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How much you eat matters

During my strong lifts phase I decided to up my calories by at least 500 calories. But how much am I eating now? To get that number I opened an account in dailyburn and started entering what I usually eat. It came out to be something like 1350 to 1500. Then I made a conscious effort to eat 1750 to 2000 calories. Also decided to eat every 3 hours for a total of 6 meals. So I have to eat about 300 calories per meal. Simple enough. I then increased the amount of food that I ate and logged everything in dailyburn. I was not easily able to eat that much food every 3 hours. I felt very full all the time. Then after reading about another skinny guy in strong lifts I decided to go with a lot of milk instead of solid food. I felt slightly better but still felt like I was over eating. During this time I tried to eat clean, but cheated several times.

I weighted about 120 lb with about 12.5% body fat when I started. My goal was to gain 10 lbs while not going beyond 17% body fat. I tracked my body weight and fat every weekend. My plan during this time was to go on a bulking phase until I reached 17% body fat, followed by a leaning phase to get my body fat % down to 12%. I envisioned that with my exercises I will slowly weight more (due to increase in muscle) and still be at 12.5% body fat at the end of a few bulking and cutting phases. However I don't think it did really work well for me. Either what I ate is wrong or how I trained is wrong. Anyway here are the raw numbers.



I started increasing my calories on 2/21/2009 and it went on until I reached 17% BF on 5/23/2009. Incidentally this is also the time when I quit strong lifts. Here is a composite graphs of weight and BF%.





As you can see I gained fat rather quickly. So at the end of it I decided to lean down back to 12%.
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  1. Ty PetersonSeptember 11, 2009 at 11:08 AM

    It's really impressive how well you keep track of all of your stats.

    ReplyDelete

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