Cut: Week 3
Three weeks down — twenty-five percent of the way done (at least) — and still hanging in there surprisingly well. It’s admittedly been a rough ‘life’ week — the home-selling saga continues, and my work schedule was insane — but in terms of the cut, things have continued to feel pretty rewarding:
Kept the same awesome macros (300 carb, 200 protein, 75 fat), so food really hasn’t changed — still getting some bread, occasional pasta, even a little chocolate.
Training has continued to feel great; it was the second week of high-volume gymnastics, which I’m really enjoying, especially after feeling like I was ‘running in place’ for so long just to try to maintain those skills while building barbell strength.
Physical hunger is a Thing, but I’m proud to recognize that I mentally ‘accepted’ this new state of things from the very first day. I don’t feel ‘deprived’; the hunger isn’t ‘temptation’ so much as just an annoying sensation to be endured. (The other day, after a couple of swallows of a protein shake, I caught myself addressing my body out loud, “Okay, there, I fed you — now shut up!”)
Clothing-wise, the smaller bra that I was (admittedly) squeezing myself into last week is legitimately comfortable now, and my street clothes are finally starting to look the way they ‘should’.
I’m still waking up once per night, usually 1:00-2:00am, but I feel like the factor that’s driving the wakeup is mostly just that I have to pee (not unusual for me). So this week I’ve been just proactively having 3-4 swallows of milk on my way back to bed (not ‘waiting’ to feel hungry) — and knock on wood, I’ve been able to get back to sleep promptly every single night (!).
Recovery has continued to feel shockingly good. I’m accustomed to feeling chronically ‘brittle’ when I’m in a deficit (an ominous sense of flirting with injury) — but this time, although I’m somewhat more ‘tired’, my muscles and joints feel… weirdly normal!
And the scale finally threw me a bone — we’re solidly in the 158s now, which means I apparently get to keep these bangin’ macro numbers for yet another week!
The biggest change this week, though, really has nothing to do with macros or pounds or inches: movement is just feeling better. That sense of increased body control that I noted last week is getting stronger. My kip has less knee bend. My ring dips don’t have as much arch. My pull-ups have an actual hollow position. I can (briefly!) hold an L-sit with my legs at a true 90 degrees. Not there aren’t still ten thousand things to fix, but I confess I’m spending extra time watching and re-watching my own training videos lately, because I have not seen myself move like this before.
I'm also surprised at how much less 'wear and tear' I'm already noticing — little things that I didn’t consciously realize were bothering me until they started to go away. For example: I have a tendency to get right-sided trapezius/neck spasms for a day or two after handstand push-ups — but I had two HSPU metcons this week, with no discomfort after either one. Objectively, I'm not that much lighter yet, barely five pounds, so this seems ‘early’, but there’s a definite difference. My right foot is another spot where I’m noticing this — I've had chronic right heel issues since early adolescence, which is a saga that isn't worth rehashing except to say that when I first started CrossFit (=strength/stability training), my feet shrank from a 10 wide to a 9 medium, and 90% of my pain went away. (I’m told this was probably due to increased stability of the plantar fascia.) In the years since, it's been minimally bothersome compared to my teens and early 20s, and even held up reasonably well to 2018 NYC Marathon training, in part because I was maintaining a lighter bodyweight. However, I do still have a heel spur on that side, and the past year's weight gain has had the unfortunate effect of bringing the pain back. It's not anything 'new' to me, so it's been 'ignorable' for the most part, but it's also hard not to unconsciously change certain movement patterns to avoid discomfort (this is actually a big contributing factor to some of the imbalances I already have). But this week I did 240 double-unders in a workout — and didn't have any pain the next day. Two days later, 60 tall box jumps — same thing. Running is still the biggest trigger — I did 5x400m sprints yesterday for the first time since early autumn, and I’m hurting today for sure — but that’s precisely what made me realize that the overall trajectory has been improving. Really excited to see where this will be in another few weeks.
