Renaissancemen.org

There is some significant international readership on this blog, so I wanted to first recognize that and try and produce some content once a week or so.  This morning, I hit 253 pounds, which is a total loss now of 119 pounds.  Last week, I was honored to be featured in my local JCC’s “Transformational Tuesday”, where they asked for a brief rundown of my transformation.  I sent them a before/during pic and I was celebrating 100 pounds of recorded fat loss there.  I had been working for a few months prior to going to the JCC, so my total weight loss now of 119 pounds is closer to 135 pounds of fat loss and 16 pounds of muscle/water gain.  This week, I dropped 4 more pounds!

So – this is me at 372 and 257.  Today was 253, so I’m finding my temporary clothing at 2X are starting to get a little big on me.  I think I’m about 13 pounds away from a 1X and size 40.  My end goal is somewhere around 180-190.

ADF

I have dedicate the month of June to alternate day fasting, and it has concluded today with 10 pounds of weight loss.  This is after 2-3 months of slow weight loss.  So, I have to say it’s definitely worth looking into for any of you who have about 8 weeks of slow/no weight loss.  Some of my facebook friends are eager to try this after 2-3 weeks of slow/no loss.  I would strongly, STRONGLY encourage all of you to not view weight loss in a linear path.  This is a long-term commitment where your weight could fluctuate day to day by several pounds based on water, food, exercise, stress, medication.

Often, people don’t see the weight move in 2 weeks and they think they are doing something wrong and want to throw the baby out with the bath water.  What they aren’t realizing is that your body is doing a re-composition.  So while the scale may not move, you may be losing inches.  DO NOT become a slave to the scale.  If you do this all right, you want the scale to be the SIDE EFFECT of healthy living, not the sole measurement.  I would encourage the ADF for something like after 2 months of zero to little change on the scale or inches.  It’s meant to change things up.  If you eat the same things day in and day out, your body eventually has a means of adapting a lifestyle to it.  This is shaking things up for me, and not going to be how I live the rest of my life.

I’m going to show you what I do for a typical ADF week.

Monday:

Black coffee in the morning.  “Black” tea for lunch, if needed.  I make up hot tea for lunch and sip it.  The caffeine keeps me going and suppresses the appetite.  I’m not overly hungry anyway due to my 6 months of doing keto and 4 months of doing one meal a day (OMAD).

Dinner – big ass salad with some shaved cheese, tomatoes, zesty Italian salad dressing, red pepper flakes, olive oil, and then 12-16 oz of chicken breast.  I make up 4-5 pounds at a time, usually add some chili powder, paprika, and garlic powder.  Butterfly.  Get to 165.  Eat 9-12 oz (the weight  after cooking is about .75 of the pre-cooked weight.  So 16oz of chicken for calorie purposes comes out to 12oz after cooking due to water being cooked out.  Many times people will use the after cooking weight for calories, which is incorrect).

Total calories: 530-800 depending on how much olive oil/chicken you use.  I typically eat a massive, massive, massive salad of 6-8 cups of romaine in a giant serving bowl.  I go to bed stuffed on 600-700 calories for the day.  I hit my protein goals.  Fat is being taken from my waist for energy.  No carbs needed.  High end energy all day.

Tuesday:

Breakfast: Coffee with heavy whipping cream or half and half with some erythritol.

Green belly buster smoothie.

I got the premise for this from Jonathan Bailor’s book, “The calorie myth”.  This is like 2 handfuls of baby spinach, 1 cup strawberries, 16oz water, 8 oz ice, 1 scoop vanilla whey protein isolate, 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp ginger.  I also add 1/2 cup raspberries and 1 tbsp. erythritol.  Some of you newer to keto might want to not add the raspberries.  I’m 6 months in an my tolerance for carbs with berries is going to be much better than yours.  I call this a green belly buster because it typically comes out to about 80-85 oz in my ninja blender.  I blend for 1 minute.  It makes up 2.5-3 of my 32oz cups.  This is perfect to split with someone, but if you have this for yourself, this comes out to be about 185-200 calories, depending how many berries you put in.

Lunch – massive bowl of chicken thighs and cabbage.

I make this up in the instant pot.  Take a head of cabbage and chop up.  Throw in.  Take 4-6 stalks of celery, chop, and add.  Add 16oz of chicken broth.  Add 1 package of boneless/skinless chicken thighs over the top.  Heavily salt, pepper.  Add garlic powder.  Put on for 15 minutes in the instant pot.  Break in to 3 servings.  You get massive servings, which comes out to be about 1 pound of chicken thighs and 1/3 head of cabbage.  I didn’t like cabbage before 6 months ago.  Trust me, if you can get past the smell when you’re cooking it, you’re in for something that tastes like a meaty chicken noodle soup.  SOOOOO GOOOD.

