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Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Cutting the fat.

Well, one could say I've got the exercise part of this down. Spinning and interval running are my cardio and I have documented a ton about lifting. Three months ago I started using this blog to share my experiences with various popular and not so popular forms of training and I have found methods that work and built in physically demanding vacations to stave off boredom; including a soon to come week of hiking in the mountains and two weeks of skiing (SKIING!!) early next year. So, great, I'm 20% of the way there. Here comes the challenging part: diet. I want the best of both worlds, lots of lean body mass burning away calories and a lot less fluff which means I just want to lose fat. This complicates things. Being a good little reader and researcher I checked to see how to do this and approximately how long it will take.

Are you ready? A woman who is close to her optimal BMI can burn one to one-half pound of fat a week, as long as she consumes enough protein and continues lifting challenging weights. (Don't feel like looking for the citation at the moment) So, here we go, I plan to lose 20 pounds of fat in 20 weeks. If it turns out I don't need to lose that much I will reassess at the time. Good thing I don't have a beauty contest coming up in the next month or so!

First, I had to figure out how much I was eating, so Sunday I wrote down everything and put it in the Fitday chart. It was a basic day, fairly healthy foods with a couple of treats thrown in. The treats were 3/4 a cup of ice cream- yes I eat it out of the measuring cup, and half of a large-ish chocolate chip cookie. 2600 calories! Yikes, and that was a no wine, no crazy filet mignon type of day. Okee-dokee. So for the next two weeks I'm dropping that down to 2000 or less (keep in mind I work-out a lot and am 5'7") and at least 100 grams or protein a day. This worked out ok yesterday.

Speaking of yesterday, this was supposed to be the start of my deload or no lifting week but after lounging around all weekend and the shock of my eating habits, towards 5pm I started getting antsy. I decided to take a Spin class, easy, cardio and Pam teaches it, she is always entertaining. However, like I said, it was just after 5 and her class doesn't start until 7:15 and I was already climbing the walls bored. There is a 6pm class but it is ridiculous (the instructor does a lot of hopping up and down on the bike, weird tricep/ pushup thingys- yes while riding the bike, and some bizarre butt off the seat- thrust into the handlebars then move the butt back again while hovering over the seat move I wish I could videotape for this. No one on The Tour behaves that way!) Which meant I arrived at the gym with just enough time to train with barbells before taking Pam's class. I'm an addict.

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