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As promised, here is the list of important facts that I have learned about fat-loss and weightlifting over the past 10+ months. It is not what you would describe as “exhaustive” for the simple reason that my memory was pretty bad before I started cycling Oxymetholone. (Just kidding! Har!)

Important fact number 1: it is impossible to cut fat without a caloric deficit, which is to say, eating less than you burn over a given period. Any successful diet, no matter how it’s structured, leads to caloric deficit and thence to fat loss. (We’ll define “successful” as actual fat loss, not just water weight; most “lose 10 pounds in 10 days” diets cause you to just lose water.) Even low-carb diets, where you theoretically can eat as much as you want of carb-free foods, only work because you eventually find yourself eating less than you burn.

This makes dieting really simple. Calculate how many calories your body burns in a day (more on this later), and eat fewer calories than that. The amount of deficit you can create will determine how much you lose; a pound of adipose fat is roughly equivalent to 3500 calories, so if you can cut 3500 calories a week (500 a day), you’ll lose a pound a week. You can track the calories with spreadsheets, smartphone apps, websites, etc. Easy-peasy, bacon cheesey. (Bacon and cheese, while delicious, contain a lot of calories, sadly.)

There are a bajillion ways to calculate your caloric requirements, and of course there are knock-down drag-out wars over it on any fitness message board you can find. Some folks use online calculators that take into account muscle mass, activity level, gender, waist and neck measurements, IQ, credit score, and number of living uncles named “Ricky.” The one I use is simple, and based on something stolen from the Men’s Health forum, which says that you should take your current bodyweight in pounds and multiply it by a value from 13-15, based on your activity. If you don’t get out to exercise much, you use 13. If you are constantly getting your workout on, 15. 14 is obviously in the middle. So, a guy like me who weighed 244 when last on a scale, and who tries to ride or run at least 3 times a week, would use 14 and get 244*14=3416 calories a day to maintain my current weight.

My problem with this method, and this is where I differ with most of the Men’s Health Forum cultists, is that it doesn’t take into account weeks where I work out less or more, and it also doesn’t allow me to balance a day of heavy eating (holidays, weekends, etc.) by doing extra cardio to burn some calories. For example, yesterday I went on a 17 mile bike ride, and then ate like a pig at various social functions that night. At the end of the day, I basically met my maintenance calories (although I’m usually shooting for about 750kcal deficit). Not taking into account that morning bike ride means I’d’ve been over and probably unhappy with myself. Plus, it seems kinda dumb to go to a lot of trouble to be very accurate with my caloric intake only to make a complete wild-ass guess on my expenditures. So, I use the minimum 13 multiplier and also track individual workouts. I do, however, stay conservative and ignore calories burned weightlifting, because they aren’t much, and calories spent doing low-intensity things (like walking).

Related fact number 1A: It doesn’t matter what time of day you eat, or how many meals you eat, except from a psychological perspective. If you need 2000 calories a day to meet your goals, and you eat all 2000 calories at 7am and then don’t eat the rest of the day, and your brain allows this, then rad. If you want to eat 18 tiny meals all day, that’ll also work, but don’t think you’re giving yourself a physical advantage by doing so. Anyone that says “don’t eat after 8pm” or “you have to eat frequent small meals to ‘prime your metabolism'” doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Eat on whatever schedule you want that fits your caloric needs.

Important fact number 2: You can’t just do a bunch of cardio and eat whatever you want, if you want to lose fat. Successful fat loss is about 3000% diet (an estimate). An example: a Big Mac contains roughly 500 delicious, succulent calories. To run that off, the average 180-pound individual would have to run, at a 6-mile-per-hour pace, for a little over 36 minutes, just over 3 miles. Isn’t it easier to just…not eat the Big Mac? The last time I tried the “eat anything and run a lot” I was doing 10-12 miles a week, 2+ hours of running, and I think I gained 10 pounds in a month. Diet is more important than cardio by far.

You can, in fact, lose a lot of fat by simply dieting and not doing cardio at all. Weight-lifting, however, is another matter.

