Hey T-Nation, I am a 31 year old guy from a small town in Bavaria, Germany.
I’ve been lifting for some time now, but had a lot of breaks due to a ton of work, laziness or injuries in between. As I started weightlifting my goal was to reduce my overweight and high bodyfat. I am about 181 cm (5’11) and weighed about 115 kg (255 lbs) at the most.
I played soccer for nearly 14 years from the age of 4 to 18. But an ACL rupture, meniscal avulsion and a ligament injury (all suffered in a time span of about 1 year) made me losing all fun I had.
The result was that I gained a lot of fat since I literally did nothing but playing online games and eat crap food.
I never had much muscle, so my lifestyle made me gain fat and weight, very, very fast. And then I started to drink heavy on nearly all weekends and I became even worse conditioned.
Some time back I had enough and signed up for a trial membership in a studio and I liked it.
Because I had some forced breaks and some breaks which were caused by myself being lazy and unmotivated, I am still not motivated with my body condition. Sometimes I fall back to old habits and eat a lof of sh*t and if I do that my brain gets crazy and wants more and more.
My strength base isn’t solid aswell. First this is because I never had been strong and I never had much muscle. I remember that I had an 11-12 inch biceps with a bodyweight of 110-115 kg. Know what I mean? Second reason is for sure that I had too much time off from time to time.
We have some good German strength training or bodybuilding boards, but after reading T-Nation for a couple of month I consider T-Nation as much, much better.
I finally decided to sign up and start a log and here I am.
On nutrition:
Because of my history I more or less know what works for me.
I hate small servings, so I try to get in only a few meals a day.
I can’t eat in a IIFYM-style with too many cheats or carbs, because the more crappy foot or carbs I eat, the more cravings I get and eventually those cravings win.
Fat seems to be more saturating in my case than carbs, so I have to get a good amount of fat in via my nutrition.
My metabolism isn’t the fastest one, since I have a job in an office.
Since I don’t have hunger in the morning I skip the breakfast in most cases.
And because I had neurodermitis until I started to eat a kind of paleo diet (note: I don’t eat 100% paleo, only ‘kind of’), I am a firm believer of limiting grains, sweets and carbs.
I love eggs, meat, poultry, fish. So I eat a good amount of protein.
This all leads to some kind of intermittent fasting and (because I want to come in better shape and had success with fewer carbs in the past) lower carb and higher fat diet. I mostly eat 2-3 times per day. I start to eat when I get hungry and stop eating at about 9-10 o’clock in the evening. Most of my carbs come in the evening. It fits my schedule and helps me to control cravings. On weekends I get in some occasional cheats, but I try to limit them to a minimum.
My lowest weight after my weight loss was 79 kg (174 lbs) one year ago. Since some tough schedule at work (which isn’t a good excuse) and being too lazy (which may be the real reason) I am back at 87 kg now. I have a bodyfat pct of something like 21-24 I would guess. I want to reduce my weight and bodyfat slowly and steadily.
You can see what I eat in my (hopefully) daily updated log. There I will post my daily weight as well.
And of course I will post my training sessions as well. As I said I am everything but strong, so despite being in a caloric deficit, I will try to improve my strength. I follow an Upper-Lower with focus on squatting, deadlifting, and benchpressing. My current calculated 1 RMs are: 105 SQ, 135 DL, 90 BP. Squat and DL 1 RMs could even be higher in reality, but I don’t know since I didn’t test them since coming back to weight lifting 2 weeks back.
In my next post you will see my latest session which took place yesterday and you will get an impression of what and when I eat.
All followers are welcome.