+30% Bodyfat - Anyone else in the same boat?

[MidLifter]

I started 5x5 in November 08 with 29% bf at about 200 lbs bw, stopped in December/January for a month vacation, then got back on the horse in January. I leveled off at about 19-20% bf at 208 lbs bw, so I switched to the AD about 5 weeks ago, I just finished my first week of the cutting phase after the 1st 4 weeks of maintenance and am much happier for it. My lifts are still going up, although a little more slowly.

Stick with 5x5, if you don't watch the calories, minimize alcohol (kills weight loss progress) and high GI carbs and eat more protein (and reward yourself 10% of the time).

[Rokku]

Hey guys - I'm a member of the 30+ club too 6', 267.6lbs (as of this morning!) and 32% bf. Ooof. I was down to 257lbs and around 28% last October, but work and life stress earlier this year burnt me out, and I didn't work out properly for 3-4 months. Throw in a 3-week holiday to Oz to visit my good ol' Mum (and her home cooking) and you can see why I ballooned up

Nevermind - am on the StrongLifts wagon now, and don't plan jumping off anytime soon!

[kdingo]

I'm now around 16% (tape measure method), lost 50# of body fat, gained around 15# of lean mass.

I wasn't (and am not) doing SL5x5, but was (and am) doing resistance training, cardio, and HIIT. Now doing Tabata and programs derived from The New Rules of Lifting. Been cycling some 5x5 days with others the past few weeks, and a lot of squat and dead work.

My main fat loss / muscle gain occurred over a 9 month period. So yes, you can make some very rapid gains with proper nutrition, resistance, and cardio. Oh, and I'm 40 (rapidly approaching 41), so even old farts can do this.

[Wooderson]

33% BF here.

I just started a log. I'll be posting food macros once I get a good method of easily posting it here.

Track EVERYTHING you eat. I've been here before, and I've dropped to around 10% BF before. Tracking is damned near the only way to do it, at least in the beginning until you get a handle on what to eat. Good starting places:

nutritiondata.com
dailyplate.com
fitday.com

I seem to prefer Daily Plate, but check them all out. Or if you're anal enough, bust out excel.

Start a journal here if you haven't already. And come read mine - we can support each other in this journey to fitness and strength.

[rozkz]

BF 33%. Female 52. 2nd week of Stronglift. DOMS....when is it over. 3weeks I hope

Working towards 25% BF

I also box on Tue & Thu and Cardio bootcamp Wed Fri. Weights mon wed fri

[nicklus]

I started 5x5 in November 08 with 29% bf at about 200 lbs bw, stopped in December/January for a month vacation, then got back on the horse in January. I leveled off at about 19-20% bf at 208 lbs bw, so I switched to the AD about 5 weeks ago, I just finished my first week of the cutting phase after the 1st 4 weeks of maintenance and am much happier for it. My lifts are still going up, although a little more slowly.

Stick with 5x5, if you don't watch the calories, minimize alcohol (kills weight loss progress) and high GI carbs and eat more protein (and reward yourself 10% of the time).

Just curious. How many calories do you eat per day when not cutting. Also how many calories do you eat when in the cutting phase?

[OneMore]

So are diet sodas ok? I have heard so much controversy, some have said the artificial sweetener slows down metabolism. I only ask because I am always tired, except after workout, and caffiene really helps me with school and stuff. I usually only have 1-2 sodas a day, 3 maximum.

Just throwing this in there. When I replaced diet soda with unsweetened sparkling water (same "soda" experience), I dropped 10 lbs without changing much else in regard to diet and exercise. Easiest 10 lbs ever!
What I read was that consuming fake sugar causes your body to expect a lot of calories associated with sugary foods. When your body expects 240 calories from a soda, but doesn't get any, it confuses your body and it makes you crave high calorie foods to compensate.

Articles:
ABC news
Reuters

*edit*
I'm also in the 30% club! My first goal is to get down to 24% (female).

[Wooderson]

Out of the 30%+ BF club. Now in the 27% club. Check my long.

[Eyeball]

Hi All,

New guy here.

