Consolidated Quick Look at What Everyone's Trying to do Fitness-Wise???

I really think that most of the nutrition advice out there is just bullshit. Paleo is just another fad IMO. First eggs are gonna kill you even if you eat one, next thing they're the superfood. Sodium is terrible, next thing you know... nope, it does nothing bad. Seriously my ancestors ate pretty much nothing BUT potatoes. Didn't hurt them too much.

Something I've been eating a lot lately is mongolian BBQ with udon noodles or brown rice. You can get those sauce packages at the store, some peppers, a white onion or two and some chicken. I'll make a shitton of it and just eat until I can't anymore because it's just so darn tasty. I don't know if you want to do that while cutting but yeah...

One thing I did do though was I quit drinking soda cold turkey and limited anything with high fructose corn syrup. That stuff's TERRIBLE. Instead I'm drinking at least a gallon of water, sometimes with a lemon squeezed in, per day.  I feel fantastic.

Also been looking for ways to get every last drop out of my day. I drive a lot, so I don't waste any of that time, it's spent doing my singing training, listening to audio books, and pumping my mood. I also started going to the gym during the "lunchbreak" I used to take, and eating as non-stop as possible all day long, instead of wasting that time.

My goal for now is 190lbs, I'm 6'0." And I'm getting some personal training now

Thank you for this post btw. Very inspiring. I need to get back into dancing lol. It is a HUGE turn on for girls. I haven't done it in so long I feel like me "dancing" right now would look like a retard in a room full of superballs

I'd pay to see that

I'm following a regime called Lean Gains which is basically IIFYM (if it fits your macros) and intermittent fasting in one plan. It has been working well for me. I'm at -15 lbs so far since starting my cut and I started 27 days ago.

For most people looking for asthetics I'd suggest using IIFYM.com to get your macros and count them using the myfitnesspal app.

For support use:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/iifym/

Paleo is not bad imo. I've lost 100 lbs on it and it teaches newbies how to eat "clean" but there is a plateau since what you eat is not precise and measured and it's low in carbs for heavy lifters.

For lifting... check out Starting Strength by Mark Rippetoe

I use Zinc, Magnesium and Vitamin B6 sold as ZMA to get deeper sleep.

I cover my windows so my room is perfectly dark for 8 hours of sleep.

Sonofabitch LOL

Title says it all.

Decided I'd go for six pack/ eigthpack by getting my diet in check along with my normal 3 times a week cross fit routine. These are the first results

.

diet is completely tim ferriss style: I had an average of 2000 kcl per day, consisting  of lentils, tomatoes, TONS of spinnaci and mixed veggies, meat eggs, grass fed butter, and olive oil, cottage cheese and about 15 g 85% dark chocolate as a treat.

Drinking black coffee, water, and tea.

Sat. was cheat day, and I go crazy: Pizza, bread, sausages, barbecue, cheesburgers and chips and about two trucks of icecream.

I had two meals a day in a window of eight to 9 hours. Intermittent fasting. first meal usually around 1 pm. Litre of coffee before that. No supplements.

I could have eaten more of all the above. but 2000 kcl is pretty good deficit for me and it turned to be easily cookable for two days like that. So I just kept it there.

I missed training two times due sickness.

And only last friday, and curiousy today I was really hunger struck and feeling low. Other wise fine.

Meals looked like this:

and were surprisingly tasty.

This is me me on 22 th of July.

These shots are from yesterday morning:

Not quite there yet,.. but  its going in the right direction. Also favourable lighting here. will keep at it for the next three weeks. Then post pics up again before I'll be surfing. jiehaaa.

Great torso. You need to beef up your shoulders tho mang

I wouldn't say that going beastmode on every workout, working out every single day, is the way to have the best mass gains. Never forget that almost if it isn't all your fitness idols are b&c or cruising steroids and fat burners. The really round shoulders some guys get for exemple is the kind of look you will probably never archieve if not roiding hard, take a compound like tren, it adds a crazy amount of mass, burns fat faster that any natural fat burner you will ever find, and you can add weights on every single workout because of insane strengh gains.

Not meaning to discourage you, you can aim for a great body, but if you want to be shredded don't expect to have too much muscle mass, abercrombie model's look is for exemple a good natty goal for a beginner who's motivated, and even some of the abercrombie  guys must be under at least hardcore (not legal) fat burners like clen/T3/DNP, not because of the mass they have but becasue some of them stay shredded year round without losing any muscle. You can of course get quite bigger that that, but then you will have to say goodbye to your low body fat for most of the year. 

Don't trust any magic pill when it comes to diet or program, I for exemple get good results on a 4 days "bro split" (push / legs / pull / shoulders), whereas most people tend to recommand programs like SS or 5*5 to add mass, and it didn't work at all for me, I need a lot of rest (7 days) before I can train a muscle properly again. 

