Diary of a Fat Girl - Episode 19: On Eating More, Branching Out, and Hitting a Benchmark

This part was written in June:
I've started writing this entry a few times in the last couple of weeks, more from a place of obligation than inspiration, if I'm being honest.  A few important fitness/health things have occurred in recent weeks, though the writing content associated with them is probably a collective paragraph (though let's be real - I'll probably talk your ear off about them).  Things have been pleasant and calm on the home front.  Dan's job keeps him pretty well exhausted most of the time, with on-call weeks and late work nights and long commutes, but it pays well and he enjoys the challenge.  My job is in the strange waking dream state that is post-senior/pre-summer June; because my program is so tiny, everyone takes final exams at the same time, and then seniors leave.  The few weeks after that are still a part of fourth term and count for grades, but the underclassmen who remain are already in summer mode.  This year, a particularly virulent strain of this disease has spread to the staff as well, and we're all silently wondering, "why am I still here?"  It's hard to blame the kids for feeling unmotivated and unfocused when we're having the same issues.

...Which is directly related to the next piece of news: I got an iPad.  And it is awesome.  Now, I can't really speak to the incredible capabilities of the iPad because I've been using it almost exclusively to play Plague Inc., a 99¢ game that has consumed nearly every waking moment of my life for the last week.  It's a strategy game in which you play as a disease (or as God, depending on how you look at it) with the goal of infecting and killing every last human on Earth.  With seven different pathogens (from bacteria to nano-viruses to prions, et al) and three difficulty levels, the game has more depth than I would expect for something that is seemingly so straightforward.  It took me a few days to really nail my strategy down, but I beat the last remaining level on "brutal" difficulty this morning on the train, which unlocked three cheat-filled bonus levels.  So I've got my afternoon planned out.  It's not like I have grading or planning to do...sigh.

The boredom is sort of pleasant, however.  Normally I'm a frantic mess this time of year, trying to finish projects for my second job (writing science workbooks) that are generally sent to the printer at the end of June or early July.  Although that job still exists, the amount and type of work have changed, leaving me with a smaller future paycheck but also a calm end to the school year for the first time ever.  In the evenings, I spend my time couch-surfing, web-surfing, and pandemic-modeling.  I have an abundance of free time, something I value extremely highly on the other side of grad school, and I'm not particularly eager to give it up.  I did take a summer job "teaching" summer school (in quotes because the kids are doing independent online courses and I'm a glorified lab monitor), but it's only 20 hours a week and there are two weeks off on either end.  I suspect that the iPad, or at the very least, several novels, will get plenty of use during that time.

That all being said, I do have a twinge of guilt over the free time because I've been using even less of it for fitness work, rather than using more of it.  It's only been about two weeks of slacking off, but it coincides with my adoption of a new lifting program, the parameters of which have me doing less work than I was doing in the first place.  So all told, I'm doing less each time I exercise and I'm exercising less often.  Not exactly the change I was going for.  The program I'm doing is from the book New Rules of Lifting for Women, something that sat in my Amazon shopping cart for weeks on end before I finally purchased it last month.  The book itself is a quick read (I finished it in about a day), but it's full of comprehensive info regarding nutrition, exercise guidelines/basics, and specific training schedules for lifting.  The routines are challenging and designed to avoid classic over-training (something I don't think I was guilty of, but I'm trusting the program right now and seeing where it takes me).  The Phase 1 exercises are mostly familiar (deadlifts, squats, lunges, lat pulldowns, cable rows, OHPs, etc.) with a few new additions (stability ball jackknifes).  I did switch from doing kneeling push-ups (aka girl push-ups) to incline push-ups using the smith machine, which were more challenging but also more doable, if that makes any sense.  My ROM is much better on the incline push-ups and I am able to do enough reps to be sore the next day; I'm hoping this will lead me to doing regular push-ups and will also improve my bench numbers.

One aspect of the NROLFW program is eating more calories.  Up until recently, I've been eating between 1200 and 1400 calories depending on the day (on days when I burn a lot, I eat more), which makes for a deficit of about 500 calories a day, suggesting weight loss of a pound a week.  I've gotten used to that level of eating, and I also got used to feeling hungry sometimes, something I would not have abided before.  NROLFW, however, suggests that eating at such a deficit is not particularly helpful, healthwise, and that only those looking to lose significant amounts of fat should be worrying about getting calories low.  According to the formulas in the book (which are pretty standard across multiple websites), I need about 1900 calories a day to maintain my weight if I'm not doing anything special (i.e. not working out).  On days I exercise, I need more like 2100-2200 calories to maintain my weight, though that number obviously varies based on what I do and how much I do.  To that end, I've increased my daily calorie goal to 1800 on most days with bumps to more on lifting days.  I drink a protein shake on those days, which I've gotten used to, and I try to eat more chicken breasts for dinner, even though they're too boring for even me.  The hardest part has actually been trying to care about macros, considering I get well over 50% of my calories from carbs every day (usually 55-60%, whereas it should be 40-45%).  Bumping up my protein and reducing my carbs is a lot harder for me than cutting calories in general.  Dealing with both number of calories and sources of calories makes the restriction more problematic, at least in my head.

