King_Marmoset!’s BodyBlog

>>> Folks, I just completed another 12 week challenge.  My goal was to add lean muscle.  Here is the last entry in my journal for this challenge:  

Week 12 1.19.2009

Protein: 30%
Fats: 50%
Carbs: 19%
Fiber: 21.5 grams
3,645 average calories per day

Vittles consumed: Free range eggs, raw milk from a grass fed cow, organic blue berries, canned tuna, unsalted raw almonds/walnuts/cashews/filberts, grilled chicken breast, organic natural peanut butter, organic spinach, organic broccoli, organic green peppers, onions, organic baby carrots, organic black beans, organic kidney beans, tortilla soup, grass fed beef, grain fed beef, jalapeno peppers, raw honey, brown rice, ezekiel bread, 1 handful popcorn (no butter), asiago cheese, organic chicken sausage, organic marinara, pepperoni, italian wedding soup, chicken soup

Booze: 2 sugar-free Red Bull and grape vodka

Whole eggs consumed: 64

Starting weight week 1: 202.5 lbs
Last Week (week 11): 210 lbs
Current weight (week 12): 213 lbs

Body fat % in the beginning: 8%
Last week: 11%
This week: 11% (according to the calipers, naturally)

Goal(s) I want to accomplish during this Challenge:
I’ve never put all my energies into gaining muscle before. I want to put on as much lean muscle mass as I can over the next 12 weeks and NOT put on any substantial fat. This challenge will be experiment heavy in a lot of ways; I’m hoping to learn as much as I can.

The Good: My main goal for this challenge was to put on muscle. Mission accomplished. Adding some mass to my arms, delts, back, and chest makes me very happy.

My body building brain took a quantum leap forward during this challenge in terms of learning what works. Lifting weight I can handle really helped my muscular development in areas I was greatly lagging in. Finding which exercises work for certain groups really helped me too. I find my success rate increases the more introspective I get.

The Bad: I added way more blubber than I wanted to during this challenge. In shifting my brain into a more anabolic way of doing things I didn’t stick to a calorie plan of any kind. I made sure to go out of my way to eat as much clean anabolic food as I possibly could. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter what you are eating, but if you over eat you’ll gain fat. This was my first "bulk" and I definitely learned as far as that goes.

During this challenge I wasn’t going to let my desire to eat clean impact social situations. There were a ton of birthdays, holidays, family get togethers, etc during this challenge. I’m not saying I pigged out, but I definitely ate more dirty food than I’d like. All that dirty food definitely showed up on my frame.

I felt I ate more for macros while mostly ignoring micros. I still ate a nutrient rich diet, but it wasn’t as nutrient rich as I liked. I’d like to apologize to vegetables for neglecting you from time to time.

The Ugly: Doing a fitness challenge when you have a death in the family is simply impossible. I should say that when the death involves a car wreck, protracted coma, and then death…the challenge simply has to be suspended.

While at the hospital for countless hours, I had to force myself and my family members to the cafeteria simply to make sure we ate something. As you can imagine, a cafeteria isn’t conducive to our way of doing business. My nutrition suffered greatly during this time.

It’s not possible to duck out of the hospital in that situation to get to gym.

I realize if I was doing a 30 challenge I certainly would have failed. So, this challenge was really 10 weeks out of 12. Thanks, peeps, for sticking with me while I dealt with that.

Final thoughts: Yeah, I did accomplish my goal of gaining muscle. However, I’m not very happy with the blubber I added. Did I save myself so I could save the world? No. Small battles were won and small battles were lost. This story continues on…

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