Greg's Running Blog

Well all good things have to end someday. For me the diet is over. What I really mean is that my 1,400 calorie diet is over. I just can’t sustain it. I mean I could do it forever if it was up to me mentally but my body is not liking the severe calorie deficit any more. So good-bye 3lbs/week weight loss, goody-bye drastic weight change. You might wonder why I say these things. The reason is simple. If you have been following me along for the past 3 months you’d know that I track a lot of things. The four most important things I have been tracking were:

• Weight
• Fat Percentage
• Calories Consumed
• Calories Burned Via Cardio

I have started my diet at around 2,0000 calories a day and then I dropped it to around 1,800 calories and from there I went down to 1,600 calories and about three weeks ago I reduced it to 1,400 calories. My exercise has been a steady 600 or so calories a day on average although I think that is going to change now with me running more and doing less elliptical work. Running is a lot more calorie intensive as my heart rate is much higher than it ever was on the elliptical. So while I’m doing less cardio in time I’m burning just as much if not more in calories than before.

My weight has been on a steady decline I don’t think the line could be any straighter than it is. The fat percentage line has also been on a strongly correlated course with my weight loss. But sadly it is not a one to one correlation. To see my real problem I had to plot my lean body mass weight which is basically my weight minus the weight of fat based on BF%. So at 195 lbs with 27% BF my LBM is 195-(195*27%)=142.45 lbs. I have 142.5 lbs of lean body mass and the rest of it is fat. So I plotted an exponential moving average of my lean body mass and this is what I found:

The chart is in kg from 11/3/09 through 1/24/10. You can see that my lean body mass was steady until about mid December where it started dropping like a rock and I have managed to lose 1kg of lean body mass in the past 5 weeks. This scares me. It actually scares me a lot! I don’t want to lose any muscle mass and I’m just not comfortable letting it all go in exchange for a quick weight loss. So I’m throttling back my weight loss and I’m increasing my calories. I’ll be eating 1,800 calories a day from now on and probably more on days with long runs. This is why I have been eating at that rate for the past coupe of days now. This means my weight loss will slow down but hopefully it also means that my muscle loss will stop completely.

I feel really good with my current weight, 42 lbs is 42 lbs lost and there is really no real need for me to drop the remaining 40 lbs at the same pace. If I can lose it in 6 months I’m still meeting my 9 month transformation goal. So I think I will keep monitoring my body fat, weight and calories even closer in the next coming weeks to make sure I eat enough and retain my muscle.

On a side note I’d like to add that while it seems like I have lost lean body mass my energy at the gym hasn’t declined and I’m able to lift/push/pull the same amount of weight that I have been when I started. So my strength is indicating that I still retained most of my muscle and haven’t lost enough to cause reduction in strength, which is a good thing. I just want to stop the loss before it gets too late.