Thanks for the great looking site. Loads of information here.
I started reading here a couple of days ago after getting the link from my brother.

I bought some weight gear off of craigslist (rack, bench, two bars, and 300lbs of weight), got it set up tonight, and plan on starting this program tomorrow evening.

I'm wayyyy into the 30%+ range.

31 years old, 5'9" for height, and for weight, ugh...



There's a bad history of heart disease in my family, so I need to make a change and get this weight off or I'm going to die. I tried another exericise+diet program about six months ago, it was a restricted calorie (2000 per day) diet with 45 minutes of cardio five days a week (I did elliptic or concept2 rowing) but I got way burned out. Tired all the time, hard time sleeping etc. I think it was because I wasn't eating enough. So my plan for this attempt is to eat more. I'm hoping that with the strength training I can still burn off some fat while upping my food intake and working out only three times a week will be nice. We'll see how it goes.

[thefinalsql]

I am in the 30+ boat, probably 36%. You mention heart disease. I will share this with you. I am 43, 6'4". Last year I weighed my most ever 353 lbs. June 3rd, 2008 I had a heart attack. I weighed 346 lbs at that time. Here is how I got myself to a safer zone. I walked every day, 1/4 mile to start, kept increasing mileage. Got up to over an hour every day. At the same time I started the Atkins Diet. Losing weigh very steadily until December of 08' got down below 300 lbs at times. But, as winter drew closer I stopped walking, I was walking outside, can't stand treadmills. Stayed on Atkins throughout the winter. Spring of 09' started walking again as it got nicer outside.

A few months ago I decided I needed to start doing more exercise. I started lifting weights, lift to fail, but not really following a program. Found Stronglifts, I love Stronglifts, gives me a structure to lift in. Now I am not loosing any weight, but I can tell my muscles are getting bigger and my stomach is shrinking. This is still a little difficult, changing your mind from weight loss to fat loss.

I highly recommend the Atkins Diet, in all of it's fat glory. The man Dr. Robert C. Atkins was a genius, proposing a low carb diet against the culture of the "low fat" craze. He published his book "Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution" in 1972. I am still doing the Atkins Diet while doing Stronglifts. Lifting weights and not eating any real amount of carbs has been no problem for me at all. As i get closer to my goal weight/BF I will add more carbs to my diet. There is no counting calories on Atkins. Eat till you are full. Carbs is what you count.

Final note on walking, if at all possible, walk first thing in the morning, for at least an hour, without eating any food. I have it in my mind, that this is a key to loosing weight.

[equilibrium]

I'm probably in the 30% range as well.

I started stronglifts back in the spring and hit it moderately hard for a couple months before being knocked down with a nasty case of pneumonia. My weight didn't change much in the few months that I was lifting and held pretty steady at 200lbs but I got a number of comments that I looked like I was losing weight so apparently I was both gaining muscle and dropping fat.

I'm starting back up from square one (doctor's advice) now that I can breathe again so we'll see how things progress. One thing I read while down really cut to the heart of things:

You can't out-train a bad diet.

[sambam]

I have just completed my 6th week of my mission to lose fat and get fitter. My goal is to not lose any body bulk (I used to be really skinny) but lose fat and replace with muscle.

As with a lot of people, my family have a history of heart attacks. It killed my Grandad and my Mom has had 2 before the age of 60. I am also unfortunate enough to have a history of alcoholism in my family as well as prolific smoking. I managed to kick the smoking habit 6 years ago (from 40 a day to quit, one of my most major life changing achievements). One problem with smoking is that it does falsely accelerate your metabolism. This meant I would eat chips (fries) and pizza and curry and chips and pizza etc. etc. then smoke a cigarette whilst drinking a can of cheapish beer (or 3 or 4 every night, easily twice that at weekends) and not really gain weight. When I gave up smoking my weight went from 10 stoneish (140lbs at 5'6", which wasn't bad at all, to standing on the scales 6 years later (7 weeks ago) and topping 13 stone (182lbs) for the first time. To make it worse, pretty much all that weight is on my stomach.

I decided to start a 5x5 program based on a mixture of Mehdis Stronglifts and Rippetoes book whilst drastically changing my diet.

