I hate to say it, but the scale doesn’t lie.

Both scales.

I’ve been weighing my food before I eat it, to ensure I’m getting the right amount of macronutrients. That I get as much protein as I need in a day, but no more. That I don’t take in much carbohydrates, but some. I strive for about 50 grams of protein per “meal” (eating 5x day). The carbs are harder since by weight there’s a much larger variety of “carbs per ounce” depending what food you’re eating. But I’ll still try to keep things reasonable, maybe just 4 ounces or so? I don’t really weigh it THAT strictly due to the wide variance, just try to keep it small and reasonable. Then all the green leafies I can stomach. Heck, at dinner last night the kids were floored that about 3/4 of my plate was covered in a large mound of raw spinach leaves.

But it does seem to be working. I’m at about 228# now, down from my high of 240-ish. I struggled for a LONG time around 235, so the 7-ish pound drop is just from the past few weeks. You can see from this recent picture (scroll down towards the end, I’m the tall guy with the blue hat) that I’m far from fat/obese, just very tall and gaining muscle. I just have a muffin top, and I hate it. Interferes with my desire to try AIWB carry. 🙂

Kiddos and Wife have noticed that I don’t have as much muffin hanging over my belt as I used to. And the bathroom scale (scale #2) doesn’t lie. But, it’s only telling part of the story: pure weight. With the lifting I’m doing, there’s gain of muscle. So weight doesn’t really tell the whole story. I need to do some body fat measurement, and while I have a pair of calipers it’s tough to get consistent measurement.

But it doesn’t matter much, so long as I can tell fat is shedding and eventually I’ll have a slim enough stomach for AIWB.

One thing that I’ve heard a lot about is carb back-loading. Supposedly it really works. I’m not ready to buy into it just yet, but I have noticed that I have already been following a rough notion of it, in that almost all the carb intake I have been getting, since I’ve been measuring, has been in the morning after workouts, tapering off as the day goes on. I want to keep reading on this topic. It’s interesting.

And ZMA I’m sure contributes here some, because after supper there’s ZERO eating. So last meal is maybe 6 PM? nothing again until I wake up around 4-5 AM. And yes, ZMA gives me some wicked strange dreams. Kinda cool.

I have wondered if this is affecting my strength work, and it probably is. While my current lifting routine doesn’t have me work for new rep-maxes, I don’t even know if I could. I’ve noticed this past week when I hit the 5th rep I feel that’s it, or maybe I could perhaps get 1 more if I really pushed it. Not ideal, but it’s OK. I know I’m walking a fine line here in what I’m doing and mixing things that probably shouldn’t. But if it means I can’t get full reps, then that’s alright. If it gets bad enough, I’ll reset and continue forward on this same basic path. No big deal.