Cut: Week 1 (Part II)
Currently in condo-selling purgatory (waiting to see whether any of yesterday’s showings may lead to an offer) — and feeling significantly more emotionally stable vs a couple of days ago — so here’s a more proper cut update.
Today is day 9; we’re past the initial water weight drop and navigating the first plateau. I’m starting to settle in.
Logistically, I honestly haven’t had to change much yet. I’m a veteran RPer by this point, and I’d never stopped structuring my food into 5-6 meals per day, never stopped doing whey during workouts or casein before bed, never stopped ‘passively’ tracking macros, never stopped eating chicken and broccoli. All I’ve really had to do so far is cut out the ‘extra’ bites and tastes — no more ‘uncounted’ handfuls of pistachios or swigs of milk out of the jug — so that I have an accurate picture of my intake.
The biggest challenge of these early days has been figuring out an appropriate ‘starting point’. I’ve been down this road enough times that I understand how to adjust and taper macros, and thus didn’t feel like I needed to buy another ‘official’ set of templates — but at this point, it’s been nearly a full year of reverse-dieting (which, for me, has been a combination of massing and maintaining). This means my intake has gotten super high (~3600 calories on the heaviest training days, with ~400g of carbs). This is obviously a fantastic thing — and means this cut should theoretically feel a lot easier than past attempts! — but it also means that what RP thinks is my ‘base’ is actually nowhere close. I’m grateful that I never stopped ‘passively’ tracking food, even during the months when I wasn’t aiming to hit specific numbers, because I’m certain I would have slashed my intake far too low if I hadn’t realized where I was starting out.
The last set of ‘prescribed’ numbers I had were ‘muscle gain’ templates for my former bodyweight of 140# — which made me giggle a bit when I cracked them open last week. I’d never used them as intended (because although I recognized that I ‘needed’ to gain, I’d worked so hard to get smaller that I wasn’t psychologically ready to watch that number go back up). Rather than deliberately massing, my approach had been, essentially, to ignore the scale for ten months and simply ‘eat to recover’ while training hard and heavy. I continued to track my food out of curiosity, but my nutritional choices were based almost entirely off intuition and experience. The reason the templates made me laugh is because (as it turns out), after ten months of this, my 3600 calories / 400g carbs almost perfectly reflects the most aggressive phase of that old ‘muscle gain’ template. (Science works!)
I could have just stepped myself down to ‘Muscle Gain 2’ and used that as my first cutting step (and those numbers are actually pretty close to what I’m eating right now), but I’m choosing to figure it out on my own, for two reasons.
First, that old 140# is a good 10-12# less than where I expect to ultimately end up. It definitely served a great purpose in terms of shedding body fat (I’d briefly dipped as low as 133#, which was not healthy; 140# was ‘maintenance’), and it was also a fine size for running marathons and learning gymnastics skills — but for me personally, it just wasn’t a great place for being strong. If I were a weightlifter, I might have taken a different approach — but CrossFit isn’t a weight class sport, so I can let my body have a bit of freedom in terms of where it settles. Further, I already know from an interim DEXA scan that I’ve put on 10 lb of lean tissue in the past year (!), so although we’ll see what happens in eleven more weeks, I suspect my natural sweet spot will probably wind up being in the low 150s. This means the 140# template is probably slightly too aggressive (or would become so, as the weeks go on).
The second reason I don’t want to fully rely on that old template — or any template — is that I’ve learned a few things about myself in recent months that don’t mesh perfectly with RP’s numerical recommendations:
training sessions take longer now, which means one large post-workout meal (versus two smaller ones) generally fits better into my schedule — AND offers more ‘fun’ options in terms of what I can eat!
turns out, 30-40g of slow-release carbs at bedtime (oats in my casein!) are extremely helpful in getting me to sleep more soundly while in a deficit. Sleep is key to this process — in fact, it has been the limiting factor on both of my most recent cuts — so now that I know this, I’ll absolutely steal carbs from other meals in order to apply them at night, RP rules be damned.
and a huge light bulb of this past year is that I also need more carbs in/around training sessions than I ever realized. I described near the end of this post how I finally figured out that I was getting hypoglycemic during training (and how idiotic I felt for needing seven years to make that realization!) — and now that I’ve fixed that issue, I feel the same way about it that I do about the bedtime carbs: no compromises. RP might tell me a first-thing-in-the-morning exerciser only needs 35g carbs in her intraworkout shake, but I’ve learned a thing or two by this point, and there are certain situations where I will always trust my intuition — and my two pieces of pre-gym toast — above a blindly-prescribed set of numbers.
