I have done a somewhat halfway decent job at tracking macros these days. I will do great until dinner and then hit this mental wall where tracking macros becomes this horribly mundane and tedious task that I refuse to do. As a result, I tend to eat poorly. Granted, it isn’t as if I go grab some burgers and fries, but I know that I am blowing my numbers up when that happens. On the other hand, tracking really sucks some days. I stay on track for a while but then grow to despise it.
That has left me in a place where I know I have put on a few pounds. I can feel it in my clothes. The last time I weighed and logged it in MFP was on June 3rd. On a side note, nobody will ever be able to convince me that the average person attempting to lose weight should weigh themselves every single day. That has always been ridiculous to me and a sign of a deeper mental issue that losing weight cannot resolve.
One of our coaches at the gym is pretty much a monster. She is one serious hard worker there and dedicated to her nutrition as well. Her husband has helped me a great deal with my lifting. I thought it might be a great idea to just pick her brain and see what she does and if it might be a fit for me. She has been following RP and said that she felt it might be a good thing for me to try. So that is what I am going to do.
I have tried RP in the past, a few years ago, and did not follow it correctly so I gained weight. Looking back I realized that I had too much food most likely because I didn’t read and rushed into the program. With guidance from this coach, I feel much more prepared. I sat down yesterday morning and wrote out every single meal for a rest day and for a training day. Then I placed each day into MFP and tweaked the numbers so that I could be as accurate as possible. I took my meals and portions and then made out a grocery shopping list.
I spent around 3 hours cooking and prepping and have pretty much everything done. I did get some of the meat portions wrong so my wife came back from the store with too little, something I realized as I got near the end of cooking. I have an alternate meal that I can sub in place which is a shake, though I would rather have the real food. My goal for this is to not rely on shakes unless the program says so (i.e. pre/post/intra workout).
Finally, I am hoping to stave off my sweet tooth with these. One of the great things about getting 50g of fat in a meal before bed is that means I can have peanut butter. So I found a low-carb recipe for protein balls and made them. Sure, they look like small balls of dookie, but my hope is that the combo of PB and vanilla protein will help fight off my sweet tooth.
When I weighed in yesterday, I was up 7.8lbs from the last time I had logged a weight. And honestly, the number on the scale did not depress me at all. I had mentally prepared myself to see a much higher number. And the number isn’t far off from where I want to be so I feel like I am in a good place.
The food so far feels like a lot. Ironically, it is less. The only number to go up from what I was eating was the fat. Everything else is lower. But the way that it is portioned out makes it feel like it is so much more. I did the first “rest day” run through yesterday and felt full just about all day. The plan is to run this for a week and see where it goes from there and then evaluate it.