I am eating breakfast which is something I have never, ever done before. I try to eat 5-6 times a day, oats and nuts for breakfast, a banana mid morning, a sandwich on weight watchers bread for dinner, an apple in the afternoon and then tea. Usually tea is chicken or steak with no carbs (sometimes post workout I will have some pasta or spaghetti, always wholewheat) on a bed of salad leaves such as spinach and rocket with some tomatoes thrown in, I really don't like veg in the main so try to fill up on leaves and the like. It's amazing how creative you can be with chicken and steak along with the millions of good recipes on the internet.

At the weekends I let myself go a bit, the odd pizza or curry again but I am at least a lot more conscious of what I am eating. Rather than curry, I'll go for a boneless chicken tikka for instance, not life saving but I suspect half the fat of something like a dhansak. When I drink, I am not predisposed to chucking pint after pint down my neck, I now don't seem to be able to do that for some reason. Maybe it's psychological, maybe not, but something about the change of lifestyle means I want to drink less where I would previously have drank loads. For the last 6 weeks I have been probably dropped from about 35-40 units of alcohol throughout the week to about maybe 10 units over a weekend. That's big progress for me.

The result of my change is as of this morning, I have lost 9lbs in 7 weeks. I have the early signs of muscle (with thanks to the 5x5 program) and I am starting to feel a lot better about myself. The gut is still there but much less pronounced than it was, there is definitely a lot less body fat than there was previously. In the first 2 weeks I lost 6 lbs which I put down to water retention so generally ignored that.

Regarding diets, I believe myself that the reason they fail most people who start them is because they are thought of as a "diet". A "diet", to me, means changing your eating habits for a period of time to achieve weight loss. When your diet ends, do you go back to what you were eating? Surely if you do the cycle restarts? For that reason I do not consider myself to be on a diet but a complete change of lifestyle and burying of my previous habits. The proof will be in the (low fat) pudding I suppose.

[OneMore]

Regarding diets, I believe myself that the reason they fail most people who start them is because they are thought of as a "diet". A "diet", to me, means changing your eating habits for a period of time to achieve weight loss. When your diet ends, do you go back to what you were eating? Surely if you do the cycle restarts? For that reason I do not consider myself to be on a diet but a complete change of lifestyle and burying of my previous habits. The proof will be in the (low fat) pudding I suppose.

Oh yes, totally agree here. I've been slowly substituting bad eating habits with better ones and it feels less like you're "giving something up" and more like your preferences are just different. Now that I have a taste for healthier food (fruit instead of cane sugar, veggies instead of pasta, etc) and a sense for better portions, it's actually pretty easy to keep it up. Having something bad every now and then doesn't really hurt me too much because I can't eat as much as I used to and I go back to craving healthy food again.

We just had an interesting lunch out earlier. I tried ordering a meal that came with two sides, but without the sides because I wouldn't have been able to finish the entree anyway and I didn't want the extra food on my plate. It became a little complicated because the waiter said they couldn't do a-la carte and I said that was fine, I just didn't want the sides. Eventually it turned into "just order something so they can put it on your plate and not be confused about it". There's such a huge push to overeat when you go out!

[MidLifter]

I started 5x5 in November 08 with 29% bf at about 200 lbs bw, stopped in December/January for a month vacation, then got back on the horse in January. I leveled off at about 19-20% bf at 208 lbs bw, so I switched to the AD about 5 weeks ago, I just finished my first week of the cutting phase after the 1st 4 weeks of maintenance and am much happier for it. My lifts are still going up, although a little more slowly.

Stick with 5x5, if you don't watch the calories, minimize alcohol (kills weight loss progress) and high GI carbs and eat more protein (and reward yourself 10% of the time).

Just curious. How many calories do you eat per day when not cutting. Also how many calories do you eat when in the cutting phase?

Sorry it took so long to reply. I stayed on AD through mid-August at 10% bf. To answer your question, weekdays I ate about 2750 cals. Weekends, I ate 600g of carbs on Saturday+requisite protein and avoided fat >3200cals. Sunday I ate 400g of carbs+requisite protein. Was about 212 in August.