Not Another Resolution

It's that time of year again. I'm honestly not that much of a fan of New Year's Resolutions although I do believe in setting goals I've always thought a resolution made for the new year is a little artificial but here I am making a New Years Resolution. The timing is right, almost my entire family was staying with us for the Christmas period and we had a lot of great meals and ate a lot of great food so now I need to recover from that week of gastronomic debauchery and get moving towards my larger goals. So that begs the question, what are my larger goals? I'm going to lay them all out here in public where all three of the people who read my blog can see them and hold me accountable.

My overall goal is to get buff by summer. Vain and somewhat shallow but a worthy goal and fairly reasonable in my opinion.

1. Lose 30 more pounds - Technically my ideal weight is still 50 pounds away but I'm convinced I'll be a wraith if I lose that much weight so I'm going to aim to lose 30 pounds.
2. Decrease Body Fat from 25% to 15%.
3. Achieve a 32" waist
4. Improve blood lipids, mostly increase HDL and decrease TG. Last test it HDL was 32, would like to see it up closer to 50 and TG was 101 (down from 325) would like to see that under 100.

To make these goals a little more concrete I'll do some math. Losing 30 lb a week by summer gives me roughly 20 weeks which means I need to lose 1.5 a week on average. As I said, that's quite achievable.


So how am I going to do it?

1. Eating Primal (of course)
2. Track food and exercise like an anal retentive b@stard. Track every morsel.
   
3. Calorie cycling - This is something new I'm trying where I'm eating my RMR (roughly 2000 calories) on the days I'm lifting weights and RMR - 500 on the days I'm not. I actually experimented with this for one week in December and I found it quite easy to do.
4. Cheat day - One day a week I'm going to have a cheat day of RMR x 2, so roughly 4000 calories. That day I will eat anything I want provided I stay under 4000 calories.
5. Lift weights 3 times a week.
6. Cardiovascular exercise 5 times week for 45 - 60 minutes.
7. Walk the dog every morning for 30 minutes.
8. At some point I may consider following Lyle McDonald's Rapid Fat Loss Handbook for a couple of weeks. It's a very tough low carb diet but I respect Lyle's knowledge and love his blog so I'll consider doing it for a couple of weeks to blast through a plateau or just move things a long. Lyle himself admits this is a very tough diet designed for people to lose a lot of weight quickly.
   
   http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/the-rapid-fat-loss-handbook

So where does all this come from? I read a book by a member of the food diary site I'm now a member of (http://www.myfitnesspal.com) called The Spike Diet. I think he could work on the name a little but I felt his ideas were pretty sound although he doesn't push a low carb or Primal diet I felt it could be modified easily enough. He suggests the calorie cycling and the cheat day impact Leptin Signaling so that you avoid the drop in metabolic rate that is associated with all calorie restricted dieting. This gels with other sources including Lyle who builds a cheat day into all his diet plans for the same reasons. Of course, there are also psychological benefits to a free day and my own anecdotal experience has shown that I often lose more weight when I cheat over the weekend.

You may also notice that there is a lot of cardiovascular exercise in my plan. I decided it was time to just hit the gym hard I'm already going there to lift weights I may as well do some hard core cardio at the same time and really burn some calories. No more excuses. This is the year I can be thin, healthy and buff. It's not even that far away.

This week I'm focusing on just getting back into the routine, hitting the gym, I'm probably going to eat a little less this week, I'm seriously still full from last week. I hope to undo most of the damage I did and I'll weight myself on Saturday morning and consider that the starting point for my efforts.

So that's my New Year's Resolution. Reach the end of this long weight loss journey and be ready for summer.

Wish me luck.