I’ve just spent the last four weeks dedicatedly stripping excess fat.
In my earlier posts this week I explained the changes that I made to my cutting diet and my exercise regime after I stripped fat last autumn. I also promised to reveal the results. I’ve included these below, but first a little bit about the problems I faced in the last couple of weeks and how I dealt with them.
Problems? What problems?
I think I mentioned before Christmas that January is one of my busiest periods at work. Two weeks ago I took a client out for lunch. A client who I’ve worked with for three years but had previously never met. Not a time to go all “awkward diet” on him.
Then last week I had to stay away on business from Wednesday to Friday. the very last half week in my four week cutting phase. The place I was staying in had no gym of any sort and was in the middle of nowhere, so dinner and breakfast were hotel restaurant or nothing. There was also no mini-bar so there was no fridge in the room that I could keep meals in,
The lunch
This proved to be quite easy in the end. I had been having chicken salads and the restaurant menu had chicken caesar salad. I ordered still water and a caesar salad but asked them to do the salad without any dressing. The restaurant, as most usually are if you ask them, was perfectly prepared to do this so I ended up with a (very expensive) plain chicken salad, politely abandoning the croutons on the side of my plate but treating myself to the slice of avocado that came with it.
If anyone had asked about the croutons or the bread roll that I ignored I would have claimed I had a gluten intolerance.
The hotel gym
This needed a bit more thought. I was going to have to miss a main workout and I wasn’t going to be able to do my full weighted cardio sessions either. Instead I chucked a dumbbell into the boot of my car (actually, it was in the bottom of my bag and I got a workout just getting the bag to my room) and reverted to the 15/15 dumbbell snatch cardio workouts from my last cutting phase.
The intention was to do 20 minutes each evening between returning from work and dinner, however I quickly found that I couldn’t convince myself to do more than 10 minutes. Instead I did a 10 minute session before dinner and another 10 minutes before breakfast, in a fasted state.
Hotel food
There was no simple answer to this one except to be glad that the restaurant menu was in the room so that I could check a few items on FitDay beforehand. If this hadn’t been the case I would have stopped in at the restaurant earlier and memorised the likely-looking items.
It really helped to know what my usual calorie split was across the day and to therefore know how many calories I had left for that first evening. The practice at the hotel is to give you the daily veg and potato but on asking I found they were perfectly happy to give me a double portion of vegetables and no potatoes and I bulked up the meals (and kept my colleague company on a second course) by asking for a side salad as a starter and having another side salad with my main meal.
Breakfast is usually pretty easy in hotels provided they do a cooked option. This place was no exception with the choice of Full English (hash brown, fried egg, mushrooms, tomato, bacon and sausage) or Continental (pastries, toast, cereal, juice, jam, cheese, ham). The trick is to find out what is included in the cooked breakfast and to ask for certain items to be left off. I only had egg, tomato and mushrooms.
With the amount of grease they used I abandoned any midday tuna or chicken, instead munching a bagful of lettuce leaves, leaving plenty of calories available to try one of the more calorie-high meats for dinner on the second night.
The moral of this story is to be inventive if you find yourself in difficult situations while cutting. Do the best you can, find alternatives that will work for you (like the 15/15 cardio) and never be afraid to ask in a restaurant for an easy-to-do variation on the meal that they are proposing. Most places will happily leave off dressings or give you a double portion of veg in place of the usual potato side-order.
So how did I do?
The results were fantastic! Not only have I managed to maintain my muscle, therefore maintaining my strength (as evidenced by my “Powerlifting Progress” series), but I have also had the following figure changes:
- Waist: 64.3cm to 59.3 cm
- Upper hips (my problem fat store at the top of the glutes): 75.6 cm to 71.2 cm
- Centre hips (which catches the centre of my fatty bottom): 82.3cm to 78.7cm
- Lower hips (my other problem fat store, just at the bottom of my glutes before they join the hamstrings): 90.7cm to 84.8cm
- Thigh: 54cm to 51.3cm
- Body fat: I don’t trust my callipers for actual accuracy, but for comparison of the start to end position they give a good indication that I’m losing some body fat since they went from 16.9% to falling off the bottom of their chart (12.5%).
What does that look like then?
Unfortunately the nature of my job means that I can’t put before and after photos of me in a bikini on my blog. However, I thought that a graph might provide a bit of an insight instead.
January 2010 - cutting month results
As you can see, there was a definite plateau for week three, before a few areas (like my upper hips) speeded up again for the last week. This is very common. I found the same pattern occurred when I was cutting at the start of last summer and last autumn. Steph, who has been doing her own version of the warp-speed fat loss program during January also refers to this plateau between weeks two and three.
You can also see some interesting things going on with my weight which spikes in week two (my period started that weekend) and ends up not much lower than when I started, despite the figue changes. This just emphasises the fact that you need the whole picture, with measurements included, to know if you are progressing. Don’t just watch the scales.
It seems to have worked. What do you think? Do you agree with the approach I took and would you try it?
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