Hey folks,
I took a progress photo the other day
that documented changes I’ve undergone since 2 Mar of 2023 until now, getting “Bigger, Stronger and Leaner”, to include my most recent all time low bodyweight in the middle, which was last year in July. I went from 201lbs to start to 165lbs in the middle to 181lbs this month, having gained up to 185 before skinnying down just a little.
I’ve gained and lost weight in the past, but this was my first time having done so WITHOUT resorting to some of my previous dirty tricks of junk food or starvation protocols, instead relying heavily on the Velocity Diet as my baseline and the Carnivore way of eating to fill out my solid food. I wanted to share the journey, experience, and lessons learned.
SUMMARY UP FRONT
• Never counted calories or macros. Transitioned from eating a diet full of keto junk food (“keto friendly” tortillas, breads, bagels, pasta, sauces, sweeteners, cookies/cakes/brownies, protein/keto bars, flavored nutbutters) and filler veggies to a carnivore approach to eating paired with protein shakes for a protein sparing modified fast. Made use of a 2 week cut/4 week bulk style of eating for a vast majority of my losing and gaining. Changed up my form on a lot of exercises. Used a LOT of different programs (Mass Made Simple and Easy Strength, Jamie Lewis’ “Feast, Famine and Ferocity” and “Juggeryoke”, DoggCrapp, and some self-designed programs).
BACKGROUND
• The first photo is of me at a bodyweight of 201lbs at 5’9 on 2 Mar 2023. The second photo is me at around 165lbs in mid July of 2023, and the final photo was taken last week, July of 2024, weighing in around 181lbs, having gained up as high as 185 in the previous month. And I want to point out that, through this whole process, I’ve never counted a calorie or macro. I’ve never found it necessary.
• In the photo of me at 201, I had just completed Super Squats. This was my third run and I was eating, honestly, just terribly. I’ve always been “low carb”, but in my pursuit of keeping carbs low, I was eating a LOT of “keto junk”. “Keto friendly” tortillas, breads, bagels, brownies/cookies/treats, flavored peanut/almond butter spreads, quest/keto bars, artificial sweeteners out the yin/yang, tons of sugar free energy drinks, etc etc. I was also eating a lot of vegetables because, for some reason, I was ALWAYS hungry, and, in turn, my guts were an absolute wreck from all the artificial garbage paired with all the fiber. I was putting away a lot of “food like objects” to get in growth, and I was also having about 6 bloody bowel movements a day to fuel that. I could not sustain living like that, despite how big and strong I became.
• To reset myself, I took on the T-Nation Velocity Diet, which I’d read about previously in Dan John’s “Never Let Go” book (an amazing read: please do yourself a favor and go pick it up), and ended up forming my own amalgamation, wherein I was having a solid midday meal along with an end of day meal about 3 days a week, but in order to meet the intent of the Velocity Diet I’d keep one of those meals pure protein via egg whites and VERY lean meat, and the other meal would be “meat on the bone” to get in some fats. Effectively, I had a hybrid carnivore diet, wherein I’d engage in a daily protein sparing modified fast using protein shakes during the day, and then a big meat on the bone meal in the evening. This had me lose 13.5lbs in 43 days, which is slightly longer than the originally slated 28 day run of the Velocity Diet, but this approach to nutrition ended up forming my baseline that I STILL use to this day.
• I continued employing the Velocity Diet approach while my weight continued to drop, to include some pretty epic “Rampage Day” meals (like the time I ate a 5lb cheeseburger in 30 minutes before settling into one of Jamie’s nutrition and training protocols: the Feast, Famine and Ferocity diet. This differed from the Velocity Diet because it employed a cyclical approach to nutrition. There are 2 weeks of famine and 4 weeks of feasting, with the former being a more restricted version of the PSMF similar to the OG Velocity Diet (which was all shakes) and the latter being simply unrelenting gluttony, similar in a way to the ABCDE Diet. I used the latter opportunity to effective allow myself 2 solid protein and fat meals a day on top of all of the shakes compared to my previous 1 solid meal a day approach. It also included a training plan that coincided with the diet, with a 2 week famine protocol and 4 week feast protocol.
• And she I ended up REALLY digging the cyclical dietary protocol, and employed all the way to that middle weight of 165 (here I was at the 3 months mark on 2 Jun of that year at 175lbs), AND employed it to also gain back up to the weight of 185. It was simply a matter of really leaning into the feasting portion when it came time to feast. At this point, I was fully embracing the carnivore approach to eating, as my guts felt incredible in the absence of all of the keto junk and the plant foods. A return to just meat and eggs had gone a long way, and when it came time to gain, I’d up my intake of animal fats and start allowing in some dairy in the form of cheeses, grassfed sour cream and ghee.
