Day 6, yesterday

Weight: 165

Breakfast: Ham sandwich, light mayo - 930 cals

Did the rowing machine, but my back was really hurting so I went to the elliptical for about 45 mins

Didn't eat lunch

Dinner - 2 chalupas and a taco, diet soda - 1070 calories

Then I got the late night munchies and ate a whole bag of fish crackers, 600 calories :/

~2600 calories. Honestly I feel like I'm barely eating and I must have been having 3500+ calorie days before this diet, so my TDEE must be pretty high or I really should weigh a lot more.

Still feel like I'm losing weight and I didn't drink so that's good.

jmakin,

Watch this before you try next time:

http://www.concept2.com/indoor-rower...chnique-videos

Just doing five light minutes at first and working up slowly from there is going to get you doing a few thousand meters without a break in no time, which (if you want) can free up some of the time you use doing elliptical to lift a weight or two (if that's a goal, not sure if it is).

eventually

I will watch that video, thanks

I am going to the store right now to get a bunch of eggs. breakfast of 2-3 eggs plus toast is extremely filling and less than 500 calories, and I can snack on hardboiled eggs when i get the munchies.

going to buy a lot of broccoli and spinach because those are the only vegetables I really like, and potatoes, maybe will try carrots. Don't really like fruit, when I buy it,it just spoils. Some salmon if it's on sale and chicken breasts.

I really love milk but don't think i should drink any right now while I'm cutting

Alright here's a good breakfast I just had that I think is sustainable:

Egg sandwich

2 slices whole wheat bread, 200 calories (100 each)
2 large white eggs, 140 calories (70 each)
half tbsp of extra virgin olive oil to cook - 60 calories
squirt of sriracha - < 5 calories

~400 calorie breakfast that is pretty filling, decent protein

Depending on the bread that breakfast has a maximum of 20 g of protein. Add in an extra egg, some greek yogurt and fruit, and make it an open faced sandwich imo.

yesterday was kind of a sloppy day. I had that breakfast, ~400 cals, then for lunch was veggies and chicken. But for dinner I had a loaded baked potato, no butter, but cheese/sour cream.. and then I went on a date and had 2 margaritas. I have no idea how many calories there were yesterday but I'd say it was over 2500 easily.

Today I did better, had the egg sandwich breakfast with a tbsp of light mayo, ~450 calories total.

Lunch was 3/4 of a turkey sandwich with avocado and cheese, with some lobster bisque. It's so hard to estimate these things, but if I assume 100 cals for each slice of bread, 200 cals for 2 slices of cheese, ~2-4 oz of turkey, and some mayo, I think we can go 700-800 calories on that one easily, but I didn't eat it all. The lobster bisque was 250 calories.

For dinner I'm having mixed veggies and orange chicken, 500 calories.

So I can log today at ~2000 calories pretty easily I think, not going to drink.

Weight: 168

Today's log so far so I don't forget, I don't think I'll eat again and I'm not drinking. I have carrots if I do get the munchies later.

Exercise - 25 mins on the stationary bike, low setting but high intensity, got my heartrate up to 180 where it stayed the whole time

Breakfast: egg sandwich (whole grain wheat bread, 2 eggs, really small amount of light mayo, sriracha), added cheese this time, 600 calories

This continues to leave me full until about 5pm.

Dinner: 3 oz of ahi tuna with 5 oz of white rice, with a few leaves of raw spinach.

~300 calories

24 "good thins" potato chips - 130 calories, with 2 tbsp of hummus, 70 calories

200 cals total

total for today is 1100 calories and I feel very comfortably full. I have more vegetables and hummus which seems like a great low calorie munchie food I can dip veggies in if i get hungry for something small.

I think I'll probably get hungry before bed in which case I have some broccoli, carrots, and snow peas that i'll eat with some hummus. I am growing a taste for vegetables. I have 6 oz of salmon that I'm going to have with some meal tomorrow.

