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Phase I of fat reduction

I though the fat reduction process would be very easy for me, being the skinny guy by nature. So according to my plan I wanted to go from 17% to 6% in about 3 months. That gave me 12 weeks to get rid of 11% fat. Remember that I have never gone below 12% in my life. This will be the first time. My body generally settles around 12% BF. I guess every body has a baseline BF % to which the body tries to reach with normal food intake.

I split the leaning time into 2 phases. Phase I for 5 weeks and the goal is to reduce from 17% to 12%. A 5% reduction in 5 weeks. About 1% per week. It felt like it was totally doable in the given time without adding any cardio. Just tweaking my calorie intake should take care of it. As per the plan I started eating slightly less every week. I don't know what I did wrong, but it took me 10 weeks to go down to 12% BF! Perhaps I should have cut more calories, but I was worried I will lose strength and muscle. Initially my strength was still going up as I was reducing calories. But in the last 3 weeks or so I stopped making any progress in strength. I was loosing fat and muscle at the same time.

It did not go at all like I planned. Here is the graph from phase I of fat cutting.



On August 15, 2009 I was 11.9% BF. On to phase II of leaning. For phase 2 I added cardio to further bring the fat %. More details in my next post.
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