Same for the intensity, going to failure sometimes on some exercices, and even pushing failure further (with drop sets for exemple) is a good way to grow your muscles, but in the end of the day if you do it on every workout you will just stop progress, your body needs recovery too. 

Some exercices you should all do : benchpress and inclined benchpress (I would suggest dumbells intead of barbells, getting a better squeeze in the muscle), deadlifts (start light, wrong form leads to severe back injuries), squats (same warning as for deadlifts), overhead press (not helping with legs, slow and controlled movement in front of you), pullups (or lat pull downs, whatever you prefer, depending on your size and strenght) and dips. 

Like that you train almost every muscle group of your body (rear delts, and legs need more work), rest of the exercices can be added to either "finish" the muscle or develop a very precise muscle. For exemple, pullups also work biceps even when properly done, but if you want strong arms some curling can only be good. 

Might write some topic about gym stuff if you guys are interested later this week

thxxx, man. also true. shoulder are weak point of mine currrently. Not my weakest though. That's squats, due to mobility mostly, working on that right now. Will put my self together piece by piece. I'm also in this for the long run. So I'm not hurried.

When I'm forty I'll be the fittest mofo I have ever been. kabaaaam

When I'm though with the sixpack challenge, I will also start eating for muscle gain.

I agree completely with the diet points mentioned.

I'm getting mine more dialed in and corrected at this point, I'm seeing results with what I'm doing but I know 100% I could do so much better. I'm going to switch out the sweet potato and the higher fat meats and make the change to more potato(starchy carbs) along with chicken, kangaroo, turkey and venison(leaner meats). 

My training and gym sessions are on point so I don't need work there. 

I do however notice, I am extremely exhausted with the recent switch to the new job, not used to staying up late to work. For a while I would work at 9pm and get home at 6am.. crazy.

I'll have to adjust this and get more rest.

School starts next week so I'll have to be better with time management. Right now, I know the diet aspect just needs to be fine tuned and I'll be getting much better results.

just finished a slow cut. Maintained strength. Ate whatever I wanted as long as I hit my macros. Did 0 cardio. 

168 - 

155- 

Bulking back up now.  Switched to a powerlifting routine only 3x a week. Getting better gains then ever. Going to get back into the cardio, but my legs failed last time from all the squatting I've been doing. Cleaned my diet up and feel alot better. Hard bulking up with all clean foods though.

I'd hit it

Amazing results dude

Yes really fucking cool to see all these 

lol ya'll make me feel skinny. Lost 15 lbs since i switched from lifting to muay thai though. I'm gonna clear up all competition in my current weight before i put on some more mass though. 

thx bros

Yo Congruent,

nice work! these are like six kilos you lost. How long did that take you, as you said slow cut?

It's really interesting to me, as we are about same height and weight. And I'm really surprised how many pds in fat you had to lose, in order to get that lean.

I weighted myself at one week in the challenge, and if I remember correctly I was about 75, or 76 kilos.

Will have to weigh myself again.

Honestly, I already realized for myself, how I super naive I was about the whole thing. But your post made it completely obvious.  I figured I'd have to lose max. two kilos in fat to be super duper ripped. lol

I lost 1 LB / week, so around 12-13 weeks. The slower the better if you care about maintaining muscle. But the fatter you are, the more you can get away with without it affecting you. I was already relatively lean in my before pic. Also, a healthy metabolism is a HUGE factor when cuttting to single digits. So many people fuck theirs up when dieting. They cut their calories too much at the beginning and by the time they're almost at the finish line, their metabolism is shot. That's why so many people can't seem to lose that last bit of fat. Its a marathon not a sprint. The lowest I had to go was 2400 calories a day and that was at 155 lbs.

Yeah man, its always ALOT more than you think.

About a year and a half back I bulked to 195 eating everything in sight like an idiot. : 

I had to lose 40 lbs just to get the bodyfat level in my before pic i first posted. Fat is very deceiving. 

EDIT : just saw your post mane. Youre already pretty fucking lean. Did you hit a pleateau? If not keep going. Incorporate weekly REFEEDS. The cheat day thing you have going on isnt helping you. If you need to junk make sure it stays in your daily marcronutrient ratios. You can do this every day if you want, I did it often. 

I concur about refeed/cheat days. I often do it but with my macros/calories in check. That's the best way to go about it to see continued weight loss and to not fuck everything up. IIFYM (if it fits your macros) is the way to go with that in all honesty. Plus it'll keep you sane on a diet especially if you're going to be dieting for a while and know you like to eat junk food. It's hard to stay away from that stuff... especially if you have a sweet tooth, are a drunk eater, or high eater lol whatever.. all the same, it's tough. But do what you can to stay on track and stay sane.

wohow, great, man. Amazing to see these kind of changes, especially with the new pic.  Its really like looking at two  completely different persons.

