One of the big things that I’ve been doing for the last year is working on my health and changing my body. I thought I’d share that here today.
The headline picture on this post is two pictures of me smashed together, clearly with absolutely no skill or attention paid to design. The two pictures are about 14 months apart, December 2021 and February 2023. I would have used a year, but I don’t take a lot of pictures of myself, so 14 months was about as close as I could get.
In those two pictures, I purposefully wore the same shirt just to emphasize the difference, but that shirt is honestly a little too big these days. I’m generally somewhere between 250 and 260 pounds right now, which is between 75 and 85 pounds lighter than I was in December 2021. That’s probably an average third or fourth grader, though admittedly smaller than I was when I was in fourth grade.
I know that there are a lot of Hollywood transformations that are thrown around in the media, but those tend to be fueled by steroids and done by people with millions of dollars on the line and tons of professional help. I thought I’d share a few pictures here of a transformation made by a regular person, without pharmaceutical enhancement. I’ll also share some details for anyone that’s interested in that.
I guess the first thing that I’d say is that I think I did it the “right” way, for whatever that is worth. I didn’t try to lose the weight super fast. I stuck to a nice slow burn and recomposition of my body in most weeks, with periods of time where I was just maintaining my weight. It’s left me in a place where I’m not dying to eat all the junk food each time I finish a fat loss phase. For exercise, I’ve been weight training again, and I walk for general health benefits. My diet has been focused on supporting my weight training while keeping calories low enough to burn fat stores. I lift weights more than would be strictly necessary for health or losing body fat, but it’s something that I like to do.
The weight training has been six days a week for the past year, with specific weeks planned to not train and let my body recover (called deload weeks). I also took time off from both lifting and watching my diet when I traveled, which was about two weeks on two occasions, once when I went to Hawaii, and once when I went to Boise. I’ve dialed in the training volume (how much shit you do in a weight training session) to what produces maximal results for me personally. I use something called a push, pull, legs split for training which results in working each muscle group twice a week. It looks like this:
Monday - Legs : Tuesday - Upper Body Pull : Wednesday - Upper Body Push : Thursday - Legs : Friday - Upper Body Pull : Saturday - Upper Body Push
Like I mentioned way back when I wrote the post after reading Atomic Habits, it’s not about having a perfect workout every single time you go in, it’s about having all your workouts. Above all, I stick to the plan. I would say that I’ve probably missed less than 10 planned workouts in the past year. It is changing my body slowly, but it is changing it.
For my diet, I count macronutrients and calories. The three macronutrients are protein, carbohydrates, and fats. These three things make up the calorie content of the food you eat. It’s about 4 calories per gram of protein, 4 calories per gram of carbs, and 9 calories per gram of fat. So I track these carefully pretty much every day, and have kept my calories low enough to lose body fat for the vast majority of the past year.
I eat about a gram of protein per pound of body weight. Right now, that means I eat about 250 grams of what is considered “high quality” protein every day. “High quality” means that it has a nice quantity of all of the amino acids that your body uses (amino acids make up proteins). I don’t count proteins that are especially deficient in certain amino acids (usually plant sources). If you’re wondering how much protein 250 grams is, it’s a lot. Go track your own protein one day and you’ll see. As an illustration of how much protein that is, consider 93% lean ground beef. This is very lean ground beef, it’s going to tend to make a pretty dry, uninspiring hamburger. To get 250 grams of protein from 93% lean ground beef, you would need to eat 1183 grams of beef. That’s 2.6 pounds. Every day.
So I have this minimum amount of protein that I eat every day, and then I also have a minimum amount of fat. This is around 0.3 grams per pound of body weight. As best I understand, some body functions, including hormone production, can really take a hit if your fat consumption is crazy low. Right now that means I try to eat about 80 grams of fat every day.
That leaves carbs. The rest of my calorie allowance each day is for carbs. So I eat as many carbs as I can while staying under my calorie limit. When I’m losing body fat, that’s not very many. During periods when the goal is to maintain my body weight, I can eat quite a few more carbs.
The key to the diet is the food scale. I work that motherfucker out. I weigh nearly everything that I eat. Which allows me to track macros accurately and keep my calorie intake right where I want it. Executing my diet plan means eating a lot of whole, unprocessed foods. Not because there’s something magical about these foods, but because they tend to be less calorie dense, and thus more filling. They also tend to be able to be weighed accurately. In addition, it means that I mostly don’t eat at restaurants, though I do sometimes.
