Journal Week 6

In week 6 I decided to use creatine, so I've been loading up with Phosphagen. Even as early as Wednesday I noticed a difference, and set personal bests on many of the upper body exercises. I finally managed to more than three reps with 35lb dumbbells. I've also decided to be more aggressive with the weights I do. I leave the first set as a gentle warm-up, but after that I jump right to my maximum weight. I never got the hang of the intensity scale. Now I'm just going to exercise quickly but make sure it hurts like hell. With some muscle groups this is easy: with biceps and triceps for instance. With the push ups, it seems that my arms get tired before my chest. No matter what I do, my chest muscles are never sore.

I think our body fat measurements are now useful. I am at 23 - 24 %, and I started at 26%. This is not a very big drop, it represents about a 2 kg in fat. However, if I lose another 3 kg in the next six weeks, I'll be happy. I'm beginning to wonder if I'm stuck at a plateau. At Steve Dobb's recommendation, I analysed my diet. (Steve is my success coach.)
Here is my analysis. It's an Excel 97 file. (Updated Feb 29 2000).

I found this web site to be very helpful for nutrition information: http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl

I have been eating less protein than the 1.5 g per pound rule of thumb (nearly all nutritionists think this is far too much protein, by the way. From what I understand, the main problem with eating excess protein is stress on the kidneys, but since we drink buckets of water on Body For Life, I don't think it's a big deal).

Insufficient protein could be a problem for me, perhaps. Also, my diet analysis comes to about 1900 kCal per day, while my energy usage should be about 2400 kCal per day. I wondered if I was going into starvation mode, with my metabolism shutting down. However, there is another possibility which just occurred to me: during the last week, I was loading up on Phosphagen HP, taking four serves a day. Each serve is 140 kCal, so four serves is 560 kCal. The diet analysis assumes one serve per day. The extra three serves I forgot about (I've finished loading, and have only one serve a day now) accounts for 420 kCal. This may be about what my deficit was before I started with the creatine.
So I have two things to think about: is my protein insufficient?
One: I was always aiming for 1.5g per pound, but until I checked, I thought that steak, chicken and fish were much higher sources of protein than they really are. Meat comes to about 20% protein; I was working on about 40%.

Two: The lack of protein is a red herring, and my problem is the extra calories from the Phosphagen. I now tend to lean towards this, after reading more about this point. I have tried to work out my calorie requirements using an excellent book I bought,  Advanced Fitness Assessment & Exercise Prescription (By: Vivian H., Ph.D. Heyward, see my resource page in case I write more about this book). The conclusion was that my base rate is 1700 kCal, plus another 40 - 45% on top of this for my daily activities (which will increase, see my actions). This result is close to that calculated here  Dietitian - Healthy Body Calculator which is the best calculator of its type I've seen on the web. The site is quite useful too.
 

My actions then:

1) supplement my protein intake. Immediately take one serve (approx. 20g) after returning from the gym, and on non-weights days, have a serve with breakfast.
Do the same with the evening meal

2) walk home from work each night, a 35 min brisk walk.

I estimate that by doing this, my calorie deficit will return to about 500 kCal per day which should lose me about one pound of fat a week. This is about my performance over the first five weeks of the program, and one which I am comfortable with. It is close enough to my objectives for the first 12 weeks to be acceptable to me.

Please God of Fat Loss, let it be so!!!!