Fat and Tired

@silverflame Hey if your goal is losing weight than I would focus on your nutrition. It's possible to build muscle while losing fat if you focus on your macros and training correctly. 2000 calories seems to extreme to me. It also seems to me that you're trying your best. Keep going in the morning, keep your workout short and intense (to save time, you said you were busy), and start building a habit.
 
@silverflame Talk to a nutritionist! Helped me immensely. Lost 20 lbs over the year by just following their advice- I’m an educator as well, so I know some of the struggle. I’ve switched to mostly pescatarian and for a while I was logging my food into an app to keep me on tract. With weight training I follow a Push Pull Leg plan. Following a progressive overload plan helped me feel like I’m accomplishing something important.
 
@silverflame Hey man, I’m 35, 5’11”, and just over 4 months ago, I was 232 lbs, so very much in the same vein as your experience.

I weighed in this morning at 189.4 lbs. I did 3 easy things after initially setting and failing at a set of lofty goals:

1) I stopped drinking completely. I’m 132 days sober, and I now consider myself an alcoholic after being unwilling to call it that at first. Alcohol will keep you from moving the scale, especially if it makes up a large part of your calorie intake.

2) I started eating the same breakfast every day: a McDonald’s Sausage McMuffin clone that I make at home by freezing the cooked sausage patty and English muffin wrapped in wax paper, then pop in the microwave for 1 minute and add a slice of cheese on the bottom after it’s warm. I also eat a light lunch and try to eat more vegetables than meat at dinner.

3) I started walking 10,000 steps a day, every day. I walk 2 miles in the morning with my dog, a good bit at work, and 1-2 miles in the evening after dinner.

That’s it.

I have a lot of experience lifting and people will rightly tell you to lift to maintain muscle mass while dropping weight, but I haven’t implemented that back in yet. It took me 4 months of doing this every day, but I’ve dropped 42 lbs in that time. I believe anyone can do the three things I just listed.
 
@solideogloria94 That is awesome! Congratulations on your amazing progress! Did you track calories?
I like to have 1-2 drinks about 1-2 times per week but those are always evenings when I follow up drinking with overeating. I may need to give the sobriety life a try!
 
@silverflame I did with MyFitnessPal for about the first week, but found that if I could estimate the 1500-2000 calorie range with my consistent breakfast at around 350-400 calories, a 300-500 calorie lunch, a couple hundred calorie high protein snack a couple hours later, and a not-overly-full dinner of maybe as high as 700-900 calories (which is easy to figure out when you’ve gotta go on a walk afterwards), I could stop being super stressed about hitting macros or whether a string cheese snack would put me over my goal.

Thanks for your kind words! I’ve been surprised by it — it really shows me how much alcohol was taking up another half of my diet that I didn’t think about or account for.

And I’m no evangelist or anything when it comes to sobriety, but you might want to take a look at information surrounding the ways that alcohol, even sparingly, seems to have an effect for many people in which it takes 3-5 days of “cleansing” your system to quit storing fat, which seems to happen when alcohol is present. Again, I have no training in the science of this other than YouTube and my own experience, but from what I understand, instead of burning fat, your body burns alcohol and stores calories you eat as fat until the alcohol is gone. It took more than a week of being sober to really start seeing even minute changes on the scale for me.
 
@silverflame No way in hell you weigh 245 lbs eating 2000cals a day on average. You need to start being honest with yourself, and you also need to start counting calories if you want this to be a success. It needs to be a lifestyle change as well, both physically and diet wise for long term health.
 
@silverflame My advice is simply to start. The most difficult part of fitness is starting. Once you start and regardless of the rate of change, you are making progress. Try to celebrate the progress and forget the goals for right now. They can be daunting. At times, the progress will be slow or imperceptible. Stay positive and focus on the direction you are going. Walk a mile each day around the neighborhood. Skip a single snack. The little things add up. Once you see results, the motivation will build. Slow and steady is longer lasting. Don't make it complicated with extensive planning because that's usually an excuse to not start.
 
@silverflame Hey principal (also a fellow educator). Yes, your goals can be reached but you'll need to work and COMMIT to achieving them. If you haven't done so, head over to r/Fitness and read the Fitness Wiki. Pick a beginner program from there and get started. As to what comes first (lose fat or start gaining strength), you're too into the weeds on this - Start with the lifting... the lifting will help you retain muscle mass as you lose fat.

You're also going to need to get control of your diet to lose the fat (not weight... lose the fat, keep the muscle). Figure out your TDEE (calories per day) and start controlling what you eat - something like My Fitness Pal is invaluable for this.

Feel free to respond with questions. You got this brother!
 
@eleventhhourworker6 This right here. Fitness wiki is the way to go. Stop overanalysing and focus on building a base.

Lift. Sleep. Cardio if you like.

You should not bulk at 30%, you will see fantastic progress by just doing what you're doing and adding in weightlifting. If you are truly eating at 2k cals, maybe eat a little more as that seems low to me for your profile, even for weightloss.
 
@silverflame You are going to be setting yourself up for long term failure and short term success if you diet first or only.

You have to make small manageable changes.

I would focus on getting .8 grams of protein per lb of body weight as your primary dietary change. Eat protein first and stop when you’re full.

If you want to lose weight and keep it off I recommend starting a strength program. Your 5x5 program will be fine. Do that 3x/week and focus on upping your non exercise movement the rest of the time.

Check out the mindpump media guys if you want more sound info like this. Here’s a good episode to start: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mind-pump-raw-fitness-truth/id954100822?i=1000525374943

I don’t always agree with their politics but you can fast forward through that as everything is time stamped. Their fitness advice is unparalleled.
 
@holdonwithfaith I’ve actually listened to them and this post was initially a question I was posing for them to answer. I always appreciate their science-based advice. I’ll make sure to give that episode a listen - thanks!
 
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