Skip to main content

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%.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Ty PetersonSeptember 11, 2009 at 11:08 AM

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

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Stats for Oct 2009

So it has been a month since I started bulking up. How am I doing so far? Here are the raw numbers Exercises Squats: 170 lbs, 8 reps Deadlifts: 185 lbs, 10 reps Bench Press: 110 lbs, 4 reps Pull ups: Body weight + 25 lbs, 7 reps Overhead Press: 75 lbs, 6 reps I am doing well in all exercises except bench press. The exercise that is already closest to my goal for end of december is my pull-ups. I can already do 7 reps with 25 lbs hanging off my waist! You can check out my previous post for the goals I have set. Body weight and fat Weight: 120.8 lbs Fat %: 12.2% I am able to add weight as expected. But my body fat % shot up too much. My goal for end of december was to weight 125 lbs at 12% body fat. But I am already over the limit for my body fat %. So I have to lower it and at the same time increase my weight. Very unlikely. I might have to revise my goals, but I will see how it goes and hope to make better predictions for my next bulking phase. It is not at all easy to ke
12 comments
Read more

End of an Era

Image via Wikipedia It has been a long time since I gave any updates on my progress. Actually it is almost 3 months! There have been a lot of developments on my personal front which was the main cause of this much delayed update. My progress has slowed down considerably too. I was hoping to be at 140 lbs by the end of this year with 7% body fat. That seems like a dream that will not be fulfilled this year. I will not even be able to meet the 140 lb goal let alone the body fat %. So what happened to me over the last 3 months? I have been in the US for more than 8 years now! I loved every moment that I was here, starting from the early struggling days of my MS to my current stable job state of today. However even before coming to US, I promised to myself that I will be back in India after gaining 5 years of work experience in US. Now that the goal has been realized, it is time to move back to India. So in the last 3 months I have been working towards the goal of moving back to India. M
4 comments
Read more

Strong Lifts 5x5 log

I started strongs lifts on Februry 23, 2009 and ended it about 3 months later on May 13, 2009. Here are the logs of my workouts by day and weight lifted. All the weights are in lbs. The cells marked with a blue background indicate that I could not do 5x5 and so I had to repeat those weights. As you can see I had some good progress overall. I never did squats and now I know what those are and how much I can squat. Bench press has always been my weakest workout. I could not go over the 100 lb weight (even today). For push-ups I used a weighing scale below my hands and checked how much weight gets exerted on it when I try to do a push-up. The scales showed 70 lb (I weight 120 lb). So I am not lifting my full body weight when I am doing push-ups. I was able to do 3 sets of 5 reps each. Then for my next push-up day I kept a 5 lb plate on my back and did my push-ups. If I was able to do 3x5 then for the next time I added another 5 lb plate and so on. That is how I got those numbers for m
2 comments
Read more