough time to get things straight. I need to focus mentally, switch up my training, and regulate my sleep. Now every day, to include my days off, i am staying up until 8am in the morning. It’s difficult convincing myself it’s morning when I get up, and that it’s night when the sun is coming up. The last few days have been good, I’ve been able to sleep at least six hours straight. The best part is, I’m about to go to the gym right now and it’s 11:15 pm. I can grunt as loud as I want and not worry about people staring at me in amazement, wondering why is that girl grunting and lifting so much weight? I swear, sometimes older men look at me like I am in violation of some moral rule that says women are not supposed to lift weights and that I am offending their manhood. Deal with it! In the meantime, find somebody else to stare at! As a matter of fact, if you looked at yourself in the mirror maybe you’d realize how ridiculous you look when your flopping around those weights that are too heavy for you. Anyways, back to the plan.
The new plan is to not start dieting until May, eat more and sleep more. Because I’ll be eating a lot more (2,400 calories a day), I’ll need to train HARDER! I will go back to doing a 4 day split. These seem to always work best for me. I used to do the traditional 1-2 bodyparts a day. I will hybrid my previous plan with my old school stuff to come up with a genius plan that I know will work for me because it is not from a magazine or website, it is a compilation of the things I’ve tried and mistakes I’ve made. I’ve tried almost everything now, from crazy supersetting high volume training, to powerlifting techniques, from reps from 6 to 30, sets from 6 to 30, and now I think I might nail it for the time being, and then when I need to switch some things up. But I think I’ll keep the training frequency consistent.
Here goes, train days 1, 2. Cardio only day 3. Train days 4, 5. Rest days 6,7 but add cardio if needed on one day. Days 1 and 3, upper body. Days 2 and 4, lower body. I’ll do mostly compound movements and bodyweight movements, adding a couple of isolation stuff in the end. I’ll start out with compound movements in the 15-20 rep range, and as I move on I’ll lower the reps to 8-10 and increase the weight. I’ll switch up the workouts every single time and focus on different groups each time, but doing compound movements that will encompass all muscles in the upper/lower body as well. I’ll keep all workouts less than an hour. I’ll do cardio completely separate.
Diet- I got too fat over the winter, eating too many complex carbs. I will keep the calories the same, but my carbs must be only fruits and vegetables. I know oats are the staple food, but I just can’t handle them. I added just more oats in my diet before and got too fat. So now I have to rule them out completely, which is hard because I love them. I’ll have to try to find carbs in fruits and veggies that will stick with me longer. Grapefruit has a lower GI, and if I eat a lot of fiber I should get enough energy. I think eating too many carbs as oats in the off season has screwed up my metabolism completely. Before when my body was accustomed to a low carb diet and energy levels were high, I could drop weight so easily. And when I would eat carbs they would just weight me down and make me tired, so I wouldn’t eat them. When I "bulked up" for several months I forced them down and ate them the first three meals each day. Now because of that I think I am having a harder time losing weight. I need to "ween" myself off of the carbs again so my body starts burning fat for fuel. I know for a fact that you DO NOT need carbs for functioning, yes even your brain. Straihgt from by biochemistry professor. People disagree because when you low carb diet at first you have a hard time thinking clearly and stuff. If people would just stick to a diet like I did before through the hard times they would realize that with no carbs for a while your body will eventually adjust, and your body makes the necessary changes to fuel your brain and body with your fat reserves. This is when you become ultimately lean, ripped, and vascular. You can feel your body burning off all the fat you eat. I had energy and did think clearly. Everything was great and I looked my best. I can’t believe I screwed it all up by trying to "bulk" again and start pigging out on carbs. What’s funny is you always want what you don’t have. When I was 120 lbs and 10% bodyfat, something I had wanted for years, I thought I didn’t have enough muscle. I wanted more shape like those girls at my NPC show who had the boulder shoulders and quads the size of my waist. So I thiought I needed to bulk up. How stupid I was!! I’ll never screw this up again. Once I get back on track I’m going to stay there, and before I could have. I liked and adapted to my diet. It wasn’t a diet anymore. It was just my lifestyle. I’ll get there again, and it’s going to start here with cutting out my oats, rice, cereals and sticking only to fruits and veggies for my carbs. Then throughout my life when I feel the need to splurge, I may have a cheat meal once and a while. But the funny thing was, when I was on my diet before, I adapted to it so well that I didn’t ever even want to cheat.
And the adventure begins………………………………..
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