Macro-wise, things are still going… kind of ridiculously well! I've been eating basically the same foods/combinations that I always do, just in smaller quantities / tracked a little more rigidly. I’ve continued to rely mostly on ‘total’ daily numbers, just because there hasn’t really been a reason to do otherwise — which means there's some occasional 'macro tetris' (egg white cauliflower thins with almond butter, anyone?) — but in general, the mental burden has been pretty minimal. It’s a testament to prolonged maintenance/massing that I’m now in my fourth week with these awesome numbers and am still steadily losing weight at exactly the rate I should be (weekly averages are dropping by ~1.3 lb per week).
However, my ‘Spidey sense’ is telling me that the time is coming when I’m going to have to start shaving things down. Bodies are smart, and this isn’t going to last forever. So I'm being proactive with my groceries; when the loaf of delicious brioche bread ran out, I replaced it with wraps and English muffins; I bought cauliflower rice so I can cut my jasmine rice half and half; I've got carrot noodles in the freezer and Skinny Pasta in the cupboard, just waiting.
Looking ahead to the inevitable macro adjustments, the challenge I see is that I've always done my 'active' counting in the simplified 'RP style', where most foods are considered just one 'dominant' macro. For example, in my head, four slices of deli turkey is 20g protein — and that's all I have to worry about. Two tablespoons of almond butter is 15g fat; no need to worry about the other two 'incidental' numbers. There are some gray areas, like milk and cheese, but for the most part, things are pretty clean-cut. That's how I learned to count, and that's the instinctive system that still exists in my brain.
By contrast, my tracking method for the past year has been almost entirely 'passive' (the free version of MyFitnessPal). This means I've gotten accustomed to seeing 'total' macros (and calories) — therefore, that's how I estimated my starting point / where I got my current numbers.
Either method can be perfectly effective, depending on what the person is used to. But making macro adjustments as painless as possible means dialing in the consistency of their timing throughout the day. And, as with anything, it's a lot easier to match a goal to an existing method, rather than try to internalize (what feels like) a whole new system.
So, this week, I went to my data. I looked at both a training day and a non-training day that had felt 'right' to me in terms of their balance, did an eyeball of how RP would have estimated each of those foods, then cross-checked it against the true total macros/calories in MFP. It feels almost like translating from one language to another.
My rough conclusion is that RP's method (which doesn’t count ‘incidentals’) seems to underestimate the true totals by approximately 30 percent. My current 300/200/75, when viewed with my 'RP eyeball', converts to more like 240/150/55. (Rest days are similar, just with ~100g fewer carbs.) So my ‘project’ this week has been to proactively map those RP numbers out into six ‘fixed’ meals, to reacclimate myself to that method of counting and thus render the (inevitable) future adjustments easier to make when the time comes.
This is also the part where I have to give myself some props. Once I had completed the above project, I pulled my official templates back out, just to see how my numbers compared. And what do you know — after taking into account the slightly higher protein requirement (for a slightly larger body), my current totals are exactly (like right down to the gram, EXACTLY) their recommendation for moderate training days on the ‘Muscle Gain 1’ tab! So I don’t know exactly who should get the credit here — me or RP — but I’m clearly doing something right!
(This also means that my maintenance was their ‘Muscle Gain 2’, and that I’m currently in my fourth week of losing weight on numbers where they think I should be gaining. Not gonna lie, I feel pretty good about that!)
However the rest of week 4 goes, I kind of feel like I’ve already won. I haven’t ‘tolerated’ a cut this well in YEARS; four weeks has been my stopping point the past two times I’ve tried this, because that was the point at which I felt completely crummy and at which my instincts told me the risks were outweighing the potential benefits. Even if I ultimately don’t make it through the full 12 weeks on this go-round, feeling this good at day 23 represents some pretty significant physical/metabolic progress, and is (in my world) something to be proud of.