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bigbassbrent's Journal

 
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02 June 2014

What is food? Food is defined as “Any nourishing substance that is eaten, drunk, or otherwise taken into the body to sustain life, provide energy, promote growth, etc.”

Did you notice that the definition mentions nothing about taste? Are we as humans the only species that have taste preferences? Will a wild animal that is starving turn away from eating something that tastes terrible? More than likely they will not, since their instinct to survive is stronger than their taste preference. However, we humans will readily make bad food choices which do the opposite of sustaining life. These bad choices are actually killing us.

Humans in general seem to be picky eaters. You hear it all the time. “I don’t like steak.” “I love ice cream” “Seafood turns my stomach.” “I could eat cake for every meal.” I know for me, I didn’t necessarily dislike one option, I just much preferred some other option which was not healthy but better tasting to me. I think we all do this, don’t we? That’s how we became unhealthy and then lead us to our quest to be healthier. Right?

We are fortunate to have an abundance of foods to choose from. Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad-food choices out there as well. I challenge you to think a little deeper about your food choices, or non-food choices that you make. When I say non-food choices I am talking about foods that are not nutritious. If you will redefine food in your mind by massaging the definition a little bit, it may help you make better food choices during times of indecision.

Here is how I define food. “Any NOURISHING substance that is eaten, drunk, or otherwise taken into the body to sustain AND IMPROVE life.”

See what I did there? Changed “sustain life” to “improve life” and I emphasize “nourishing” and took out the junk about providing energy and promoting growth. Who cares if your food provides energy or promotes growth? We can eat a cup of sugar and consider that a meal but it does nothing to improve your health nor does it provide nourishment. It may promote growth, but not in the right places. 

Let’s define nourishment really quick since it keeps coming up. Nourish is defined as “to sustain with food or nutriment; supply with what is necessary for life, health, and growth.” You see, nourish means to consume food that is healthy and necessary for life.

You already know that there are a lot of food options out there for us modern day humans. Sometimes we make wise choices and other times we don’t. If you will stop for a minute and redefine food in your head before you reach for that big bowl of ice cream (or whatever food weakness you may have), it may just help you to make a better choice.

This is the way I now view food (and non-foods). It has worked wonders for me. All the things I use to love to eat that were unhealthy, are no longer even consider food to me. They are non-foods that I now consider as unnecessary treats. Cake, ice cream, cookies, candy bars, sodas, pizza, hamburgers, bread, tv dinners, etc.

You might have noticed that all the foods listed above are basically food “inventions”. Food inventions are what I see as combinations of many different substances to make a food. (or non-food in most cases.) “Eating clean” means sticking to real foods and doing your best to avoid non-food treats.

I hope this has nourished your brain a little. Good luck with clean eating and making wise food choices!

30 May 2014

Hey everybody, I hope you all have found some sort of success during May!

My May summary: I’m still doing great sticking to low carb. It has become an engrained lifestyle at this point. The problem is that I haven’t been managing my calories like I should. I loosened the reins a little at the beginning of the month and decided to eat when I felt like I needed it to help with workouts and recovery. Some days I ate over maintenance calories and other days I ate below. My average daily calories for May are at 2283 and my calculated average daily deficit is - 322. Something is not adding up because I haven’t lost any weight this month and it looks like I have added muscle mass. I think my deficit is not really -322 for the month because of inaccurate logging of my exercise in fatsecret.

I still have a way to go with trimming up my mid-section and that bothers me. At this point I want to make that a priority. I found that in May I was changing my goals between adding muscle mass and losing fat from one day to the next. I need to pick one goal and stick to it.

Here is where the decisions get confusing for me. My body measurements show that I have gained muscle mass. So that’s good. I have also lost about a 1/4 inch around my belly. This is good too! So, it seems like things are working out as planned. However, the fat around my midsection is still there and I want it gone pronto!

So for June I’m going to try a new strategy. I will continue working out but I will place more emphasis on diet and cutting the remaining body fat. I am going to use the IIFYM site calculations to set a daily caloric intake based on their calculator numbers. For the IIFYM calculator I will only mark that I work out four days a week even though I walk 5 days a week, lift 3 days and do a 20 min ab routine twice a week. (What do they consider exercise anyway? walking, weight lifting, rugby, shopping, carrying the baby around?)

After running the calculator IIFYM says that I should consume 2053 daily calories to lose weight slowly. I will round this number up to 2100 to keep things simple. I will set 2100 as my fatsecret RDI. I will stick to this for my daily intake regardless of the daily exercise that I do. Once everything averages out over the course of the month I hope to see some positive results. I also think that eating to the same set number of calories each day will be easier for me mentally than what I had been doing, which was to try maintain a specific deficit each day based on my daily exercise.