Important fact number 3: When your body is in a caloric deficit, it will burn fat to make up the difference, but sadly it will also leach protein from your muscles, because your body is a self-destructive prick. The away you can help it avoid this is by 1) not trying to lose too much fat at once, no more than 1.5-2 pounds a week, and even less if you’re already fairly low on the body-fat percentage scale; and 2) convincing your body that it actually needs that muscle mass by lifting heavy things and putting them back down. Also make sure you get a large protein surplus in your diet, which can be tough while eating at a deficit, but something along the lines of a gram of protein per pound of bodyweight, or more. Chicken, rare tuna, skim milk, and powdered whey protein should be your friend. Ho-Hos and Devil Dogs, sadly, contain very little protein.

Important and really sucky fact number 4: Your body cannot grow muscle at the same time as it cuts fat. It’s an either-or situation, and I hate it. Because I’m still 20-30 pounds overweight, I’m in the midst of cutting fat like a champion, and lifting heavy, and I’m bumping up against the maximum amounts I can lift with the muscle mass I have. It really sucks not being able to bench press more than 180 pounds for 5 reps, but I’m basically stuck there until I start eating again (although creatine has helped, more on this later). Hopefully if I get my body fat down into the low teens by the end of autumn, I’ll be able to eat “above maintenance” through the holidays (mmm…pie) and start progressing on lifts.

Important fact number 5: Accountability and logs are more than necessary; they are completely vital. Whatever you can do to track progress on workouts and diet is going to make a big difference, whether it’s a spreadsheet, a website, or just a yellow legal pad filled with numbers. The good news is there are lots of useful online tools for this:

• LoseIt.com: tracking of food intake and exercise calories. Huge database of foods (including restaurant and brand name processed stuff), and you can add your own individual foods and recipes. I don’t think I fully trust their calculations on exercise calories, so I fudge that a bit with values from the websites where I track my workouts.


• Runkeeper: a smartphone app with a nice website as well. Helps a great deal with tracking cardio. The iPhone app uses the GPS to track your location and elevation, so you get accurate distance and timing for running, cycling, etc. Plus, it interfaces with Facebook and Twitter so you can post your workouts and get Likes from your pepys.


• Fitocracy: currently in beta, but invites are fairly easy to come by. It’s great for logging weight training workouts, something that Runkeeper doesn’t really do, but also interfaces with Runkeeper to get cardio information. Every exercise you do earns you points that correspond to “levels,” so you can compete with your friends and other Fitocrazers in groups. Roleplaying nerds give it a big thumbs up.

Important fact number 6: Most health supplements are wastes of money. Even ones that are relatively beneficial are usually too expensive if purchased from, say, a GNC. Exhibit A: 5 pounds of Whey protein for $65. I use this for under $40 a 5-lb tub (I “subscribe” to it and get a fresh tub every month).

Diet pills and “mass gainers” are dumb. Depending on your goals, you don’t need anything other than whey protein, a vitamin, maybe a fish oil pill, and possibly creatine if you’re trying to bulk up a bit. If you’re trying to gain weight/muscle, a “mass gainer” is the stupidest thing you could possibly buy. Would you rather eat a nasty sugar+protein powder, or a big ham sandwich? Diet pills simply don’t work, unless you don’t care about fat loss and just want to lose a few pounds of water.

Important and staggeringly depressing fact number 8: Getting into shape takes time, and often a lot of it. Not necessarily from an “hours per week” perspective, although the more effort you put in, the faster results will come. If you want to go from 30% body fat (roughly where I was last October) to a 10%, that’s a multi-year project. After almost 11 months of working out and trying to be a good boy with my nutrition, I’m at roughly 20% body fat. I’m hoping to be somewhere near 15% by Christmas. So get ready for a long haul, and keep in mind that this is a life change, not a diet. If you want to be healthy, you’ll have to work on it for the rest of your life, and stop eating bacon at every meal. (I myself have cut bacon back to only 2 meals a day.)

With this, I conclude the fitness-centric portion of the bloggage. I’ll post more on my progress and other fitness-related jams here and there, but you can expect to see more random funny crap in the future. Thank God for that.