Epilogue, or, What I Learned From a Less-Than-Awesome Physique Transformation
On the bright side, I dropped 19 pounds of scale weight in 7 months. On the down side, I didn’t quite make it to walk-around-with-relaxed-ab-definition-mode. Was it for a lack of trying? I didn’t think so at the time, but maybe. Long story short, I didn’t suffer enough. (Callback to what Shelby Starnes wrote.)
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a morning BJ while eating a peanut butter and marshmallow sandwich and 10 being putting your dog down with your bare hands, hindsight tells me that I kept things around the 6-7 range for the majority of the challenge, intentionally or not.
I’d very occasionally brush up against 8 with a few intense cravings at social events or during the last two rounds of HIIT cardio and there were a few 4s thrown in along the way with, like, totally justifiable and valid rationalizations. But for the most part, if my average non-challenge training and diet was a 5 (the literal average, obviously), I shouldn’t have expected significant results from making not-significant changes to what I was doing.
For sure, I stepped up the training overall and had nothing but good results from Waterbury’s plan the last few months, but training is the easy part of a cutting plan, even considering hard cardio. Workouts are, what, 10 total hours a week if that. The nutrition-front is absolutely where things are won or lost, and we all know this. I’ve paid more deliberate attention to every meal every day instead of improvising along some rough guidelines like I’d gotten comfortable with.
I haven’t had an awesome NY bagel in over two months and I haven’t had a bigass bowl of spaghetti with my phenomenal homemade meatballs (cooked in the sauce, of course) in closer to four. But, seriously, boo frickin’ hoo. Let’s check with anyone who made serious fat loss progress and see if “Well, I didn’t have many bagels” ranks high on their keys to success.
These last two months have been the toughest grind, mentally. Not only did they make it a solid 7 months/31 weeks of dieting (or diet-ish), but there ended up being some really weird and unexpected mental aspect knowing that the T-ransformation was officially done but I was still having to press on to shoot for my goal. I realized just the other day that it really did feel a bit like summer school. Everyone else got to stop in June, but I didn’t do what I was supposed to so I have another 8 weeks of work before the relaxation and ice cream can begin. And I had to take summer school for math class 3 out of 4 years in high school, so I know of what I speak. Yeah, I know that sounds super-crybaby but it kinda digs into the mental toughness bodybuilders need to push through for shows.
So… yep. That’s a real quick snapshot of where I’m at physically, mentally, and emotionally (ugh, gross, eyeroll). Down a bunch of pounds, not quite into “holy shit what a difference” territory as was originally intended, still expecting to get hit with the DYEL comments from the peanut gallery, and very much looking forward to a bit of short-term coasting before deciding what to shoot for by the February check-in.
), I was, and still am, getting good results having hydrolyzed casein (specifically