brent99’s BodyBlog

So I re-engaged the weightlifting, ate clean, and weaned off of the cardio.  My weight retreated almost 4 more pounds, in spite of efforts to keep it up.  When you lose weight, its always a combination of fat AND muscle.  And I already lost a lot of muscle the previous month!

I ended up dropped 1.5 lbs of muscle, but dropped over 2 lbs of bodyfat.   In my experience, that’s not a terrible tradeoff.  It seems a bit disappointing to lose any muscle when you are lifting as much as I am, though.  Still, I’ve always found the bodyfat number to be the more reliable and to see that reverse over the past month is a real positive!  Without weightlifting last month, I lost muscle AND gained fat!
My overall bodyfat now scores in at 11.5% and my total fat is only about a pound above the lowest I’ve been in the last 2 years.  I’ll put on more weight over the next couple of weeks and see how it weighs out.  Expect a report then!

Or so the cover of one of those rags claimed.  I had little doubt my wife would pick it up on her next trip to the grocery store, which she did.  Compelled by irrational curiousity, I thumbed through the 2 page article that underpinned the cover story.

The Jessica in question here is none other than Jessica Simpson.  Her amazing breakthrough diet?  It consists of a high-protein, low fat daily diet of 1300 calories.  And, a 45-minute per day circuit training weight routine.

Of course, the article wanted to focus on her special "meals" she was eating as the "magic ingredient".  And I’m sure a line of magic meal pills will follow in the next 90 days.  But I, cleverly, saw through this and even the article itself writhed and struggled with its premise that this "diet" was the secret to her newfound success.

I was amazed.  Who would have thought of THIS????  She works out every day, and eats clean — and she’s losing weight and tightening her body?  Amazing, who would have thought something this crazy and radical could work. Someone needs to publish a book and share this groundbreaking information with the public!!!

I’ve loosened up a bit the last couple days and am gradually bringing my weight up.  Throwing in some cheat foods, a couple light beers….nothing too crazy but just trying to get those filler calories in.  Using my morning weight….I’ve gone from 169.5 to 171.5.  I don’t want to go up too fast but this seems just about right.  Oh cheating is such hard sorrow.

Going through my blog, I found something interesting.  In December, as in this past May, I was limited with a shoulder injury and did sparse weightlifting.  Also, being football season, its a given as my blog states that beer & food were in plenty.

Then, I DROPPED from 15% to 12.5%.  But this past May, doing likely the exact same thing, I went UP from 10.3% to 12.5%.  Same exact routine, two completely opposite results.  I have little doubt that workout comparisons between December and May would be strikingly similar.

It just goes to demonstrate that the body does have a thermostat of its own, so to speak.  Over the last 18 months, I’ve recorded 12.5% frequently.  That’s obviously where my body likes to settle with a nominal amount of exercise in progress.  But, history is going to change…

What I’m liking about bodyspace is that I can complain about my results this past month and not sound quite as silly.  Outside of this world, gaining a couple pounds and losing some muscle when you look like I do probably seems entirely ridiculous.  But I feel the people here understand the concept of having goals and objectives that live outside the norm.

I was really disappointed by taking a step back last month.  I honestly believed I was working out hard and making more progress and had no idea I was deluding myself.  Only when I faced the reality of my measurements did I fess up that I was letting a lot of things slide.  Yeah, it doesn’t really affect my appearance or anything, but I workout to make PROGRESS and I want to do it efficiently and effectively.  When you put in work and get negative results, its a bad feeling.

I like that there are a lot of people here who can probably identify with that.  I’m rededicating myself back to the basics and looking forward to recouping my previous gains as fast as possible.

Hydrostatic weigh-ins are considered the most accurate method available for determining bodyfat composition.  They measure your weight out of water and then in the water.  In the water, the fat in your body doesn’t contribute to the body weight so the difference in the two measurements is the fat in your body.  The rest is typically deemed "muscle mass".

I’ve been doing this for over a year, and what I have found is that "difference" ie fat is really the best number.  The "muscle mass" number includes water weight and can fluctuate somewhat wildly.  But the fat number is very stable even as your own body weight may move over ranges as high as 15 pounds (a body fat scale is driven NUTS by weight changes).  For muscle mass, I still prefer the apple-to-apple comparison of having my weight be about the same for a measurement, but even if it isn’t, the fat number is very stable and gives a really good indication of where you are at.
As I workout, I’ve become accustomed to cheering my weight staying the same or increasing.  When I start losing weight, there’s an excellent chance I’m actually losing more muscle than fat, which is generally a result of not eating enough or not lifting enough — possibly both.