Weight: 167

This is also the end of the first week, and I think I can say pretty comfortably that I lost at least 2 lbs. If I did, I think my TDEE I calculated is a bit off or I am way overestimating calories consumed. But I've weighed myself multiple times daily over the last few days and haven't gone much above 167, as low as 164 sometimes if I do it late at night so I'm pretty sure some loss is there from the original ~170 I started with.

I'm using a combination of my gym's scale and my home electronic scale which is pretty nice and they usually are the same weight, or very close.

If I lost 2 lbs, i think my TDEE avg is closer to 3k/day which seems insane

will know better next week

jmakin,

It's almost certainly (in part) a loss of water weight due to decreased carb and salt intake; you haven't lost two pounds of pure fat, obviously.

The reason I think it might be higher is because I think i'm really underestimating the amount of calories i burn while working.

I think it could be as high as seven or 800, maybe more

Alright here's some numbers, I guess I was a little off. it's about time I did this:

In one shift I walk the equivalent 2-3 miles a day. Let's say I'm having a lazy day and call it 2 miles, I think that's pretty close. I can get a pedometer if someone recommends me a good one to buy.

I also never sit down for 7 hours of my 8 hour shift. If we assume 50 cals/hour burned while standing and 100 calories for each mile walked, that's 550 calories a shift, 4x a week.

At school I'd say I easily walk about 2 miles a day. It's a brisk 15 minute walk to my farthest class from my car, and I'm at school all day walking between classes. Let's say 2 miles a day, 5x a week. That's 1k cals/week.

So that's 3200 cals/week I'm finding just from my normal routine. roughly 457/day for the week.

So if my BMR is ~1800/day (age 28, 5' 10") add 457 and you get 2257/day, plus whatever exercise I do during the week. So my initial 2400/day estimate was pretty close.

What I really don't understand is how I got to this weight, because I've basically eaten and drank the same way since I was 21 and I've had basically no change in habits and this weight came out of nowhere. It must have been really, really slow. I think it may have started a year ago when I went down to 4x a week working from 5x.

If I ever stop working I will get fat.

You can get a pedometer app on your phone.

Why do you think you should be different than every other man as he gets older?

The thing is you're really not that heavy for a 5'11" guy. You would get much more dramatic body composition results by utilizing some kind of resistance training routine along with your calorie deficit.

I'm going to when I can figure this out more. The massive weight gain is what concerned me. ~15% of my body weight in less than a year is something to be concerned about.

I'm also really really self conscious in the gym and don't really know what I'm doing in the weight room. I like machines but I know they're not as good as free weights. I'm not good on the free weights and don't know what to do really. I considered buying some to have at home.

I can incorporate pullups and pushups in my daily routine though.

Didn't you play baseball? I assumed you knew a bit about weights. In this forum, the default novice program is "Starting Strength" with book by the same name and linked in the FAQ. It's focus is on the big compound movements (squats, deadlifts, bench press, & overhead press), starting fairly light, and progressing pretty rapidly with an emphasis on good technique usually 3 days per week for an hour. It's not really a vanity program, just pretty efficient at building up some baseline strength and muscle. After a few months you can move on to whatever you want ("enormous biceps, here I come!"). I feel like there's a lot less to be self-conscious about at the squat rack than at the dumbell section (note "dumbell" refers to the weights you hold in one hand, typically lined up in pairs, not the idiot section). If you're squatting, people just look at your squat.

Bodyweight routines can be great though, but try to incorporate some strength work for your legs and low back as well; lunges and walking lunges, split squats, box jumping, high step-ups, and even some sprinting or uphill sprinting. Once you get used to them, they can be harder to progressively add weight to, though, which makes body recomp harder than with weights.

Yea I did, but it was a really long time ago and honestly I slacked off. I don't like exercise really, never have.

I will check out starting strength, I've read about that before on here but never really incorporated it.

Yesterday's log:

Breakfast sandwich w mayo: 450 cals

Dinner: Chow mein, orange chicken, broccoli beef, w 3 beers: 1650 calories

2100 cals

Weight: 166

At 162-165 right now, i was too busy to post all my logs and so i was saving them in notepad and i lost the file.