Dinner – taco Tuesday.  With the wife, I will make up 1-2 pounds of ground beef.  Probably 2 pounds, then she can take the leftovers to work on Weds.  Take one of those taco seasoning packets and add with water.  I will use 1 packet for 2 pounds, because the packet has carbs.  I will also add 1/2 tsp of cumin, chili powder, and smoked paprika.

Serve this over a taco salad.  I use 6 cups of iceberg lettuce, cherry tomatoes, taco cheese, sour cream, 1/2 chopped avocado, and I drench it in hot sauce.  SOOOO AMAZING.

Total calories for the day approach 2100-2200.  Hit my protein, have majority fats.  I might hit 70g of carbs on this day due to the fruit and cabbage.  Don’t give a shit.  Let me explain.

Those of you who have been doing keto for some time are training your body to burn fat over carbs.  According to Mark Sisson, when you’re doing this for a long time, say 6 months, your body is building more mitochondria in your cells.  You become even better at burning fat.  If I happen to have 70 or 80g of carbs, it’s possible I drop out of ketosis.  But the big problem is when you’re not fat adapted.  If you drop out of ketosis, you have to train your body all over again to prefer fats.  I don’t have that problem.  If I hit 70g of carbs, yes, I might technically drop out of ketosis, but so what?  The downside of those who are not ultra fat adapted dropping out of ketosis is that you will then possibly get the keto flu again when going back.  Sisson has no problem having 100-150 carbs per day.

The big issue here is if you have too many carbs to prefer burning fat – yet too little carbs to power your body and you feel run down.  When you’ve done keto for like 6 months, it’s not much of an issue anymore, you can have 100g of carbs and your body is still burning fat.  This is more of the “paleo zone” which is significantly higher than keto.

What you don’t want to do is eat 400g of carbs.  This is going to be a problem.  When you’re on keto for so long, 400g of carbs sounds like sooooo much.  But that’s 1600 calories, and on a 2400 calorie diet, that’s 66% of your calories as carbs – which was about my daily intake before I started all of this.

Wednesday – repeat of Monday

Thursday – repeat of Tuesday, except dinner is different.  Dealer’s choice.  I have tended to do a “breakfast for dinner” with eggs, bacon, sausage, or ham.  This is relatively quick and all of these foods are keto friendly with the ratios of fat.  I DO have a giant salad before this, however.

P.S. – I try to go and pick my own raspberries at the local orchard, then I wash/freeze them.  I think the cost to get these is maybe 1/3 the cost in a store.

Friday – either fast all day OR repeat of Monday.  Twice I’ve done the “fasting Friday” with no food.  One time I had a pizza party at work for my team.  I didn’t eat, watched everyone chow down. I took 2/3 of a pan of salad home.  I smelled it the whole way.  Didn’t plan on eating that day.  Ate one of the most obscenely sized salads anyone has ever seen.  I think I ate 2/3 of what was there – so essentially a half a large pan of salad.

Saturday – this is my gym day, so I’m not terribly worried about calories on this day.

I try to have a hearty breakfast of eggs and bacon along with coffee/cream.  After the gym, I do my belly buster with the protein shake in it and perhaps a handful of almonds if I’m hungry OR I will have one of my cabbage and chicken thighs if I plan on doing a lot of exercise in the afternoon like hiking/biking.   For dinner, you’re looking at steak and cauliflower mash or tons of broccoli with a giant salad before it.

I might hit 2500-3000 calories.  Zero F’s given.

I am sleeping 8-9 hours Friday into Saturday and 8-10 hours Saturday into Sunday.  So, all of the food I’m eating is repairing everything.  All of the exercise creates some inflammation and tiny tears, so all of the protein and nourishing food is welcomed in my body!

Sunday – perhaps a repeat of Saturday except a lighter lunch.  My dinner might be one of my KeDough pizzas with a big salad beforehand.

Now that you have a formula which helped me lose TEN POUNDS in June, I want to move on to my next idea – triathlons.

Traithlons

I have never raced a 5k.  Yet.  Working on that one.  I think I’m going to take off another 20-30 pounds before I put on a lot of miles to train for this.  I don’t feel being 253 pounds and running 10-20 miles a week is good for my bones yet.  And – I kind of messed up my math here a few weeks ago.  I must have been sleepy yet when doing so.  I’m looking to get somewhere between 15-20% fat as my goal.  Hoping for 15%, but once I hit 20%, that might be a long cut to lose that last bit.

