I’ve also been spending about 20 hours a week practicing golfing so that works up a fair amount of sweat for me. I think i burn ~150 calories (conservative) when I go to the range. Going to play a round this weekend with no golf cart.

I need to cut back on alcohol but I’m going to start lifting and cross training because my swing speed is embarrassingly slow and I can only drive it about 180-200 yards. So i’ll maybe fire this up again.

I get a good laugh everytime my friend updates his myfitnesspal with his golfing, apparently golfing for 3 hours with a cart burns 1,500 calories.

Without a cart it’s more like 700-1000 - you’re walking about 3-5 miles carrying a 30 lb bag around. Plus swinging is more exertion than people realize. But i’m typically pouring sweat after an hour going through a 125 ball bucket, and sometimes I do two of those.

oh no, I agree without a cart its a workout. But with a cart its lol. A bucket of balls is def more of a workout than a round with a cart

Can anyone recommend a good routine for me? I am going to be one of those obnoxious people in January and sign up for a gym.

I am 185, skinny fat but approaching actual fat. 5'11". I want to go for aesthetics, nothing too crazy but I just want to be slim and cut again like I used to be. I have wide shoulders so I fill out muscle pretty nice but I have a narrow waist so any weight above like 160 just looks kind of ridiculous on me if I am not lifting.

I have nfi what I am doing, I don't need to be spoonfed like N1 but I'd like a program that lets me cut ~20 pounds while gaining muscle. I know that's hard to do while cutting - should I cut first then lift? Or lift while I cut? Cardio will be hard, I am a smoker but planning on quitting.

For diet I'm gonna try to cut out drinking while eating a lot of lean protein and vegetables. Nothing too crazy or complicated there.

Obv wait for monte, but how much time can you devote to working out?

As in like 4 days a week hour each day?

I spend more time than that at the range, so yea I could if I committed to it.

Diet plan sounds good; a mild caloric deficit while you get back into lifting is fine.

Re: the gym, I'd give Starting Strength or GSLP a try until you start to stall, then move onto something a bit more inline with your specific goals.

Well if you have that much honestly just showing up at the gym and doing the 4 big ones, squat, DLs, bench, and OHP with some curls is prolly good enough imo.

If you want more than that, just add in the normal stuff like tricep push downs, lat pull downs, curls, ect on the appropriate day.

Also obv I defer to monte.

Ok I actually have the starting strength book.

Diet is tricky for me because I hate cooking in my apartment. I can, it's just a pain, I don't have a kitchen so I need to use this little camping stovetop and a toaster oven to bake.

I had success with skipping breakfast a month or two ago. But sometimes it led to large meals later at night, so I think I probably go with a few hardboiled eggs or a piece of fruit in the morning to stabilize my blood sugar, I have weird issues with that.

Lunch - nfi. Like I said I don't really want to cook, but they have frozen chicken and veggie entrees at the store that I know clock in at like 300-400 cals and are actually decent.

Dinner - this is the tricky one. I usually get home, smoke weed, and then go to town. Eating BEFORE smoking weed usually helps. But I easily slam down like 2k calories at dinner sometimes if I didn't eat much in the day.

Drinking - obviously no, and that worsens the overeating.

To deal with munchies I think I will stock up on snap peas/carrots and hummus or something. Something I can just gorge on that doesn't have a lot of calories would be ideal. I could stop smoking weed but I don't want to. Drinking def. has to stop though.

I'm a pretty recent lurker of your other blog (off and on over the last six months), but given your recent professional and financial success (mazel tov btw; sounds very well earned and deserved), maybe upgrading to an apartment with an actual kitchen might be in order?

If your kitchen situation changes and/or you have the desire to start cooking, hit me up and I'll dig up some low to medium effort recipes that you can easily batch cook for lunch/dinner. As it is, hard-boiled eggs, cheese, fruit, and cereal are good low impact breakfasts; whether or not you do Lean Cuisine type frozen meals or fast food, just being aware of calories and trying to keep protein relatively high should be enough. Re: dinner, I don't really have experience with trying to maintain a good diet without access to a kitchen while ripping bong loads, but it sounds difficult. Some situation whereby you have prepared, reasonably healthy meals available when you're hungry as opposed to whatever your trigger snack foods happen to be would make success a fair bit easier.

Thanks for the response, yea, apartment is probably in order soon but I pay $800/month and i really enjoy having the absurd disposable income I have. 1 bedroom in my area is like $2k/month. I’ve been squirreling away a lot of money that would otherwise go to rent at a real place. That’ll probably happen before summer though.

I CAN cook it’s just super annoying to me and I hate it. But yea my idea for the smoking thing was to just stock my place with munchie veggies i like (i really love carrots) and if I have a bad night it’d be better to slam down a bag of baby carrots than a box or two of triscuits which I am known to do. Or even worse, doordash something.