The actual exercises in the program, however, seem a little too easy for me.  Given that the program recommends 2-3 sessions a week (and I've only been doing 2), there are several days each week that I am able and willing to do work but shouldn't do any strength training.  Some of those days are running days, which is something I'm still trying to work on in both speed and stamina.  According to my personal trainer (who is taking the summer off and might be moving....laaaaaaame) and several websites and the NROLFW book, I should be focusing on interval training rather than steady state cardio.  However, I enjoy longer easier runs a lot more than short, intense runs.  I know that "enjoy" and "should do" are not the same, and the beginning of the C25K program was closer to interval training than steady state cardio anyway (and I did just fine there and saw amazing progress in a short amount of time), so I know what I should be doing, but it's hard to get motivated to do it when I don't have a regimen/goal/schedule to work with.  If I want to hit a 10-minute mile, however, I would be better off doing short rounds of interval training than running a mile every week and shaving a few seconds off.

I have, however, had some running success lately.  On June 2nd, I ran in the 2nd Annual Pug Rescue of New England 5k in South Boston (Castle Island, to be exact).  Considering the RFYL 5k was more of a mud hike than a run, and considering I was held up for almost an hour at the final obstacles, the PRoNE 5k was the first real 5k race I've ever done.  The weather was as abysmal as it could be for June in Boston.  It rained heavily the entire time, with ferocious winds coming off of the ocean and spraying the runners with stinging salt water.  It was slightly cold, which meant that the wind and rain combined to make for hypothermia-inducing conditions.  On any other day, the route would have been beautiful: overlooking the ocean the entire time and ending near a historic fort with beautiful grassy areas everywhere.  But instead, it was a shitstorm.  Apparently, though, I thrive in such conditions, because I posted a time of 39:06, which beats my previous treadmill time by like 2 minutes.  I think it was a combination of the motivation boost of being in a real race with other people and the overwhelming desire to go home and get out of the rain.  It took me several hours (including a nap) to feel normal and warm again after that.  I'm hoping my future events are less taxing on my homeostasis.

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This part was written today:
Things have improved quite a bit, motivation-wise, since I stopped writing last month.  Once school ended, I found myself sufficiently refreshed enough to hit the gym about 5 days a week, rather than 2 or 3, and I have finally finished stage 1 of the NROLFW.  To be honest, I got pretty bored with stage 1 after a few weeks because it the same two routines back and forth for 16 sessions.  Without bench presses (which make me feel super-human even though I'm benching like 50 lbs) and any real variation between the sessions, I found myself going through the motions more than thriving in the activities.  Stage 1 is over, though, and thankfully the subsequent stages are all fewer than 16 sessions (most are half that) and have more exercises to do during each session (with the exception of a special stage designed to make me able to do a chin-up - which is going to be awesome).  So this past week I've been substantially less bored at the gym.  I've also starting doing interval runs, which are not as bad as I made them out to be in my brain.  I do need more running songs, though.

As for weight/calories/other things, I finally hit the 50 pounds lost mark at the beginning of June.  It was a much bigger deal at the time, because I've been stuck within a pound of that weight since then, although at least that was kind of on purpose.  My aforementioned calorie re-working put me right around maintenance, and when you combine that with a little bit of gym deceleration, you get stalled weight loss.  I didn't put a bunch of weight back on, which I'm happy about, AND I did manage to do a little recomp in the meantime.  I finally broke down and bought one of those impedance scales with the metal things you step on.  Yeah, it's not super accurate, but at least it's consistently inaccurate, if that makes sense.  Great for tracking delta-F, where F is fat.  If I "calibrate" this reading against the hand impedance meter I used at the gym twice before, I have lost at LEAST 3-4% body fat in the last 3 months, and if I ignore science and controls, then it's almost twice that number!  Of course, I have lost pounds in that time, so it's not all balanced by muscle gain, but I can only expect so much muscle gain/maintenance on a cut, even a meager one.  That being said, I am ready to start losing pounds (net) again, so I have cut my target calories from 1800 to 1600.  Still a lot more than the 1200-1400 I was shooting for before, but not so close to maintenance.  We'll see how it goes.

To be honest, the reason I'm so hastily wrapping up this entry is that tomorrow marks one year since I started my Diary of a Fat Girl series, and I intend to write something (hopefully) more interesting and more coherent than this mish-mash of unconnected updates.  If I allow myself the indulgence, they may be one or more numbered lists.  You know how I feel about that shit.  For now, please accept my apologies for passing this off as worth your time.  I could never be a professional writer because it pains me to throw anything out; I get attached to everything.  Exhibit A, ladies and gentleman.