At about 160 or so of lean body mass now, that tells me at 200 pounds I will be at 20% body fat.  Somewhere around 190 I will be 15%.  Ummmmm…whoa.  So my goal of 180 might be a little hard unless I’m cutting a lot of muscle in the process.  So far, over the last 20 months or so, I have gone from 140 pounds of lean body mass to 160, and have been holding the 160 steady for some time.  My fasting/keto has not reduced it.

If I ever want to be “competitive” at triathlons, I would have to weight 157-165 or so.  Well, not particularly interested in “winning” these yet either.  I find the sport fascinating.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s talk about triathlons.  I’ve done an indoor one, which is a timed event for charity.  I plan on doing this in February again.

Indoor tri – 10 mins swimming, 30 mins biking, 20 mins running.  This has time time between the pool and biking for changing.  I placed second to last when doing this around 305 pounds 10+ years ago.  I looked at one’s recent results and today, at this very day, I could probably get middle of the pack.  Now, let’s focus on 7 months from now, when I’m perhaps 215-220 pounds.  I feel if I keep up with what I’m doing, I could be in the top fourth.

Sprint triathlon – these are probably what your friends are doing that you hear about.  These are like 1/2 mile swim, 12 mile bike, 3.1 miles running.  Today, I train at 1000m swimming, 16 miles biking, and 2-3 miles running (when I run).  I could finish one of these, today, however, I would be at the very bottom of the pack.  Looking for fall 2019 to do my first one of these.  I have some problems though – I have no road bike, I have no wetsuit, and I’ve never swam in open water.  I also have ZERO experience with anything like this, so I have no idea what to do.  I have been watching some youtube videos on this, but I still have sooooo many questions.  My guess is that I can buy a used road bike on the cheap at 300-400 and will buy some sort of wet suit when I hit my goal weight of 200 pounds or so next summer.  So – next summer, I will have to try and find a place to do open water swimming.  This…..this might be the deal breaker on all of it.  Not sure I can do it, with no knowing what’s in the water and what is on the floor.  For example, I’ve done enough fishing growing up to know I have contributed thousands of hooks to nearby lakes.  That terrifies me with bare feet running into a lake like an idiot.

Olympic triathlon – this probably is my ultimate goal to do, and the end of the chaos.  Would like to do one of these and finish midway by the time I’m 48.  I’m 42 now.  Reasonable.  This is double the sprint tri distances.  Or, 1500m swimming (1 mile), 24 miles biking, 6.2 miles running.  I could possibly finish this, today, at 253 pounds with probably the last 3-4 miles of the run actually being a walk.  However, this is probably going to be my upper limit my body can do at 190 pounds without shrinking a lot of muscle.

Half Ironman – this is like 70 miles total distance, essentially 56 miles biking, 13 miles running, 1.2 mile swim.  With a road bike and dropping another 50-60 pounds, it’s conceivable I can bike the 56 miles.  My top now is 22 miles or so, but that was done on a rail trail on a hybrid bike in 95 degree temps at 305 pounds.  I feel if I wanted to go as long as I can go…today, I could hit 30 miles.  I can swim the 1.2 miles, today.  My upper limit of running is about 4 miles.  So – with being 190 pounds at 15% bodyfat….and doing triathlons for 4-5 years, it is conceivable that I could complete a half ironman in the bottom 1/4.  When you break it down by age bracket, hell…as a 47-48 year old, I might be able to finish near the middle of the pack?  Probably not.  I have run a lot my whole life, but that 13 miles to finish off the race seems to be the deal breaker.  I’d have to run a half marathon at some point to gauge whether I could even complete this.  Probably not.

Ironman – nope.  This is certain death for me at any age.  This is 2.4 miles swimming, 110 miles biking, and then….for good measure, you run a goddamn full marathon at the end of it.  Maybe…just maybe when I get in peak condition I want to TRY to run a half marathon.  Maybe I’m a nutcase and try a marathon.  But to do that after 2.4 miles of swimming at 110 miles of biking?  Death.

So – look for me to do…

February 2018 – indoor tri

Spring 2018 – my first 5k

Fall 2018 – first sprint triathlon

Anyone have any tips on open water swimming, please convey them.  This is absolutely terrifying.

I feel like my wife and I also NEVER travel.  This might be an excuse to do some regional travel over the next 5 years.  Maybe a sprint in the catskills.  Maybe an Olympic on long island.  Maybe another sprint outside of philly or in a lake region in virginia.  Seems to be what I want to do the next 10 years, it might be fun!