<aside> 💪🏽 This is a series on my 2022 goal to get shredded (< 10% body fat).
All posts:
Last month, I started cutting and got my initial DEXA scan, which showed that I was at 16.8% body fat. My goal is to get to 10%.
After a month of counting calories and working out consistently, I was excited to see how my body composition changed and the results did not disappoint (most recent results are on top):
In the span of a month, I gained 2.4 pounds of lean tissue, lost 5.2 pounds of fat, and dropped my body fat by 3.2%!
One of the nice things about the DEXA scan compared to other methods of measuring body composition is that it analyzes each body region. With that level of granularity, I’m able to see that although I’ve gained lean tissue overall, I’ve actually lost muscle on my arms, android (lower abdomen), and gynoid (hips, upper thigh, butt):
I was surprised that I lost about half a pound of muscle in my arms given that I’ve been working them out consistently, but some muscle loss is to be expected when cutting.
My weight dropped from 147.8 lbs to 145.2 lbs. Those numbers are different from the DEXA scan results because that’s from weighing myself first thing in the morning in my boxers. My weight doesn’t actually matter since the goal here is fat loss, not weight loss, but weight loss is a decent proxy for fat loss.
Overall, I’m very pleased with the results!
I’ll break down what I did for the past month because it worked quite well.
I wanted to make sure I was properly tracking my consumption, so I started counting calories on MyFitnessPal. I initially set my weekly goal to “Lose 1 lb per week” and my activity level at “Lightly Active” which put my daily calorie goal at 1700. After two weeks, I realized that the activity level of “Not Very Active” would be more appropriate and that lowered my daily calorie goal to 1500.
Using an activity level of “Not Very Active” might seem strange given that I rock climb and work out on a regular basis, but those activities don’t burn that many calories. I actually moved quite little this past month: I mostly sat around at home, sat on my motorcycle, or sat around at the gym / cafes. I’ll probably start going on more walks as it gets harder to lose fat, but in the past month, I barely moved which goes to show that you can make substantial progress simply by watching what you eat, without any cardio.