I have faced many ups and downs in my journey over the last three years. Starting around 239lbs, getting down to 185lbs, then back up to around 215lbs at one point along the way.
Ultimately I have found what works best for me and have been able to reach my first goal of 180lbs and continue progress beyond that.
While I don’t have many images of me at my start weight, I do have a video I took when we started seeing a personal trainer in Jan. 2022.
[apparently my video is against IMGUR rules…trying to find alternate site to upload to]
Not sure if IG is allowed, sorry, mods remove if not, I didn’t think this would be an issue one Imgur:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DHbl_L8yVXH/
My progress is attributed to changing my diet, running, and weight work.
Diet:
The primary thing that has helped me was simply tracking everything. When I say everything I mean everything. Even if I eat a box of girl scout cookies, I am tracking it. It’s important that I know all of the calories in, even on the bad days, so that I can see long term trends.
One thing that used to derail me was not tracking when I had a bad day, or on my birthday, or during a vacation, then my mindset would shift. Since I wasn’t tracking I would eat more or even binge.
I still struggle with binging time to time, back tracking these moments helps to keep everything into long term perspective and stops me from binging multiple days or weeks in a row.
I have also found a lot of pages and influencers that take a very honest approach to a healthy relationship with food which is what I needed. Cutting my favorite foods, not having that piece of cake at my kids birthday party, things like that really gave me a bad relationship with food. While these “diets” would seemingly work quick, I would always crash hard. Accepting that days will have ups and downs and simply tracking CICO and staying in a slight deficit was the secret for me.
Ultimately I strive to stay in an average of 200 to 600 caloric deficit per day (the large range will make a little more sense later).
Running:
I have runner win my family and was always attracted to running but was terribly out of shape and bad at running. It started by committing to a C25K program and working slowly, very slowly, up to my first 5k. To keep this short and sweet that eventually led to my first marathon in 2023, countless half marathons since then, and currently training for my second marathon this coming May.
This is part of the large sway in caloric deficit. Some rest days I may only burn my baseline TDE in which I strive to stay about 200cal under. Other days I could be doing a 20 mile run and could potentially be burning a total of 4,500+ calories in a day in which my deficit may end up being 1,000,+ but ultimately I try to stay in the 1/2 to 1lb a week deficit range on average long-term.
Currently I run about 30 to 40 miles a week.
Weights:
Started by seeing a personal trainer once a week in 2022 with my wife.
He urged us to go to the gym once or twice a week on top of that which we were fairly inconsistent with but would try. These would be pretty simple full body workouts to maintain strength more than anything else.
Recently however (about 4 months ago) I made commitment to myself to make sure I went twice a week, add more of a focus on progressive overload and make each day focused on a major muscle group in order to gain a bit more strength. I am not looking to get bulky or anything, but I do want to work on eventually leaning out a bit having some definition and gaining functional strength, running is still my passion though.
I now do a Leg Day, Arm/Shoulder Say, and a Back/Chest Day (with trainer) once a week. I have stuck consistently with this for almost 4 months now only missing one leg day due to a sick kiddo.
I have seen some progress in tone and strength which has been fun (there is a recent post in my profile with progress pics for that and more information)
I am probably missing some stuff or rambling or somewhere in between so please let me know if you have any questions or anything!
