I’m Back Blogging After 6 Months Off
This is my first blog post in over 6 months, during this time I have been spending my time doing other stuff. I’ve still been lifting weights and exercising. But my diet plan hasn’t been 100% clean.
The reason I started this blog was to document my progress and finally get my body fat percentage down to about 10%. This blog is over 18 months old now and I haven’t achieved my goal. This just isn’t good enough, but I’m not the only one. Having just checked out a few of the most popular weight loss blogs on the Internet, I’m still amazed to find that some are still blogging every day, but still not achieving there weight loss goals.
I have decided to start blogging again, because I have found this blog to be a tremendous motivation tool for me to start losing fat again. Like I mentioned earlier, during 2010 I’ve been mainly lifting weights and this has allowed my muscle mass to increase. I’m walking around at around 225 pounds at the moment, with a body fat percentage of around 22%+. This is only an estimate though.
To be perfectly honest with you I’m too scared to step onto my body fat scales, because I know I won’t like what is staring back at me. Yesterday I started eating healthy again, and have started to cut back on the calories. My main aim is to cut some weight and hopefully the weight that I lose will all be fat.
I’ve had several emails from people asking me when am I going to start my Friday weekly weigh in’s again. Well I plan on starting these again in the next few weeks. Because these weigh in’s were a fantastic motivation for me, because I was embarrassed to show pictures of the scales each week that shown poor results. This is because I let all my family and friends know that I had started this fat loss blog. And each week if I was seeing poor results at the weekly weigh in’s I would get it in the neck off friends and family members that I was slacking.
Like everyone else, I hate failing. So by starting blogging again hopefully this will help me to get back on track with my fat loss journey.
Setting Fat Loss Goals To A Deadline
Setting yourself goals is probably the best way to lose fat over the long term. I started 2009 not only overweight but having a dangerously high body fat percentage of 30%+. I knew at the beginning of the year that my friend was hosting his stag weekend at Benidorm in the middle of April. This didn’t give me much time to get into shape. I started the year weighing 234 pounds. My weight yesterday was 202.2 pounds. So has you can see I’ve lost quite a bit of body weight so far this year.
I’ve got 4 weeks to go now till the stag weekend, but I’m still carrying quite a large amount of body fat at 23.6%. My aim in the next 4 weeks is to work my butt off and burn of as much body-fat as I can, and get my body weight down to 195 pounds. I know for sure that I will achieve this, because I am dedicating my life at the moment to my body fat reduction journey. I’m constantly thinking about it. Setting yourself fat loss and weight loss goals like this is brilliant because it really does keep you motivated to work your butt and lose your excess fat.
In 4 weeks time I would absolutely love it if my body fat percentage was below 20% to achieve this though it’s going to take much more hard work than I’ve already done so far. As I’m losing weight my resting metabolism is getting less and less each week. This means I neither have to burn more calories off through exercise or reduce my daily calorie intake slightly. Once I start building muscle my calorie intake will become higher and the more muscle my body carries will also increase my resting metabolism.
I’m currently writing this post as I’m exercising on my stationery bike. But once I complete my one hour cardio session. I am going to set out a 4 week plan that will maximize my fat loss to the most that I can possibly do. At the moment I’m eating carbs on a night. I’m going to make a 4 week diet plan that stops me eating carbs after 5 pm. I’ve only got 7.2 pounds to lose in 4 weeks, I may lose more during this 4 week period but whats important is I need to hold onto as much lean body mass as I can. This will probably mean an increase in my protein intake, and perhaps an increase in my complex carbohydrate intake during the earlier hours of the day.
I’ve already starting doing things to improve my fat loss already. One I’m now doing my cardio in the earlier hours, which will give my metabolism a boost for the day ahead which means more calories burnt every day. I’ve purchased a sweatsuit from www.sweatsuits.co.uk and I’m now exercising in it instead of my normal workout gear. It will hopefully allow my body to burn even more calories. A word of warning though if you are thinking about doing this yourself take it easy because your body heat rises. So don’t exercise hard wearing a sweatsuit, ask your doctor first to see if it’s OK.
If you have that special occasion coming up start setting yourself goals. Let’s say you need to lose ten pounds because of a wedding your going to in five weeks. Set out a plan and make sure you lose those ten pounds before the wedding arrives. Don’t leave it till the last week, so your crash dieting to lose weight. Been there and done the crash dieting its works for a short period then your quickly back to square one.
