Hello,
It's been 4 weeks since I started my own body transformation diary and it's time to make another transformative report! I would like to standardize these reports to give you a very good structured picture of what's going on. So, in each report I will talk about things I've done first, then I will talk about my results with the key ones displayed on the side panel of each video report on YouTube, and I will wrap up each repot by talking about my plans and expectations for the 2 weeks to follow.
What did I do in the past 2 weeks?
Generally speaking, I didn't change much - I adhered to my original nutrition plan. As planned, the foods that I consumed were low-carb and I fasted intermittently - I would have 1 meal in the end of the day and I tried to keep the portion sizes small to keep the diet hypocaloric. As you know, I believe that you won't be able to lose a lot of weight if you consume more calories than you spend even if you are going keto or fast. The nutrients and energy stored in your food will be taken in and have to be stored somehow if they are not used.
What are my results of the past 2 weeks?
During the past 2 weeks my weight loss continued, but, as predicted, it significantly slowed down. I've lost "just" 6.4 pounds, whereas I've lost 15 pounds in the first 2 weeks. In general, I feel very positive about my results at the moment as everything goes according to the plan - first of all, I keep losing weight and I've already lost 21.5 pounds in total, which is a good result on its own. One of the important factors is the loss of glycogen and body water, which usually happens in the first several days of any decent diet and that was the reason why I lost so much weight in the first 2 weeks. Just to illustrate it I crunched some numbers and it looks that in the first 2 weeks 44% of my lost body weight was lean body mass (mostly water), not fat, whereas in the past two weeks I've been losing minimal amounts of lean body mass (just 1.2 pounds over the course of these 2weeks), and 81.1% of my lost weight in the past 2 weeks were actually fat.
Another important thing is that these 2 weeks show a realistic amount of weight I can lose if I continue following my regimen and this amount is quite decent, effectively we are talking about 2-4 pounds per week, which will get me to my goal of losing some 40 more pounds of body weight relatively fast - within 3-4 months if I keep the same level of commitment.
Couple of other important indicators of successful weight loss - my body fat percentage went down to 26.4-28.0%. Again, I don't trust one of my scales much, but I'm trying to be consistent and thus I will keep using both of them. I used one of the big InBody devices and it showed that my BF% is 23% and I used one of the calculators that we have here, on my website and it gave me 24% BF (Feel free to check it out yourself - it's located in the toolbox and it's quite handy!). In general, I see that the BF% is slowly but steadily goes down and I'm happy about it. Also, I've lost couple of inches in my waist and my clothes feel very differently compared to 4 weeks ago. People keep making comments about me looking skinnier than usual, I get some compliments and, ironically, most of the people ask how I feel - they do expect that I would feel pretty bad. Well, the honest answer would be that I don't feel really bad, neither do I feel particularly energetic. It's only natural to feel this way and I don't expect to feel really great, but the negative aspects are quite mild and negligible, I just feel sluggish from time to time.
What's the plan and what are the expectations?
The plan is simple - keep following the same nutritional plan. There is plenty of room for making it stricter in case I need to, say, if my weight loss slows down significantly, but sometimes slow and steady is better than brisk and unpredictable. In the end of the day, the main driver for weight loss is consistency. In addition to that, I will keep my "introductory" training - I will be having 2 workouts a week. They will be short, intensive resistance training workouts with relatively low weights (I'm increasing them gradually to avoid overtraining).
That was my plan for the next two weeks and what I hope to achieve is losing 5-7 pounds or a bit more. I want to cross two psychological barriers of 90 kg and 200 lb of total body weight, which are quite important to me. Hopefully I'll make it happen very soon. I will keep you posted as I proceed. Please, leave comments and ask questions - I'm always happy to answer them and to share my knowledge. I hope you'll find it useful and my blogs will help you with your goals as you are my motivation now!
Sincerely Yours,
Dr.Sam