I'm not sure whether I hit a plateau. haven't really taken exact measurements, as I figured results will inevitably show in the mirror. Will just keep doing as I did the last weeks till I go to spain in two weeks. Then take pictures.

Whatever my results for now, I know I will be a lot more scientific about this. Will get myself a wage, calipers, etc. Then experiment with the whole thing a lot more.

I chose that specific diet, because it was so simple to follow. Just doing the same every day. The cheat day is exactly as prescribed by Tim Feriss. But he also doesn't advocate actually putting yourself on restricted calories additionally, as I did. The slow carbs alone should do the trick on his approach. But its also aimed more at people in your 40pds plus stage, I d' say. ^^ so who knows. I don't really have the data to track, apart from taking pics again in two weeks. damn me. well, next time as I said.

So it actually might be that I fucked up my metabolism.

OTOH the 2000 kcl. doesn't sound completely nuts to me. I calculated my TDEE in a variety of ways and its between 2360  (IIFYM) and 2890 (Katch MC Ardlean) kcl per day. The latter is way more accurate I'd say, might even be a bit more. because I don't think I could go under 2000kcl a day without going maaaad. lol.

And I'm also really surprised that you had never to go under 2400 kcl. per day. If your TDEE is more or less like mine according to KMA-formular above, thats would be exactly the minimum deficit to have a 2500 kcl, pd a week deficit. If we assume your refeed is only your TDEE plus max 500kcl. But great.

And if I understand correctly, refeed day means to get the body out of its deficite one day but day, like either going till TDEE or  a bit above and but not going full junk food style? Just making sure the macro rates as caculated on IIFYM fit.

Curiously then I think this is one of the best things for me personally:  I find it way easier to not eat junk all week at all, and then go for it just one day a week. Makes me so much more effective during the week. I mean I love to eat potato chips. But I do not want to eat chips doing anything productive of sorts at all. I want chips and watch an action flic. Junk Food goes hand in hand with junk action, consumerism at least in my case.

It seems to me thus that effect of food on life quality, might be physiological in many ways, but its also very much psychological.  -> So know I find my self super active and productive in sitations where I would be just slacking around two months ago.

From your post your cheat day looked to be around 4000-5000 cals. If your normal intake is 2000, and you eat say 4000, thats 2/3 of a pound. If you eat enough to lose a lb a week thats canceling 2/3 of your progress. So tracking is the best way lol, but you'll probably get there if you don't go super crazy. Maybe just 1 cheat meal.

A refeed is keeping your same protein intake, keeping fat as low as possible, and eating the rest carbs. Eat at your maintenence level. So eating all that ice cream would actually be beneficial here. It will boost your leptin levels and keep your metabolism running efficiently. 

Yeah I wouldnt say your metabolism is fucked up at 2000. Probably just a little slower than it could be. The body adapts to your diet so you have to continously add tools to keep progressing. Thats why starting with less is better. Its really hard without tracking exactly because there can be so many other variables causing a pleateau (which you said your unsure of) like your cheat day and your day to day calories. 

I feel ya  on the psychological part my diet is almost identical to yours now lol.I only eat junk once a week. Its hard because I have to eat around 3700 cals with that diet and I feel super full all day with all that fiber.

Allright I see what you mean now. I just wanted to name all the sorts of shit I eat those days for effect. I ain't stuffing myself with junk till I can't walk.. I'm just eating what I want that day and the selection is rather focused on shitty stuff.  haha My cheat day is probably around 3000 to 3500  max. Stiil enough of a blow in my weekly deficite.

But according toTim Ferriss it shouldn't matter that much at all, how much you eat that day.

The way Tim Ferriss explained it, most of ithe cheat day calories get flushed out unused anyway. There are some additionally tweaks for that, too, that I didn't do, though. But he said its only necessary if you want to go roman-like etremes on your cheat day.

Furthermore  he advocates even a different nd more detailed NO-Carb to go the last mile, which might hacve applied more to me. But slow carb seemed less of a hassle for a first try here.

In the end it really boils down to solid trakcing and then finding the right tools for one self, as you saiid.

Well, thx for your input, that really got me some perspectives here.

And keep us updated on your bulking results :D

It's little things like this that make me go "Derp".

Yeah pullups of some kind are a huge part of my workout/lifestyle. I just added dips back to my workout two months ago and my arms are bigger than they've ever been in my life. I'm interested in the front squats I didn't realize the potential till I saw him do the movement. That's big. I have never been a fan of deadlifts. I realize I'm a bit ignorant but to me they always just seemed an overly glorified lower back exercises, lol.