LOL, no seriously though, I am cutting again and so far so good. This time around I am in no rush, b/c I am not starting from a condition where I look all sloppy. I actually started from around 11-13% and after 2.5 weeks I think I’m around 10-12% now. I’ve lost around 2 lbs of straight fat… not water weight. I am not eating a low carb diet, so my glycogen stores are pretty full… basically my fluid balance isn’t fluctuating much at all. Mostly from not having high carb days and low carb days. For the 1st time in, well, as long as I can remember at this point, I’ve actually had my weight hold for as long as 6 days with no fluctuation… 6 mornings straight I was 162.0 lbs the 1st week I started.
Anyway, another really cool thing is last time I was at 162 lbs and cutting (in the summer) I was eating ~1900 kcals to lose ~1 lb/week. Now I’ve been eating ~2400 kcals to lose ~1 lb/week! That’s a heck of a difference! Also, I’ve been doing either less or the same amount of cardio, and training less w/ weights too! (Only 5 weight training sessions/week as opposed to 6!)
My point is my metabolic rate was in the gutter last time. Reason being, well, I had been eating too great of a deficit to lose weight for too long, so my metabolism had slowed a good amount. It was so bad that by the end of my cut I was eating around 1500-1600 kcals/day and losing ~1 lb/day. I was also doing HIIT post weights and low intensity cardio at night for 20-40 min!
What I’ve learned from this is to not get too high in body fat, b/c to strip it off will take either so long that you screw your metabolism or if you do it too fast you screw your metabolism and lose muscle. Either way you screw your metabolism up!
My current goals are to get myself looking how I did in the summer at ~155-156 lbs @ ~9-10% bf. I think in another 2-3 weeks I should be there at around ~157-158 lbs. I’m just estimating. Even then I still think I should be walking around leaner, so I plan on keeping with my slow cutting plan up until Jan. 1, 2009. I’m hoping to reach ~7-8% bf by then. At that point I will spend a month or two working at maintaining that condition. Then depending on how I feel I will either try to get leaner still, or slowly work on adding LBM, and I MEAN SLOWLY. I plan on spending as long as it takes to add LBM w/ pretty much no fat. I at least want to try for several months, b/c I believe it can be done, and to me it’s worth it. I no longer feel "small". I don’t feel big, but I never had "getting big" as my goal. So, I’m fine with my size. I still want to improve, but I’m in this for life, and I have no need to rush it. Not to mention I believe rushing gains = gaining too much unnecessary fat. I mean, if you gain too much fat you spend more time cutting it off. I have not proved this yet, but I am theorizing that the same exact LBM gains can be made in say 12 months, but without having to cut. So, person A spend 6 months bulking / 6 months cutting and gains 6 lbs of muscle. Person B spends 12 months gaining slowly and gains 6 lbs of muscle and doesn’t have to cut. It may not work exactly like that, but the point is I think the relatively the same gains will be made. Even if person A can gain slightly more than person B in a yr, I still personally feel that the amount of greater gains will be so minimal that it’s just not worth the hassle or bulking and cutting to only gain 1-2 more lbs of muscle (and that’s if that method would even produce that kind of progress… in my experience it hasn’t).
Take my experience of 2007-2008. I "bulked" from Aug 2007 to Jan 2008 and gained ~25 lbs, 5 of which ended up being muscle; the rest was fat and water. I spent the next 6 months cutting and finished at a hydrated weight of 155.8 lbs @ 9.3% bf by Aug 2008. Last Aug 2007 I was 152.4 lbs @ 10.5% bf. So, 5 months of eating and gaining and then 6 months of kicking my @$$ to get lean and I was only ~5 lbs of muscle bigger! I seriously think that I could gain 5 lbs of muscle in 10-12 months without gaining so much fat, if any at all!
My previous attempt of gaining was somewhat successful, but not as successful as I would’ve liked. I gained ~2.5 lbs of muscle in 2-3 months, but I also gained ~2.5 lbs of fat. I may find that this is how it is to be done. Even this way is by far better than the way I did it last year. Last year I was just an idiot and didn’t know much about nutrition. I thought the more "good/healthy" food I eat the more muscle I’ll gain. It doesn’t work that way 
. Even healthy food gets stored as fat when the surplus is too great for the body.
Anyway, I enjoy testing out my theories . I’m also excited to look lean. I came really close this summer, and I think if I hadn’t been cutting for so long I would have been able to get leaner. This time my metabolism is up to speed, and I think I’m gonna do it .
We shall see, eh?
;)
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