Cut: Week 2
Two weeks down, ten to go.
This week was interesting, because it was the first week of a new training cycle (last week was deload week) – and all I have to say is that I AM SO GLAD I WAS PATIENT when the scale seemed stagnant. Those awesome macros of 300 carb, 200 protein, 75 fat were a little too good to have lasted much longer on deload – but with normal training volume now restored, we are trucking right along again. Broke through the weight plateau on literally the first day of this new cycle, without any changes to macros yet.
Having said that, hunger has definitely picked up this week, and I’m having to apply a few basic tricks now – adding extra veggies, eating by the clock, chasing each meal with a glass of water. It’s nothing new or unexpected — and I definitely have plenty more tricks up my sleeve that we haven’t yet tapped! — but it’s a big shift from last week. I’m also starting to notice some of the small psychological behaviors associated with calorie deprivation (listing out the meals I’ll make in the coming weeks, unconsciously spending more time in the kitchen…), and also had my first legit craving: walked past a restaurant, caught the scent of a hamburger, and was instantly salivating. That made me laugh with equal parts recognizance and rueful amusement (like, “oh yeah, here we go again.”).
On the up side: although sleep hasn’t been perfect, the magical casein+oats (along with my ZMAs and occasional assistance from melatonin/Flexeril) is still letting me average about 5 good nights out of 7 — and on the nights when I have woken up, I’ve mostly been able to get myself back to sleep. (After many, many, many sleepless nights on previous cuts, my personal conclusion is that it’s worth it to just get up immediately, have a few swallows of milk, and get right back in bed. If I choose to tough it out, I have to either just get up for the day, or lie in bed and ride a 90-minute cortisol roller coaster before I can fall back to sleep. A small glass of milk, on the other hand, is often enough to interrupt those stress hormones and allow me to actually sleep for an extra 2-3 hours, which is the bigger priority in the long run.)
The TL;DR is that my recovery still feels okay. My body is more ‘tired’ than usual, but nothing actually ‘hurts’. And (with the notable exception of this week’s 3x500m rowing time trial) I’m shocked by how good I’m feeling in training. A lot of the credit for that probably goes to my coach (who knows I’m cutting and has adjusted my programming accordingly) – but based on prior experience, I fully expected this to be twelve weeks of ‘embracing the suck’ from day one. Granted, barbells do feel a little heavier than I’d like, but I’m generally still able to hit my typical numbers, and there are certain things (chest-to-bars, burpees) that have surprised me by suddenly feeling better, even at this early stage. There’s a sense of having just slightly more body control now that there isn’t quite as much of me to move around.
There have been a couple of other fun perks this week, too. Aesthetically, when I got home from the gym on day 11, I glanced in the mirror and unexpectedly saw QUADS for the first time ever (!). In hindsight, this shouldn’t have been surprising (my lower body is typically the first part of me to shrink) – but it’s pretty great to see that there’s some actual muscle under there this time. (In clinic yesterday, I was obviously wearing pants, yet a new patient — who, it turned out, was a soccer coach — spontaneously commented, “Okay — you HAVE to lift weights, with YOUR LEGS!”) And in terms of clothing, I am over the moon to have already dropped nearly a full cup size (one down, one to go – this was hands-down THE most annoying part about massing!).
Cut day 11 — QUADS. When I posted this to my cutting companions in the ‘secret’ RP ladies’ group, the response was “if I had your muscles, I’d stop cutting!” While that certainly made me feel good, I was also quick to correct them — MASSING is what built this, NOT cutting!
I’ve long been a walking, talking billboard for the value of an extended maintenance (and I also think most women’s ‘maintenance’ calories are NOT, in fact, their true upper limit) – but I suspect I’m now about to start trumpeting the benefits of massing. Granted, it’s early days yet, and this process is definitely going to get more uncomfortable, but this is a much different experience from what I’d prepared myself for. Once I reached a certain level of leanness (early 2018), my body abruptly stopped tolerating the cutting process very well; the disrupted sleep and poor recovery typically kick in for me almost immediately now. I expected this to hurt a lot right out of the gate, and had zero expectations of being able to sustain more than 4-6 weeks. But this is my first ‘post-mass’ cut, and it already feels really different. I’m starting to think that maybe, just maybe — the full 12 weeks may actually be possible this time.
…Which is my cue to outline my ‘hard stops’. I’ve experienced firsthand how ‘cut brain’ can skew your perspective as the weeks roll on, so here are my guidelines.
First: I’m not going to push this for any longer than twelve weeks. Wherever the scale ends up at that point — even if it isn’t where I think it should be — cutting is a huge stressor on the body, and twelve weeks is long enough to ask this much of my system.
Second: I will definitely stop sooner if sleep or recovery become persistent issues. A certain amount of impact is inevitable, and I have a number of strategies for addressing that – but if there’s a week where I’m waking up every single night no matter what I try, or if the ‘brittle’ tweakiness in my body shifts to something that feels more like a true injury – well, that’s when we call it. No matter how disappointing it will feel in the moment, if that happens, it’s better to hit Pause, maintain for a while, then try again if need be.
Third: scale-wise, my ‘hard stop’ is 148#. That’s not a ‘goal weight’; it’s the point at which (based on past experience) I believe it would probably be detrimental to performance for me to get any lighter. (I also don’t think I’m terribly likely to reach that number — but I’ve said that before and been wrong, hence this bullet point.) The objective is obviously to preserve as much muscle mass as possible, and as I said last week, I suspect my natural ‘sweet spot’ is probably in the low 150s. There’s always an expected 2-5# of rebound (water/carb) gain at the end of a cut (and I know from experience that that reality always feels much harder to accept when the time actually arrives). So… consider this my accountability.
Looking ahead to week 3, I feel optimistic. Things are going about as well as can be expected — certainly dramatically better than I would have predicted! This has been PMS week for me, so that’s added a layer of mood/sleep disruption, and the scale has been taunting me a little — literally dropping one-tenth at a time; I’ve seen a flat 160.0, but am both amused and slightly annoyed that I still haven’t gotten even one single peek into the 150s! However, the weekly average somehow still managed to drop by a full pound, exactly as it’s supposed to do, so I get to keep the same macro numbers for now. And I woke up with my period this morning, which marks the beginning of (what should be) a happy, strong, energetic 10-14 days where the scale runs low and where I don’t feel super hungry (yay for zero progesterone).
Speaking of cycles, one thing I’m curious about is whether mine may lengthen back to a more normal duration now that my body has less energy availability. I initially didn’t link the two things together, but in hindsight, I can see that higher calorie intake corresponded with shorter cycle length (a consistent 22-24 days for most of this past year). From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes total sense — my biology was saying, “hey, we’ve got PLENTY of fuel, let’s have as MANY potential babies as possible!” — but it’s been incredibly annoying, mostly because I’ve barely gotten to spend any time in the awesome follicular phase before (sleepy, hungry, moody) progesterone was suddenly back in the picture. My early prediction is that the calorie deficit probably will make a couple days’ difference and that I may be looking at more like 26-28 days in this coming month (HALLE-FREAKIN-LUJAH) — but stay tuned.