• I made use of various programs along the way, to include spending 2 weeks pretending that I was a Viking, Dan John’s Mass Made Simple, which I blended with his “Easy Strength” program as well, 9 weeks following my own Chaos is the Plan protocol for 9 weeks while pretending I was a Cimmerian, Jamie Lewis’ Juggeryoke, Dante Trudel’s DoggCrapp, and various other distractions along the way.
• I also competed in a strongman competition while my weight was completely free falling, which went poorly and a grappling competition which I won despite having not actually grappled in 18 years…so that was cool. Oh yeah, I also did a 10 mile race with no training, which was another not smart thing I did.
• I also went on a few cruises throughout the duration of my weight loss and weight gain, 2 of which I made it a personal mission to gorge myself in as much carnivore food as possible, the most recent one (over my kid’s spring break) resulting in me consuming 102 eggs and 54 steaks in 7 days, alongside multiple triple entrée dinners and other delicious foods. I do firmly believe those cruises were pretty effective for my goal of gaining, as 1 week of full scale feasting and minimal training really had me in an anabolic way.
LESSONS LEARNED
• Fat Loss is a vacation. I’ve said that multiple times. Gaining is the HARD part: fat loss is the BREAK was get FROM gaining. To get at that initial 201lbs, I effectively broke myself from the training and the eating. I had to get healthy before I could gain again. And in the process of getting healthy, I got STUPIDLY lean. And it was incredibly easy. I never struggled with hunger, low energy, etc: I just kept eating and training and letting the weight fall off of me. I was also able to basically train anyway I wanted to during those phases (which is why I did that Viking/Cimmerian stuff), because the only real function of resistance training while losing fat is to maintain muscle, and it requires FAR less effort to maintain muscle than to build it. This is why folks should NOT worry about “overbulking”: it just means you get to spend even MORE time relaxing from the VERY hard effort you put into gaining.
• On the above, starting out from such a lean state gave me a TON of runway as far as gaining goes. THIS is the secret to “lean gaining”. It’s not about operating on the tiniest of caloric surplus margins to ensure you gain only muscle and no fat: it’s about starting off in such a physically primed state to grow that, even when you DO put on fat, you go from “peeled to lean”, rather than “from tubby to obese”. Dan John wrote about this in “Mass Made Simple”, and experiencing it first hand was pretty eye opening. Which, once again, is WHY we have phases of gaining and losing, rather than just always trying to be in a state of gaining by trying to cheat the system with tiny calorie surpluses. And on that note…
• Everything operates in cycles. There is the bulking and gaining cycle, but even then that can be truncated into the Famine and Feast cycles I was employing (2 weeks Famine, 4 weeks Feast was standard for me). And even then, throughout the week itself, I’d cycle my nutrition: having some days that were pure Protein Sparing Modified Fasting, some that had midday meals and end of day meals, some that were just one meal a day, some that were 3 meals, etc. Trying to keep things controlled and uniform all the time just promotes stagnation: things need to be kept fresh and a little chaotic. And my training was the same way: you see the various programs I ran over this time, rather than just sticking with one way indefinitely. There was a time and a place for all of these programs, and some were there when I was ready to really push the petal to the metal, and others were there when I needed to back off a bit and prioritize something else.
• When my weight was dropping, I changed up how I DID my exercises. At my heaviest, I used a low bar squat technique, which was something I’d been using since the very first day I squatted. While my bodyweight was falling, I knew I wouldn’t be able to match my previous performance on it, and rather than let that get in my head, I completely changed how I squat, using a high bar, very close stance, and hitting as full of a depth as I possibly could. I specifically used Mass Made Simple to break in this style, since Dan has you start off squatting 95lbs, and this gave me an opportunity to effectively relearn the movement from scratch and not concern myself with how much I was moving. I also started squatting beltless for the first time…ever, and removed the belt from the majority of my training as well for similar reasons: it gave me a whole new paradigm to operate off of. And now I’ve been using that in my gaining phase, and in doing so I’m bringing up weaknesses that were holding me back previously and growing/emphasizing new muscles. My quads are responding well from all the deep squatting.
• I didn’t “need’ NEARLY as much food as I thought I did. This was a boon as a gainer. When I dropped all of the weight, I was eating until satiety, and since I had radically shifted my diet so much, I reached satiety much sooner than I previously did. This meant consuming far fewer calories than I ever did before…yet I felt and performed fine in training. I wasn’t dragging, I wasn’t in a zombie state, I wasn’t starving, and I was looking pretty awesome along the way. And when it came time to gain, I didn’t need to be NEARLY as aggressive as I was in previous endeavors: I could eat slightly beyond satiety or add in some more calorically dense foods and be more than squared away.
CONCLUSION
• This was definitely a lot to read, but I’m hoping it was helpful to those who made it through.