I will have one full on cheat day every 15 days in June where I can eat over my calories and let loose on the carbs. Whoo Hoooo!!! I think this part is important to keep your body from becoming overly adapted to the same amount and type of calories every day.

My only concern is that I do not want to lose the muscles I have built while I try to cut the fat. I would like to eat more protein but it spikes my blood sugar if I go over 150g a day. So I am stuck with that because of pre-diabetes. I hope the moderate protein and continued lifting will do the job of retaining muscle.

I have been at this for 8 months now. I just put a couple of progress pics on my public profile page if anyone wants to see a shirtless “no tan having” 40 something year old who has lost almost 50 pounds and built some muscle. 

Have a great weekend!

30 May 2014

Weigh-in: 173.4 lb lost so far: 1.6 lb still to go: 0 lb Diet followed reasonably well
   (8 comments) losing 0.6 lb a week

23 May 2014

106/69 Blood Pressure
68 Pulse

I still do not have glucose test strips. When I go to the doctor next time I'm going to see if he can write me a prescription for them so they don’t cost so dang much. They want 125 bucks for 100 test strips or 50 for $75. That’s nuts!!!

This week I added 250 calories to my daily intake. The scale sure shows it this morning since I weighed in at 174 which is up 1.8 pounds from last week. I am not surprised at this. I stuck to the right foods but ate over my maintenance calories two days this week. Normally I would be stressed about the extra weight but at the beginning of the week I decided to take some body measurements in case this sort of thing happened. Both my waistline and my belly have not increased in size so this tells me that some of the new weight could actually be muscle gains. I am still happy with the progress I see in the mirror so I am going to stick with this plan until I start to see my waist or belly size increase. If I find I am adding girth in these areas I will scale back the calories a little bit. Basically I am at the point where I am trying to do a body re-composition where I build muscle and lose fat at the same time. (hopefully)

On the exercise front it was a good week. I feel better overall with the extra calories in my diet. My workout recovery has been a little bit better and my workouts have felt strong. I didn’t skip any days this week and I felt like I had beneficial workouts each time. I went up on my deadlifts again. Next week I will deadlift more than I weigh for the first time. That makes me feel good! I also started doing regular squats with the barbell instead of dumbbell squats. I am doing light weight (75lbs) and concentrating on form since I plan to have my power rack by the end of next month. Then the real heavy lifting begins since I can be safe doing it with the cage! When it is time to switch up my routine I think I may do the stronglift 5x5 program for a while, then go back to my current routine after I stop making gains on the stronglift program.

I hope everyone has a great day and nice Memorial Day extended weekend.
Weigh-in: 174.0 lb lost so far: 1.0 lb still to go: 0 lb Diet followed reasonably well
   (2 comments) gaining 1.8 lb a week

19 May 2014

Journal number two for today. I dont know what has gotten into me!

I have decided to add more calories to my diet. YAY!!!! My weight has been stagnant for a little while now but I’m still seeing positive changes in the mirror. Today forward I will be adding 250 daily calories to my diet. This is in an attempt to have improved workout performance and quicker recovery times. I will now be eating at a 250 calorie daily deficit instead of a 500 calorie deficit. I do not expect to see muscle mass gains while in a deficit but hopefully I can continue to build more strength and not be as sore after my workouts. When I first started working out my M-W-F routines would take 30-35 minutes each. Now that I have become more comfortable with lifting, I added more exercises and the routines are now taking 50-55 minutes to complete. I think I might need more calories to support the more difficult lifting sessions.

My mini-goal right now is to be able to see my abs. I still have small amounts of fat there hiding my six-pack, but I think with some more time, things will tighten up. I am pretty sure that I can still successfully lose fat with a 250 calorie deficit I just need to be more diligent with measuring food and recording.

There is always a chance that the scale could start going in the wrong direction and I could gain some fat. This is because I calculate my daily calorie deficit based off of my exercise entries in FS. I try to be ultra-conservative when I enter exercise since the worst thing that can happen is for me to overestimate calories burned and end up eating over my maintenance calories. With a smaller deficit, this is more likely to happen so I will be very aware of what is going on for the next few weeks.

My TDEE at my current weight is 2440 cals. This includes brisk walking for 2 miles 5 days a week and working out for almost an hour 3 days a week. I am a fairly active person and usually never get more than 2 hours of “couch time” per day. If for some reason I start gaining too much weight with my calculated 250 cal deficit I will consider converting over and going strictly by the TDEE numbers and aiming for the 250 deficit off of that. That would make my daily goal 2190 calories regardless of my daily exercise. Right now for May, my average calories per day in FS are at 2207 so I am already pretty dang close to the minus 250 cal TDEE numbers. It’s just a numbers game and I like to play!

I plan to break this weight loss stall and reach my goals. What better way to do than to eat more and work out harder? 

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