Cut: Week 8
Okay: first COVID, then cut.
We’re all on our own timeline with this stuff. Last week was my rough patch. I’m not the first to observe that this ‘social distancing’ process is a type of collective grief, and most of us are accordingly bouncing among the expected stages (denial, sadness, anger, bargaining, acceptance), while also dealing with an ever-present layer of anxiety over the (varying) impacts that this situation is having on our jobs, our families, our money, our goals, etc. Everyone is progressing through this at different rates, but for me, I was pretty overwhelmed for most of last week — anxious, sleepless, tearful, lonely — feeling weighty responsibility, both as a healthcare worker and as a human in society — yet also feeling as though there were just ‘nothing to grab onto’ in terms of coping mechanisms to help me bear up underneath that load.
Ultimately, my amazing box owner saved my sanity by lending out barbells and plates. I cannot express what an indescribable relief that was. Obviously training isn’t going to be quite ‘normal’, but my coach is a freakin’ whiz at home workout programming no matter what equipment an athlete has (or doesn’t have), so it’s also not an exaggeration to say that, for me, obtaining that barbell was as effective as taking a pill. Having the resources to train hard and heavy gave me an anchor upon which to rebuild the rest of my emotional stability. Life suddenly felt — and still feels — manageable again. Like I can handle all the rest of it — work stress and condo-sale stress and social-distancing stress — as long as I have THIS.
This past week was also ‘moving week’ for me — the condo sale timeline has absolutely NOT gone as planned, in any sense, but the move to a studio apartment was already set to happen on 3/19, and I chose to proceed. So, in essence, the condo is now my ‘gym’ (LOL), and I ‘live’ in the apartment. The process of moving is far from done — there’s a TON of stuff to get rid of, including a couple large pieces of furniture — but at this point I feel very ‘settled’ into the new place; nearly 100% of the stuff I plan to keep is already there. I’ll definitely write a more in-depth post about the moving/downsizing process at a later date, but it’s actually been rather soothing to have a ‘project’ to focus on, and I’m pretty proud of how much I’ve been able to accomplish on my own (#functionalfitness!).
Okay, now the cut.
Honestly — what cut? You mean the one I’ve been too distracted to even notice? …Kidding, sort of, but this past week definitely reinforced the importance of ‘habits’ — knowing when, what, and how much to eat, and just mindlessly doing it — because I was truly too busy to prepare many solid meals, or even to ‘feel hungry’ very often. I did still hit my macros every day — we’re still at the same ‘tier’ as last week, with ~2100 total calories on a training day and ~1700 on a rest day — but meals definitely included a lot of low-volume things like bars and shakes (pretty sure there were a couple of days where I consumed zero vegetables).
This is a fairly typical training day nowadays.
And this is the sad state of affairs on a rest day.
Sleep is definitely suffering more, but not as badly as it could be, because I suddenly remembered the bottle of benzodiazepines that I’ve had (untouched) in my medicine cabinet since 2016. The anxiety of last week was like nothing I have experienced before, and after several very restless nights due to racing thoughts, I finally cracked open the bottle and took half a pill. I’m not going to say it’s fixed everything, because I still consistently wake up in the wee hours for a drink of milk, but with the meds I’m able to go right back to sleep again for a couple more hours (versus getting up and folding laundry for 90 minutes at 2:00am, which is what I was doing last week). I’m trying to use them sparingly, only every second or third night — but there is a time and a place for everything, and this seems to qualify. It’s also safe to say I would have had to end the cut by now if I hadn’t remembered that secret weapon (because if I can’t sleep, I can’t do anything else).
On the plus side — recovery is actually still hanging in there. Cut Week 7 was deload week, and this past/8th week (first week of a new training cycle) has obviously been home-based training, so it’s a little less intense in some ways. That’s not to say it’s ‘easy’ — trust me, I am still regularly hitting total muscular failure! — just ‘differently challenging’. I don’t have outdoor space at home (and I live on the second story of a converted warehouse, with zero insulation between floors), so ‘dynamic’ work like kipping and jumping is a lot more limited, which may be sparing me some overall physical wear and tear.