Given all of the above, I’m starting things off by relying more on ‘total’ daily macros (versus the RP style of counting, which generally counts each food as one macro / doesn’t count incidentals). This may change as I get settled into a pattern — but for the moment, my (training day) totals are roughly 300g carb, 200g protein, 75g fat. Rest days are lower, but right now they’re still in the realm of 200/200/80. (Which I kind of can’t believe is even really a cut, but here we are!)
Things are moving slowly — but they are moving. Another trick of mine is that I generally try to structure my cuts so that I’m starting during week 3 of my menstrual cycle, because the luteal phase is when most of us are ‘puffiest’ (and hungriest). I usually feel better-equipped to deal with that predictable phenomenon during the early days, when it seems like a ‘plateau’ rather than a ‘backslide’. I’m definitely there right now, but it’s not really messing with my head, because I understand what’s going on. I’m unquestionably in a deficit, so there’s still fat loss happening under here; it’s just ‘hidden’ right now!
Honestly, my current stumbling block is the opposite of what I expected: it’s easy to push too hard too fast. One issue is the above weirdness of “are we sure this is a cut? I’m still eating pasta and chocolate; how can this POSSIBLY be right?!?” — but also, my hunger signals got with the program much more quickly than I’d anticipated. I thought I would be starving and pulling out all my old cutting tricks right away — but after a day or two, it felt like my body said, “oh, this again? Fine, if you must.” The lack of discomfort, coupled with high motivation, means there have already been a couple of days when I’ve inadvertently fallen too low (which I promptly recognized when I was then wide awake during the night). So far, I’ve done a good job of course-correcting, but I’ve also had to keep repeating to myself, “Don’t rush it; you know how this works; this is a LONG road; it doesn’t need to hurt too badly right away.”
In hindsight, I can see that this is likely why my last (short) cut was so uncomfortable. In September, after five months of massing (and with the Open looming), I had reached a point of increasing psychological unease — but was still terrified of the scale and not willing to see my actual numbers. I ultimately did a four-week cut based on intuition — which I’d call ‘successful’ in the sense that I reached a size that felt comfortable, maintained it through the Open, then did a strength cycle / another mass right afterward — but that was a tough four weeks, and given how the first nine days of this cut have played out, I now suspect I inadvertently made things a lot harder on myself than I needed to by not using scale data to drive my adjustments. Lesson learned.
By contrast, this week definitely feels like the least emotional attachment I’ve ever had to the scale — which is pretty great. I didn’t grow up with a scale in the house and so I didn’t really ‘learn to care’ about that number until starting RP in 2017. Once I did start using it, there was a (thoroughly predictable) pendulum swing: that daily metric slowly acquired increasing importance; there eventually came a breaking point where I had to ignore it entirely in order to prevent it from holding me back; now, it’s a useful tool that helps drive macro adjustments, but it’s entirely detached from my ‘worth’ as an athlete. (And it’s a relief to have reached that point!)
At any rate, it’s not all sunshine and roses; training is definitely already starting to feel more difficult, and my body is noticeably sore, which hasn’t been an issue for months. (PSA: if you’re one of those people who’s sore all the time, I dare you to try eating some extra food for a week or two — the rapid recovery will blow your mind.) But I’m fully aware that this is both expected and temporary, and right now it’s worth it to me.
And there are other rewards. Clothes are already fitting just the tiniest bit better; chest-to-bars are feeling just the tiniest bit easier; the scale is doing exactly the super-slow, super-steady thing it’s supposed to do. We’re on track.
9 days down, 75 to go.
Onward and upward… I mean, downward.