So my five weeks are up. It was originally meant to be six weeks of cutting, but that would never do.
Getting my calories back up
When coming off a cutting diet it is vitally important not to immediately step your calories back up where they were, otherwise you’ll pile on fat. Instead you need to ease them up gently, a few hundred calories each week.
For someone as slight as me, it is important to increase the calories particularly slowly. After all, an extra 200 calories on the 1,000 calories I’ve been eating each day for the last five weeks would be 120% of the previous week’s intake. So for my post cutting week one (next week) I will only have an extra 100-150 calories each day, probably in the form of an extra egg at breakfast (75 calories) and a spoon of mayo stirred into my tuna cabbage (50-75 calories, depending on the spoon heaping…).
Week two, as holiday week, can then have the flexibility of a couple of Big Eats days (especially for the spare rib and BBQ days that are on the horizon), and it shouldn’t take my body so much by surprise if it is alternated with some mid-range calorie days (ca. 1,300).
I’m hoping that I’ll get back from holiday without all my hard-earned efforts from the last five weeks having disappeared. Thankfully I’m not a big drinker so at least I’ll avoid too many liquid calories.
So how have I done?
Well I’ve definitely got more of a bikini figure than I had a few weeks ago. I’ve seen my bottom set of abs for a couple of weeks (whenever I haven’t had water retention issues) and I’ve got a lot more definition around my glute muscles.
I’ve not done as well as I might have hoped on getting rid of the stubborn fat deposits round my glutes, but I have made much better progress than during the last cutting phase, probably helped by successfully retaining muscle. So I’ll just keep chipping away at that.
The biggest joy has been with my weights. I think I can honestly say that this time I have managed to retain muscle and I may have even developed some muscle along the long road of weight loss. My glutes are definitely more developed than before and my sumo deadlift, single leg squats and pull up numbers have gone up consistently every week.
My bodyweight has dropped 4kg and I’ve lost two inches off my waist. The loss of several inches off my backside is slightly meaningless since the way it has changed over the weeks has shown me that I have both gained glute muscle and lost fat, so I’ve probably lost more fat than the measurement suggests.
What were the secrets?
- Lifting heavy using a 10 sets of 3 repetitions method – this meant I could keep lifting at the maximum of my potential, developing muscle without reaching exhaustion.
- Fasted cardio using weights – I think it made an enormous difference using weights for my high intensity intervals. Last time, I did my intervals on a bike which hit my cardio system but didn’t use any significant muscles, so it probably contributed to stripping muscle as well as fat. This time I was creating growth hormones and telling my body it needed to maintain muscle even while hitting my cardio system.
- Being strict about which carbohydrates I had and when I had them – I kept all my carbs clean and restricted the peaks of carbs (fruit and yoghurt) to immediately pre and post workout (within 20 mins of either side).
- Being flexible on my calorie intake on a Saturday – you’ll have noticed from my cookery posts that we had some pretty reasonable-sized meals at the weekends. At all times completely ‘clean’ (meat, fish, brassicas, cabbage, other green leafy vegetables, shallots, garlic, a little tomato) but not counting the calories too much. The biggest benefit of this was that I could boost my metabolism, giving my body an opportunity to recover itself, avoiding starvation mode, and allowing me to hit the calorie count really hard again every week. The added bonus was I kept my sanity by getting something special to eat each week as well.
What to avoid
It’s hard to cut fat when the weather is turning and the nights are drawing in. Animal research on calorie-restricted diets has shown that the body temperature was significantly reduced (Feinman, RD and Fine, EJ.: “A calorie is a calorie” violates the second law of thermodynamics; Nutrition Journal 2004). Within the first couple of weeks I felt my own body temperature dropping and when the temperature outside also started to drop from balmy late summer highs in the low twenties down to autumn frosts in the low tens I really started to struggle.
I’m looking forward to increasing that calorie intake next week. Food has never seemed so precious to me!
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