In part one, in my pre-Intermittent Fasting days, I had started lifting weights, gaining size (and a lot of body fat), and discovered the evil of sugar.

Here’s part two:

So I continued along my merry way, focusing on muscle-gaining, but this time I had learned my lesson from sugar in 2010, and it’s coke-like effect on my brain and hunger signalling.

This time I removed sugar, and ‘cleaned up’ my lean-bulking diet a little. Losing a few pounds of fat first, I continued to focus on size for a while.

Fast-forward to the summer 2013, and I switched focus a little. With ‘beach season’ approaching, including:

• A three week holiday in Crete
• A one week ‘lads holiday’ in Malia, the ‘party central’ part of Crete
• A festival up in Scotland

I wanted to be lean, and I wanted to reveal the hard work that I’d put in over the past few years.

So I got to work on dieting…

Beginning at about 178 pounds (roughly, I can’t remember exactly), I started cutting the calories and the carbs. Problem is, I was still eating cereal every day (and cereal was very much my trigger food – even without sugar).

Asking for trouble.

But I knew that energy balance was the key variable with all this stuff, so I continued to focus on reducing the calories. And it worked. For a while.

But I ran into trouble with diet adherence and consistency, largely because of hunger, cravings, and a lack of satiation, which was largely down to:

Continuing to eat my ‘trigger food.’

Lesson:

When fat loss is your primary goal, you must make sure that any potential ‘trigger foods’ (that could lead to excess consumption or a binge) are OUT of your cupboards and immediate environment. DO NOT let yourself indulge, otherwise you’re making it 10 times harder to get ripped.

Energy balance is the number one factor that you must get right, whether your goal is to gain muscle or lose fat. But there are several things that will throw you off and make it far more difficult to sustain the correct energy balance for very long, not to mention the risk of muscle loss.

You want life to be easy, not unnecessarily difficult.

My journey looked like the following:

Week 1 – 178 pounds

Week 3 – 173 pounds

Week 5 – 175 pounds

Week 7 – 167 pounds

Week 9 – 168 pounds

Week 11 – 160 pounds

Week 13 – 157 pounds

And finally, I was officially ‘ripped’. But it wasn’t exactly a healthy, nor sustainable way to lose weight. I was hungry all the time, irritable, pissed off, and permanently weak. My workouts sucked. My stress levels were sky-high.

I was yet to discover the solution to all of this (Intermittent Fasting), as this would serve to make fat loss effortless, hunger minimal, and stress levels rock-bottom.

But for now, I had made it to 10% body fat, finally. It was a brutal journey, but I was happy to finally reveal my progress, have abs for the first time in my life, and actually look really good on the beach.

Could I sustain it for more than a few weeks while on holiday in Crete, eating Gyros, Moussaka, and drinking beer?

Find out in part three…

If you want to get to 10% body fat with minimal hunger, stress and strength loss in the gym, check out the Intermittent Fasting meal plans I offer, and also the one-to-one coaching packages available to you – Silver is only $97 per month, and you get a tailored meal plan + training program, on an on-going basis.

Enjoy!

The post My History With Fitness: Part Two appeared first on Forever Alpha Blog.

Even though I was daft and made countless mistakes, I was always a quick learner and managed to process everything very effectively, with anything that I deemed important/interesting enough to really analyse.

Let’s go:

As a kid, I was the typical ‘skinny-fat’ (most kids are), especially once I grew into a teenager. I was always inspired my strong, muscular actors in movies, and I think this set the foundation for having a desire to lift weights and gain muscle.

I looked at Schwarzenegger, Stallone, and then some of the WWE wrestlers (the Rock being one of them), and thought:

“That’s pretty cool.”

I was always impressed by strength/size, and was never taken in by the modern-day media pushing skinny guys, or guys with ‘Dad Bods’ etc. That was clearly insane in my eyes.

Then later, it was the likes of Achilles (Brad Pitt), James Bond (Daniel Craig) and the Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) who inspired me to get into fitness.

And in 2010, I did do.

I started hitting the machines in my local gym, once per week (as that was as often as I could go at the time). I hit my entire body, didn’t know what a ‘split’ was, and was ego-lifting 24/7 using horrendous form.

Too scared to enter the ‘power room’ (which was really just the free weights room, but it WAS full of meatheads), I continued to blast the machines and make gradual progress every week, despite the distinct lack of frequency.

But I noticed something.

I was becoming hungrier. And boy, was I happy to satiate that hunger – I’ve always been a food lover, for better or worse. But I was gaining A LOT of weight.

My face was chubbier (WTF?), my arms didn’t look as hard, and there was no definition at all around my mid-section. Shit. I was lifting weights and training so hard, whilst progressively deteriorating in the mirror.

The post-workout, high-sugar protein shakes were starting to add up. The late night bowls of cereal (with additional sugar). The cereal in the morning before school with additional, you guessed it; sugar.

And I was getting even hungrier, despite being fatter and heavier.

What the hell was happening? How could you gain weight, keep gaining weight, and STILL want more food?

I was starting to understand how people got overweight/obese. Holy shit, was this going to happen to me too?

And this anxiety lead me to lesson number one:

Sugar is the number one corruptor of your appetite, and acts like cocaine on your taste buds and brain. You must minimise sugar at all times if you want to keep your body fat levels down.

I knew I was consuming a decent amount of sugar – I mean, I was adding it by the tablespoon to my bowls of cereal. But what I didn’t know was just how powerful an effect it has on the brain, and just how distorted your hunger signalling becomes.

I was yet to discover my Intermittent Fasting system, but I already knew about the power of sugar, and that it was to be avoided.

Stay tuned for part two, where I start preparing for ‘beach season’…

The post My History With Fitness: Part One appeared first on Forever Alpha Blog.