<aside> 💪🏽 This is a series on my 2022 goal to get shredded (< 10% body fat).
All posts:
So apparently, unless I've (1) committed to writing every day and (2) am doing it publicly, I don't write at all, so I'm going to go back to daily journaling. This seems like something that'd be appropriate for a new year's resolution but I have a bunch of stuff swirling in my head so I'm getting a head start so I can start dumping my brain ASAP.
ROAD TO RAMEN IS BACK
There's a ton of Browserflow stuff I want to write about because there's so much that's happened in the past month (the period where I stopped writing R2R happened to be the best period business-wise... hmmmmmmmm gonna chalk it up to coincidence and not think about it too much), but I recently lied down on this machine that scanned down to my bones so let's talk about that.
I've always wanted to get a DEXA scan to measure my body fat, and I found out there's a spot close to me so I went ahead and got one for the first time. It was only $40 at BodySpec ($40 is the monthly membership price but you can cancel it anytime so you can do just one and stop if you wanted). I plan to get one every month since I committed to cutting for the first time in forever to measure my progress (wow, I guess I'm really starting all the traditional new year's goals early).
Current status: I have some pudge on my face and my mid-section, but I'm in decent shape and my abs are slightly visible so I thought I'd be around 13-15% body fat. Actual result: 16.8%.
Higher than I expected, but that's also fun because that means there's much more room for my body to change and lean out. I've been consistently around 145 for many years now in generally the same kind of shape, so I'm excited to see what kind of changes I can make.
I told a friend yesterday that my goal is to hit 10% body fat (who knows if I'll make it there, but I'm going to try), and he asked me why I care about lowering my body fat. Some reasons that come to mind:
Curiosity / seems like fun: Learning how to deliberately and methodically induce changes in my physical appearance, whether that's losing fat or gaining muscle, sounds like a fun skill to develop. I'm also curious what I'd look like now with much lower body fat — the last time I was super lean was probably around 2015:
That time was an anomaly though because despite the smile on my face, I was suffering from food poisoning that prevented me from digesting anything thanks to me recklessly drinking coffee out of a reused dirty coke bottle from a random street stand in Vietnam. (The locals were drinking it so I thought I'd be fine — oh sweet summer child.) I want to try getting lean without draining my body of all liquids this time.
Looking better: I put weight on my face quite easily (round azns represent) and I know cutting down my BF% would help me look less like Anpanman. (To be clear, I'm happy with how I look but I'm always down to look better.) I was inspired to commit to this after I met up with my sister recently and saw just how much better she looked with her recent weight loss. Her face shape is way more defined now and I was just like, "damn nuna, you look great!"
The 10% body fat goal is a proxy for how lean I'd imagine myself to be, but I'm not tied to that number: I'm going to go off what I see in the mirror and stop when it feels right rather than waiting until I get the magic numbers from a DEXA scan report. Might be 12%, might be 10%, hopefully won't be lower than that because I'm not trying to make myself miserable in order to lose weight.
I'm kind of tempted to put on more muscle before cutting because I might just look like a skinny boy if I were to cut from my current point. Oh well, we shall see!
I'll go through the results of my initial body scan section-by-section:
The important bit here is my body fat percentage: 16.8%
