Week 3: 201.6 lbs – 202.0 lbs

Weight gain during a cut is where the numbers on the scale can get a tad tricky. This is what I ran into during week three. There are so many things you can do to skew the results of the scale.

A full day of eating and drinking, cardio or no cardio, or if you’ve carb loaded the night before, can change the way the scale appears completely. The best time to weigh yourself is when you wake up in the morning. Your body has been using the calories from the night before, and when you wake up, you’re in a fasted state. Weighing yourself fasted provides the most accurate representation of your weight.

That’s also why the numbers on the scale aren’t always negative. If you look at yourself everyday and notice positive changes, it’s because you’ve been gaining muscle, which is great!

Muscle gains make you look tone, and increased muscle equals more calories burned. Your body naturally burns more calories if you’re carrying more muscle so increase in weight isn’t necessarily bad. In my case, I’m seeing myself getting leaner, yet the numbers are going up.

One way to one hundred percent guarantee fat loss is to not eat sweets. Toward the end of my bulk I gained almost six pounds in fat from eating candy and I couldn’t stop. I was thinking about how I lost all the weight originally and had the self control around sweets. It’s actually super easy and simple so here it is: don’t buy it. I cheated my diet and lost control because it was there for me to eat. As soon as I stopped buying it, I stopped gaining weight. Easy.

One incredible advantage to becoming healthy is things get easier. Fixing up my diet at the beginning of the cut has made my rigorous morning training so much easier. Waking up lighter makes the cardio easy to the point where it’s mindless. Also having a clean diet clears up your mentality and everything becomes brighter. Seeing positive results everyday makes the process much easier and increases your determination and drive.

Since the morning cardio sessions are getting easier, I’m now implementing post workout cardio sessions. I found that when I run at a ten percent incline at 3.5 miles per hour, I burn ten calories per minute. Thirty minutes of cardio equals three hundred calories burned, putting myself in a deficit to burn fat. The cardio after my gym session is so that I can eat more throughout the day, because who doesn’t love to eat food?

Since Spring Break is around the corner and school is coming to a close, I can now officially put all of my attention into the grind. No more getting home tired, binge eating, and early nights. I’m gonna be in the gym for about four hours a day and keeping the eating regiment tight during Spring Break. Next week’s update should be big.