Day 736: Body Fat - 1 Month Update

fitness

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%!

Region Breakdown

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):

Lean Tissue Report

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.

Weight

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!

Routine

I’ll break down what I did for the past month because it worked quite well.

Diet

How much I ate

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.

My adherence to 1,500 calories a day was… spotty. It didn’t help that this period coincided with the holidays because that meant spending more time at my family home, where I have much less control over what I eat (my stepmom’s cooking is delicious, but it’s basically all carbs) and my exercise routine since I don’t have a gym membership down there. Also, my discipline is just much worse when I’m not in my regular routine and environment so I ended up eating quite poorly.

Here are two weeks where I went well over my daily goal:

I had a super mega binge on 12/31 when I hosted a New Year’s Eve gathering, so I started off the year with a 36 hour fast to balance it out. It was surprisingly easy! Given the many health benefits of fasting and how chill the 36 hour fast was, I considered incorporating a 24+ hour fast every week into my diet, but I wanted to keep things relatively simple so I decided to do intermittent fasting instead.

So starting from about a week ago, I’ve been doing a 16:8 intermittent fasting protocol and limiting my eating from 12pm to 8pm. This is honestly more for the psychological benefit of setting boundaries around when I can eat rather than the health benefits like improved insulin sensitivity (although that’s nice, too). All my binges have historically occurred late at night when I’m tired and have no willpower, so it’s helpful to simply set a rule that says I can’t eat past 8pm.

Over the past 5 weeks, I consistently went over my goal of 1500 calories and consumed an average of 1800 calories a day.

What I ate

Protein. Lots of it.

My goal was to hit 150g of protein a day, but I never managed to hit that despite guzzling tons of protein shakes. I averaged about 110g of protein a day, which is decent but not as high as it should be. Maybe I wouldn’t have lost lean tissue in my arms, android, and gynoid if I had increased my protein consumption, but who knows.

You’re supposed to consume more protein the leaner you get in order to preserve lean tissue, so I will have to try harder to hit the 150g goal (which is the higher end of the recommended range).

I ate mostly the same things every day. Here were my most common foods:

  • Protein shakes (banana, soy milk, protein powder, creatine)

  • Protein bars

  • Huel

  • Oatmeal with peanut butter

  • Tofu

  • Vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, carrots)

    • I recently realized that eating steamed vegetables with simple seasoning (no oil) is amazing for feeling full while consuming very few calories

  • Veggie burrito bowl at Chipotle

Being vegan means that I’m not consuming common fitness foods like chicken breast and eggs. One of my goals with my fitness journey is to show that you could be strong and look great while eating a compassionate diet because too many people still believe that you can’t do it without eating meat.

Exercise

I continued bouldering about twice a week and worked out using the Body by Rings program, which is targeted at hypertrophy. I feel like the program would be more fun if I were bulking because I’d make strength and muscle gains more easily, but that’ll have to wait until after I finish cutting.

As previously mentioned, I didn’t do any cardio.

Routine Summary

To summarize, here’s what I did this past month:

  • Diet

    • ~1800 calories a day
    • ~110g of protein a day

  • Exercise

    • Bouldering (2x a week)
    • Body by Rings (4x a week)
    • No cardio

Photos

In terms of appearance, there isn’t that much of a noticeable difference compared to last month, which is surprising given the 3% difference in body fat. There’s slightly more definition, but it’s not substantial. I think this is likely due to the fact that there isn’t as much muscle that I’m starting out with, so an increase in muscle definition isn’t as noticeable. That said, I’d guess that the difference in leanness between 10% (goal) and 16.8% (starting point) will be much more noticeable.

Expand for shirtless progress photos

  • Normal lighting

  • Flattering lighting

Plan

My plan for this upcoming month:

Diet

The plan for this month is to stick to 1500 calories per day rather than consistently going over. I’m hoping intermittent fasting will help with this so that I have fewer binges.

I’d also like to increase my protein intake to 130g. That should be doable by adding an extra protein shake a day.

Exercise

In pursuit of developing calisthenics skills (planche and front lever), I’m switching my training from being focused on hypertrophy to training for those particular abilities. This means that I’ll no longer be continuing with Body by Rings (BBR), which I think will have a detrimental effect on my body fat % and retention of lean tissue as I cut because BBR has been great for working out all the various parts of my upper body. As a result, I expect my body composition progress to slow down since my training won’t be as comprehensive and stimulating as the bodybuilding routine I have been doing. I’m in this for the long haul, so I’ll be happy as long as I make some progress even if it’s not as significant as this past month!