And, also on the plus side — it seems that when your house moves, so does the scale! I probably should have anticipated that — I was doing this entirely by myself (#socialdistancing!), so my activity level obviously increased significantly, and the high anxiety (prior to getting my hands on the aforementioned barbell) didn’t help my appetite either. But after seven weeks of very slow and steady loss — averaging just under one pound per week — I’ve suddenly lost nearly three pounds in one fell swoop. And that’s off my average, not just a one-time weigh-in — I’ve been in the low 153s all week long; even got one peek at 152.8.
Anyone want to guess when I started the process of (single-handedly) moving myself into my new apartment?!? 😂
So, technically, I'm actually in my goal range now — 152-154# is where I'm thinking my long-term maintenance zone is probably going to be. I don't really feel like I've 'achieved' anything yet, because at this particular moment, I'm so close to getting my period that my body looks and feels a little funny to me — but I know that I was feeling pretty comfortable and confident prior to a couple of days ago, and that things will rebalance again very soon.
With a numerical plunge like that, it should go without saying that I am not making any changes to macros during this upcoming (9th) week. When I started seeing the freefall, there were actually a couple of days where I deliberately added an extra 100-200 calories back in, even though I wasn't terribly hungry. Moving is one of those activities where it's tough to know exactly how much energy you're burning, and my fear was that I might accidentally dig myself into such a deep metabolic hole as to ‘run out of room’ before strictly necessary. (Meaning, if I was losing weight on 2100 calories while also devoting lots of energy to moving, how low will I subsequently have to go in order to keep some steady loss going once I'm no longer moving?) So this ninth week is just going to be ‘one foot in front of the other’, keeping everything the same (except maybe not running multiple carloads back and forth between my ‘two homes’ every day, LOL) while I wait and see where things settle out.
The real question, in my mind, is what's going to happen in week 10. So far, I've gotten roughly three weeks of progress out of each 'tier' of this cut, so it's highly likely that things will stall during this coming week and that the fourth (and final) macro slash will happen in the second week of April.
At this point, it's still a choose-your-own-adventure story; however, I can see a few potential ways that this might play out:
Systemically, I might just not tolerate going any lower. Rest days in particular are already pretty painful, and the next slash might prove unsustainable, whether in terms of sleep or recovery. This wouldn't be altogether surprising — the next drop will take me to about 55% of the calories where I was maintaining a couple of months ago (!) — so, home-based training or no, it would not be at all unreasonable for my body to say “nope.”
Conversely, I might systemically tolerate going lower, but my body might just not respond anymore (read: might stop losing weight). Again, that would be a clear signal that we’re done.
Or, I might somehow continue to feel okay after the next slash, continue to progress in "slow and steady" fashion, and then (in week 11 or 12) either hit another plateau OR even potentially hit my 'hard stop' weight (148#). Either way, we’d be done; I’m not reducing macros more than one more time, and (based on extensive past experience), I still believe it would be counter-productive for me to go lower than 148#.
This is something I said I wouldn't do — but I also couldn't have predicted exactly how wacky life was going to get. So I’m leaving the door (just barely cracked) open to the possibility that I might (MIGHT) push to 13 weeks. I don’t really ‘want to’ do that — the process is admittedly starting to feel somewhat fatiguing — but the reason this is on the table is twofold: (1) that 13th week will be my deload week, and (2) if current estimates hold, that will also be the last week of all the businesses being closed. I do think this option is pretty unlikely, because it’s dependent on (1) whether things remain expected to reopen on schedule (which I think is doubtful), and (2) how well I continue to tolerate these shenanigans overall. But in a perfect world, this would work out nicely, because the initial bump in food would coincide with a training increase (rather than a decrease), and I'd be able to get an apples-to-apples DEXA scan (on the final day of the cut, i.e. under the same circumstances as all my previous ones).
Bottom line, “if you want to make the universe laugh, tell it your plans,” so right now it’s just one day at a time, on a lot of levels. Let’s see how this week shakes out.