Need Help with Cutting Diet
Hello all,
My name is Sam. I am a student at Missouri S&T in the Nuclear Engineering program, on my way to getting my Bachelor's Degree.
I have been training for mainly mass and secondary strength purposes since my freshman year, and have made some decent improvements. I have been training since middle school, but that was just the high school strength coaches not knowing how to properly make an effective training program for athletes. This left me with some shoulder tendon damage as well as Osgood-Schlatter Disease in my knees, which I have learned to work with and around.
I have always been at a higher body fat percentage, and my family has a history of higher body fat as well. My freshman year when I started training on my own, I weighed about 290 lb at probably around 25-30% bf. I made some beginner gains, which brought my weight down to about 270 lb with maybe 20% bf (I can't recall, I did not pay attention to nutrition at this point.) In my junior year of college, I got very stressed with personal issues as well as school, and that caused me to take about a month off of serious training, I would go 2-3 times a week and not train hard whatsoever. I gained so much body fat through the stress hormones and the bad food choices, that I weighed 320 lb at the end of the fall semester.
The spring semester, however, I did a keto diet (<20 carbs/day) for about a month and got back down to 290 lb. This made me lose quite a bit of strength and a bit of muscle mass, as well as it not being very enjoyable. I would have to bring food everywhere I went, and when I did not have food on hand, I had to pay quite a bit of money for on-campus food and take out a lot of ingredients to stay in ketosis. This diet was not enjoyable, and I did not like how my training sessions went or how my diet was comprised.
I have been at around 285-290 lb for the past few months, although I have gained some muscle mass and strength back. I try and keep my carbs <100 g on most days, but I eat a few more on leg and back days (Monday, Wednesday, Saturday.) This coupled with ~15 minutes of HIIT cardio on a stationary bike has kept me somewhat able to maintain my physique for the time being, but I would like to find a good diet that I can enjoy, as well as cardio that isn't overwhelming and boring (side note: I hate cardio, ever since I was playing youth sports.)
Any help on this would be appreciated, I have done quite a bit of research into dieting, but I am compromising one that will work for me and still let me enjoy life at the same time. Also, eating 6 meals a day is very inconvenient for me, I prefer to eat 4 or 5. This allows me to eat breakfast before class, eat a preworkout meal (some days I train early afternoon, others I train in the evening), a postworkout meal and one extra meal. I have my training regimen pretty locked down, I have devised one where I can work around my sports-related injuries and still optimize my time in the gym.
Thank you to anyone who responds!
- Bookmark
- 0
- 0
search post by makwa and catalyst or irongame below for some good diet advice.I used the makwa post "how to lose ten pounds quick"and tookoff fifty pounds in three months.Granted I was obese when I started so the loss was very fast at first.Use the search feature and everything you need to know is right at your finger tips.As iron game said carb cycling is great and so are glycemic index diets.
Check out my diet in my forum posts. It's carb cycling but if you don't wanna do that you can just pick one of the 3 different diets and follow that daily. But it gives you multiple selections for every meal which really helps make things easier vs having to eat the same thing at the same time everyday. Like chunky said definitely up the cardio, fasted in the mornings and after you lift. You should be able to drop a lot of weight fast in the begenning and then it will slow down to 1-2lbs a week or so.
Sounds like your diet is ok, especially considering you're a student. Get out of bed and go do 60 Minutes on the treadmill at three and a half miles an hour or so for 60 minutes at 5 to 8% incline. Make sure you do this before breakfast. Nothing more than a cup of black coffee or 2 on your way to the school gym. no cream, no sugar. I went from 280 to 250 with abs in 24 weeks. Don't rush it, keep diet on point, do your cardio. Try to lose 1 to 2 pounds a week. If you want you could do 30 to 45 minutes post workout to the speed shit along, although your leg strength is going to suffer big time doing this.
What I've been doing is training legs on Monday, and doing 6-8 rounds of HIIT cardio (30 sec sprint 1 min steady) before legs, and then training. Other days, I do that same thing, but after, with about 10-15 minutes of steady state. Also, I don't like training in the mornings. I tried that my freshman and into sophomore year, and I need at least 2 meals before I train or I just feel drained. I was planning on going to do about 45 min of steady state in the morning, and then go do some leg extensions and calves a few times a week, just to stay motivated to go there for something else besides cardio.