I get a hydrostatic weigh-in every month and this month I had an uncharacteristic disappointment.  After more than 6 months of constant improvement, I had a HUGE set back.  I had run 60 miles as per the month before, but I had gained 2.5 pounds of fat while losing a whopping 5 pounds of muscle.  And using a weigh-in from a week earlier the results were over 3 pounds of fat gained.  That’s a whopping 8 pound deficit in a single month!  The figures set me back to January and explain why my recent photos look so bad.  <sic>

So now….why why why?  Ok, time to do a bit of honesty time.  Have I eaten out a LOT in the past month?  Yeah.  How about beer?  Mmmm, guilty there too.  So eating hasn’t been clean.  How about the workouts?  Well, haven’t really lifted that much in the past month either.  And while I did rack up 60 miles, I fell behind and did them in large spurts of 4-to-5 miles, rather than mostly 3s like the previous month.  I didn’t even realize it, but it sounds like I’ve been sliding harder than I realized.
Also, there probably is merit to the fact that I’m at about 12.5% bf again and that seems to be where my body is comfortable.  I maintain that level pretty easily, but it appears that to get leaner I really need to work it.  So my body may have used the opportunity to go where it likes to be.

I know I can get those 5 pounds of muscle back on pretty quick.  But the 2.5 pound of fat is gonna be stubborn.  If I work it, can I even get back to where I was a month ago?  I guess we’ll find out.  I’ve already stepped up the weight training again, and I feel that’ll right the ship quickly.  As for beers, I think I’ll go back to counting them with 1 hand for a while, and I won’t assume that just because I’m running, I can eat whatever the hell I want.

In my last blog, I used a very unsubstantiated assumption to make a point.  That assumption was that it takes 30 miles of running to burn off 1 pound of fat.  It almost sounds, at first glance, a bit crazy to say that.  30 miles is a LOT and we are all conditioned to think as losing 1 pound as pretty much "nothing" — something you could do crossing the street or skipping a meal.  I never made an attempt to support that assumption, however.  I will do so now.

Running 1 mile, or for a rather ordinary person such as myself and perhaps you (although this is bodybuilding.com so who knows) takes roughly 10 minutes and will burn over 100 calories theoretically.  I use "run" lightly because really WHATEVER it is you are doing to get your heart rate into the low-to-mid 100s qualifies.  Basically, 10 minutes of moderately intensive exercise of any type qualifies in my mind for general cardio work.

So if you run for 3 miles, or 30 minutes, you may if you are lucky work off as much as 350 calories.  Across 10 workouts for a total of 30 miles, you might manage to work off as much as 3500 calories.

Now, 1 pound of fat is 3500 calories.  If you have 100% fat utilization during your workout in burning that 3500 calories, you would work off 1 pound.   In other words, my assumption that you have to "run" 180 miles to lose 5 pounds was hideously OPTIMISTIC.  It seems like only in the most idealized scenario would you accomplish this!  And even if you aren’t burning fat, you would lose a pounds worth of calories and to many people, a pound is a pound when evaluating their results.  And since the argument was made in a mainstream context, it is a fair one.
There are a few other factors to keep in mind.  Exercise can boost your metabolism over the long term, causing you to burn more calories not only when you are on the treadmill but throughout the day.  Studies show that a cardio workout could have effects on body metabolism for as long as 24 hours following a workout.  It also may have impacts on how you use and store food.  So perhaps there are some secondary reasons that might make these assumptions plausible.  On the other hand, perhaps it’ll take as much as 60 miles to work off a pound of FAT.
The residual point is: my 30 miles aka 5 hours of cardio certainly wasn’t TOO MUCH.  If anything, it wasn’t enough.  Which underscores the point even more that REAL results take a tremendous amount of REAL work and REAL time to achieve.  The proof is in the underlying math.  It wouldn’t surprise me if it really required 10 hours of cardio supplemented with 3500 ADDITIONAL calories from a pure protein source to really burn off 5 pounds of fat while maintaining your muscle base.