Day 704: Body Fat Goals

fitness

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.

Motivation

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!

Body Scan Results

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%

This is what my body looks like under their machine. Looks like I don’t know how to keep my head straight. (I do have scoliosis so I say that only half-jokingly.)

This chart shows the distribution of results from other BodySpec customers who have gotten scans. That is, it’s not representative of the general population because the kind of person to go in for a body fat scan tends to be more interested in their health.

Since I’m male, 29 years old, and at 16.8% body fat, that puts me at around the 20th-40th percentile of people who go in for scans.

This shows the body fat % for different parts of my body. The person who explained my results to me over the phone gave this definition of android and gynoid because I had no idea what those were:

  • Android: waist and belly button area
  • Gynoid: hip, butt, thigh area

The RMR is how much calories my body would burn if I were completely bedridden. This is different from my Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE), which includes calories burned from going about my activities during the day. (When you calculate how many calories to consume, you use TDEE as the starting point for how much to eat to maintain weight.)

Oh, I just noticed that the definitions for Android and Gynoid are included in the report. Anyway, my A/G ratio falls in the expected region.

VAT is the fat that apparently sits on top of your organs and should be as close to 0 as possible. The BodySpec rep who explained my results said that the average male has 1-1.5 pounds of VAT and that there are increased health risks around 2 lbs or higher. Seems like I’m good.

I was told to ignore the T-Score and focus on the Z-Score, which shows my results relative to other BodySpec customers of similar age and ethnicity. With a z-score of 0.1, I’m basically smack dab in the middle of the distribution. I asked how I could get higher bone density and the rep told me that after age 30, bones stop developing but that you could use heavy resistance training and take calcium and vitamin D to get stronger bones. She also mentioned that genetics plays a significant role.

Lastly, there’s this table which basically says that I don’t have significant muscle imbalances.

Plan

My plan for reducing body fat has two parts:

  1. Eat at a caloric deficit to lose 1 lb per week
  2. Continue strength training to minimize muscle loss

Diet

For my diet, I’m focusing on total calories (to make sure I’m at a deficit) and protein (to make sure I’m getting enough to minimize muscle loss).

I’m using MyFitnessPal to keep track of my calories (it recommends that I consume 1750 calories per day to lose 1 lb a week at an activity level of “slightly active”). I’ll see just how much weight I lose every week and adjust this number as needed to stay close to 1 lb lost per week.

The general recommendation for dieting athletes is to consume around 1.6-2.4 grams of protein per kg of body weight which means that at a weight of 150 lbs, they should consume 109-163 grams of protein. (There’s another study that suggests that protein intake should be even higher.) I’m not an elite athlete, but I’ll aim to consume within that range. Also, given that I’m vegan and that the digestibility of plant-based proteins is lower than animal-based proteins, I should err on the side of consuming more to make sure I’m getting enough. (For reference, a typical serving of protein powder contains around 20g of protein so hitting the lower end of that range means consuming the equivalent of 5 or 6 servings of protein powder every day. This means that in addition to eating protein-rich foods, I’m going to be drinking a ton of Huel and protein shakes.)

Exercise

I’ve been doing Daniel Vadnal (FitnessFAQs)’s Body by Rings program for the past two months or so, and I’ve liked the results I’ve been seeing. I’m going to continue with this program, keep bouldering several times a week, and hopefully add in some more mobility work like I’ve been meaning to.

Projections

Because I looooooove spreadsheets, I created one to calculate how much weight I’d need to lose given the following variables (highlighted in yellow in the spreadsheet):

  • My current body weight
  • My current body fat %
  • My desired body fat %
  • What % of the weight lost is expected to be FFM (fat-free mass)

If I assume that 100% of the weight I lose will be fat, then I’d need to lose 11 pounds:

If I assume that 75% of the weight I lose will be fat (meaning 25% would be lean tissue), then I’d need to lose 15 pounds:

I haven’t been below 140 lbs since probably high school so dropping this low will be… interesting.

In practice, I won’t know how much of the weight I lose will be fat compared to muscle until I lose some amount of weight and then get another DEXA scan to see exactly how my body composition changed. So I’ll have a better idea of this number in a month when I go in for my next scan.

There’s also the possibility that I actually put on muscle while losing fat, which would mean that I would need to lose less weight in order to get to the desired body fat %. That would be sweet, but I’m not counting on it.

So if I end up needing to lose around 12 pounds and I’m losing a pound a week, I’ll be cutting for three months assuming everything goes perfectly. That sounds like a super long time, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be sick of being at a calorie deficit so let’s hope that my enthusiasm keeps me going for as long as possible.

Of course, this wouldn’t be interesting without a progress photo. I’m going to have it collapsed by default so that you don’t have to look at a shirtless progress photo of me unless you actually want to:

Starting point

Notes:

  • Not flexing, no post-workout pump
  • I originally only had the bathroom selfie but the lighting is quite flattering so I added the other one to show more normal conditions. Lighting makes such a big difference!
  • Looking at these, I feel like I could put on some more size so I’m tempted to bulk instead. I suspect that a month or two in, I’m going to feel like a spooky skeleton who has “lost too much muscle” when in fact I just didn’t have that much muscle mass to start with. Still, going to stick to my current (possibly naive) plan: Get lean first, then try to get stronger and put on muscle while staying lean.

Okay, let’s do this! I plan on posting an update once a month whenever I get a new DEXA scan.