Yesterday was a really, really bad day but I'm pretty sure I'm losing weight. Dtill feel fat AF though. Quarter's getting pretty intense so i need to put this on hold for a bit.

Alright school's finally over so I can get back into this.

Cliffs from the last year:

I have gone from a fairly active job to a completely sedentary one. My eating and drinking habits are admittedly out of control. The other night I drank a 6 pack and ate an entire 14 inch pizza. I have ballooned a little bit; right now I am around 175-180. My scale is not super accurate so I am not sure.

A healthy looking weight for me is around 150. ~155 and i start looking a little pudgy. I have gone from total skinny fat to maybe slightly pudgy, so i guess that's better than being skinny fat because it's easier to fix.

I have broad shoulders and hips and can build muscle fairly easily in the past, but I am nearly 30 now and my testosterone is starting to go down. I want to eventually work out but right now I am just going to focus on diet purely, and going to post logs in here. One positive - I have kicked my smoking habit. However, I get out of breath and sweaty just from the walk from my car to my desk at work. I have dangerously high blood pressure and my resting heartrate is around 95. I know if I continue like this I will have really bad problems in a few years.

I drink way too much, bordering on maybe having a problem. Towards the end of a quarter is usually the worst, at least a 6 pack a night, sometimes far more. My hope is that this log forces me to confront that.

So here we go. Was going to get my usual cream cheese bagel + salmon + tomato/onion, but a 1000+ calorie bomb for breakfast is probably a good habit to kick. I got a 400 calorie breakfast burrito from del taco and am going to try to make that last until late afternoon.

I need to eat more protein but I don't really know what and I suck at cooking so I could use some diet advice.

I saw photos of myself yesterday and was disgusted with how fat i looked.

This is what I’m working with. What I hate the absolute most is how fat my face looks and my chin.

There's a pretty decent cooking thread here that should have some decent ideas for recipes to try; beyond that, what sort of meats do you like? There are lower fat options everywhere (not because fat is bad, just to contain calories a bit).

Re: overall advice, you're an MLY thread-er, so you know what to do: eat at a mild caloric deficit, food log, food scale, ~0.8-1/g/lb body weight of protein, fat 0.4-0.5 g/lb of bodyweight, most carbs from fruit or complex carb sources. Start out either tracking steps or purposefully walking twenty to thirty minutes 4-5 times a week; add in weight training a few days per week if you're so inclined.

I just opened up a random TDEE calculator, put in your stats (30 year old male, 5'11" 180, lightly active) and got ~2600, so shooting for 2000-2200 calories, at least 150 g of protein, ~60-75 g of fat, and the rest from whatever). Good luck.

I didn't know exact numbers so that is helpful, thank you.

I will check out the cooking thread. I don't eat beef. I really like fish. Poultry is ok, but I need it on a sandwich or something. I don't like chicken plain unless it is fried and obviously I should stay away from that.

I would think my TDEE is probably lower than that so ~2k is probably a good number to shoot for.

If I drink there's no chance I reach that. Like almost none unless I just don't eat.

J,

Here's a quick chicken recipe that can be made in bulk and has some flavor:

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

Here another one that isn't "plain":
https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/...en-recipe.html

If you like fish, it's pretty easy to prepare (grilled fish of essentially any type is awesome). I can post some recipes if you're interested.

Re: logging, eating mostly lean protein and vegetables and cutting down/eliminating booze will probably get you 90%+ of the way to where you want to go with no additional effort. I tend to sleep better and do better at the gym if I don't drink the day before, so lifting generates a positive feedback loop wrt diet for me. YMMV

Awesome on the quitting smoking and making a log! Love the title!!!

Like Monte said, what to do to lose weight has been laid out several times. Knowing what to do is the easy part, doing it....
What you have to figure out is what's going on in your mind and work on that.

If you just can't cook at all, the roasted chickens at Walmart for $4 are great and juicy. Grab one of those ND eat on it a couple of days.
Monte always links awesome recipies and it might be fun for you to learn something new.