Yea dude.... i went hard. I could give deets but it’s really embarrassing. I was having some 7k+ days for sure.

At ralphs they have whole baked chickens for like $7 so that’s a decent dinner option with leftovers for lunch the next day

Re: stoned food, sounds like a plan. Physically not having those foods in the house is probably the best thing you can do.

This is kind of along the lines of what im thinking. I realized I could bake the salmon in my toaster oven. The misc veggies and olives + feta are for salads. The vinaigrette was the lowest kcal one i could find. The feta is only 180 calories for that entire cup!

Ah!

First of all, I see what jmakin is saying with the veggie sticks for snacking. In doing the same, I discovered hummus is **** high in calories compared to guacamole. Salsa practically calorie free. Unrelated but also calorie free snack; pickles. Some of those diet ice creams are high enough in protein that they're basically fine for snacking during a cut and, while not a devilish gellato, are actually tasty. Berries always good to have on hand.

Addressing the kitchen; while I've been hitting a lot of grocery store roast chickens the last couple of years, for cutting you really want to throw the skin away and stick to white meat. I finally got around to actually cooking some chicken breast recently thanks to...InstaPot. Cooks quickly with minimal attention being paid to it. Sounds like that would immediately massively upgrade your kitchen for something like $150. And if you've got some more money you could get one of those Breville Smart ovens for about $250. Not even a waste--I use that instead of regular ovens basically because it's better for all but a few giant-turkey-type things.

Oh those all in one cooking pots is a really great idea. I know salsa is free but everything that goes with salsa is.... heavy.

Im surprised guacamole is fewer cals than hummus. I have a good feeling for what things cost and i know avacados are a kind of a calorie bomb as far as vegetables go.

Got an instapot on Black Friday for 60 lolCanada$ and the only problem is I have so many recipes I want to try I can't eat enough to get to them

Yeah, I didn't realize until I was food logging and had the hummus and guac side-by-side. Something like 2x the calories, but it depends on the brand. I think it's the tahini and sesame oil or in other words the stuff that makes it *good* hummus.

I just go celery and carrot sticks for salsa or use it as a topping instead of some calorie sauce. It's somewhat disgusting at first but you get used to it.

I know it's probably not technically hummus, but using a blender to blend chickpeas, garlic, and olive oil is a super-delicious accompanyment to veggies in my opinion.

Also, definitely get an Instant Pot. They're amazing.

+whatever to Instant Pot and a countertop oven (I have a Cuisinart) - fantastic ideas that will allow you to meal prep in bulk.

And yes, hummus is a total calorie bomb; if you're not going to log food, I'd at least get used to looking at nutrition labels for a while.

Prepped lunches and dinners that combine lean protein + carb + veggies will help the weight fall off; I'm of the opinion that the salt/fat content of a lot of those premade "healthy" TV dinner type meals means that satiety with them must be a fair bit lower than cooking your own stuff. Roasting off chicken breast, chicken thighs, pork loin, or fish and throwing in some beans or rice (both doable in the Instant Pot) and a few veggies of your choice will take negligible prep time and should improve your results immensely - planning to succeed and all that.

ETA: This Instant Pot bean recipe claims that it takes 5 minutes of prep, which seems too high by a factor of two to me:

https://www.camelliabrand.com/recipe...t-black-beans/

Quick perusal shows there's a ton of tasty recipes that require similarly low levels of effort.

This one would probably taste better, but would actually require the full five minutes of prep:

https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/...zo-recipe.html

BTW, I don't follow your other log and have a strict grunching policy, so cliffs on the life upgrade appreciated. Considering you are now looking at a $20,000 annual increase in rent as a doable cost, I imagine congratulations are in order regardless of the details! I think the Starting Strength-then-specialize recommendation is a good one. What is your current gym situation like and have you checked on other options? Minimizing gym costs used to make perfect sense to me when I was young and poor, but it turns out upgrading gyms is easily worth it every time if you have the money, and I regret not doing it as soon as I could afford it. Successful gym-going as a habit most often involves either the gym being really good or really convenient/close.

Here's a product review from serious eats that is basically the orientation that *should* come with the InstaPot (one of those "I wish I'd read this before I ever started using this thing" examples). https://www.seriouseats.com/2018/09/...-good-for.html

Also, you could ditch the camping stovetop and get one or two of these (or something similar):

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0045QEPYM...EAAAAAAAAAANvu

Better explained here than on Amazon: https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/be...ction-cooktop/

Actually sounds better than my induction rangetop--I can't set it by ****ing temperature!

Good luck and congrats on the promo jmakin. If you need some extra motivation; Im a skinny fat looking to improve as well (190 6'0), if you can figure out a wager that makes sense I'd probably be interested.