For me, during a fat loss phase I need to be very strict about all of this if I want to see the pounds come off. This usually means a routine of eating pretty boring foods that just provide exactly what I want as far as macros. During weight maintenance, I still keep a general eye on things, but I don’t have to be quite so strict. So I don’t have to be totally militant all the time, but I need to keep an eye on things.
I’ve found that this strict diet doesn’t feel that bad to me most of the time. There is definitely some hunger involved during fat loss phases, and that can get pretty intense near the end of a phase, but it’s tolerable because it’s temporary. One of the things that I’ve done that’s helped a lot is to engineer my environment to make things easy. There are no tasty snacks in my house, other than oh so glorious craisins. I know how I am about that stuff, so I don’t buy junk food unless I’m ready to ingest all of the calories in the package. I do not have two cookies and then close up the package for another day, that’s just not how I work. If I buy ice cream, it’s getting eaten in one sitting. That means buying small things every once in a while, but not keeping snacks on hand in my house. For example, I can manipulate my other macros during the day to eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s cookie dough ice cream. I don’t do it very often because it means modifying the rest of my day of food, but I do it from time to time as a treat. Making the change to not have snacks on hand means that it isn’t a constant battle of willpower to stick to my diet plan, it’s just eating what I provide for myself.
For my health, the changes have been good. Part of caring about my health is that I’ve gone to the doctor for a basic health check-up, rather than because something is wrong. My blood tests and health markers are really good. For the first time ever in my life, my doctor said that he was going to ignore the BMI flag on my charts because it was obviously not a good measure due to muscle mass. It’s been really nice to see these health markers improve.
I think one of the key changes that enabled me to change my physical body was improving my mental health. I know that many people will extol the benefits of exercise and physical health on mental health, but for me there was a strong effect in the other direction, too. As I healed my depression and anxiety, it felt a lot better to exercise, and I cared more about eating right. As I worked on my feelings of self-worth, I felt more comfortable in life, but also more comfortable doing my thing at the gym. As my mental health improved, it was easier to take care of my physical health, which then felt good mentally and emotionally, and so on. There are clear ways that we create negative feedback loops in life, but in this case I’ve been able to create a positive feedback loop that’s helped me a lot.
So what’s it like making a body transformation like this? Truthfully, it’s difficult. I did everything I could to make it as easy as possible, but it still took a lot of time and effort. Effort in every sense, physical, mental, and emotional. I was hungry plenty often. I did feel worse at times. I did have to avoid eating at restaurants or buying fun treats pretty often. In the long run though, it’s been an overall positive for me.
I’m pretty sure I mentioned in an old post that at some point in life the goal is no longer to have a beach ready body, it’s to look okay with your clothes on. I’m not delusional about how I look. I don’t think it’s made me a traditionally great looking person or anything like that, but I’m at ease with the way I look right now. I think I look pretty decent in my gym clothes, and that’s not too bad.
I included a picture that shows almost all of my body, to show what something like this really looks like for a 40 year old man (41 when I post this…) that used to weigh about 335 pounds. You can see that I did not get to a place where I’m ready for a cameo in a marvel movie. Well, maybe Fat Thor, who was described in the movie as looking like melted ice cream. Most people who undergo this kind of physical change will have something more like what I’ve done than some extreme Hollywood change. I worked my ass off for the last year for these changes, and I went from fat to… less fat. The thing is, I feel fine about how I look right now. This isn’t bad, and it’s a lot better than it was. It was still a big positive change to my health and my appearance.
One last little reality that I wanted to mention briefly, that I think people don’t talk about much when they do something like this, is how it affects you socially. We all will say that it’s what’s on the inside that counts, but to be perfectly honest, people treat me differently. People are nicer and happier to talk to me. People want to talk to me and ask for advice at the gym. People are more interested in me in general. In fact, at times I can see the change in the way someone interacts with me just when they find out that I used to be fatter. We all like to act as though it doesn’t matter, but it does actually make a difference. That’s the reality of it. People probably don’t want to be that way, but they just unconsciously are.
So anyway, this is what I look like right now. I thought that I’d post this up just to show and talk about this particular change that I’ve made over the past year. It’s been a big time and effort sink for me, but I think it was worth it. It has changed a lot of things that are both directly and indirectly related to how I feel and how I look. In the end, those changes tend to be pretty nice. Most of all, I can say that I think my body right now is decent for a 41 year old man. That’s something. As always, thanks for reading.
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