Cut: Week 11

Around the world in 80 days. …Or 77, I guess. Today is my finish line.

Honestly, this final week was hard. It was always going to be hard. At the very end, this is how it goes. My body feels ‘brittle’ now — like if I move too quickly, something might snap. By the end of the day, my legs are so heavy that I’m taking the elevator to my second-floor condo. There are persistent muscle spasms around my left scapula — not ‘limiting’, but also not resolving. I’m exasperated by the constant hunger, losing my temper over small stuff and perpetually trying to distract myself with anything except food. And I’ve been utterly exhausted during every training session — weights and reps have fallen off, and mentally pushing to get the work done has been unbelievably difficult (to the point that it’s sucked some of the usual joy out of the process).

I hate this feeling — and yet, on some level, I’ve also been waiting for it. Because this is what the end of a cut feels like, and in a masochistic kind of way, I’m glad to finally be feeling sufficiently uncomfortable as to know that I ‘did something’.

TOP LEFT: Day 1, with giant quad bruises from the Hero WOD I had done on my birthday two days prior. BOTTOM RIGHT: Day 69, in the final stages of moving out of my condo, with some baby obliques (and a much better tan 😂).

Feeling this rotten also confirms for me that stopping here, at 11 weeks, is the right thing to do. I’ve endured my requisite two weeks of ‘pain’, and my body is telling me loud and clear that we are done. If I’d been ‘cruising’ at this stage, I’d have felt like I should push for the traditional 12 — particularly in light of the knowledge that my period should arrive in five days, meaning I could wrap things up with a super low scale number. Bodyweight has plateaued this week, which is both expected and appropriate — but if I stuck with it, I’d almost certainly get a peek into the 148s by next Friday.

But why?

No, really — why? Objectively — what purpose would that number serve?

Visually ‘seeing’ that 148 would only tell me that it’s time to stop. WHICH I KNOW ALREADY.

By the numbers, I’ve shed roughly 12#. Better, I lost 3” off my waist and 3.5” off my bust (halle-freakin-lujah) — meaning I finally got my hard-fought C-cup back, while still managing to keep MOST of my butt. 💪

It’s like I said last week about the inability to get a DEXA right at the very end. Labeling a result doesn’t change its existence. Whatever percentage of fat loss I’ve achieved here has already happened, whether it’s currently ‘hidden’ by two pounds of PMS fluff or not.

I don’t need numerical validation in order to know that I did what I set out to do. I’m not in a weight class sport, so this was never about numbers in the first place. The scale was a tool, not an endpoint.

I’m back in a body that feels comfortable and confident, and am stronger and lighter than I’ve ever been simultaneously. That was the goal.

In my one-on-one conversations, something I often say about body composition is that “it’s not a ‘transformation’; it’s a continuum.” I’ve referenced a ‘pendulum’ many times over the past three years, because, from a bird’s-eye view, that’s what this process has been. Pun intended, I’ve explored the width and breadth of sizes at which my body can exist — while slowly honing in on the ‘sweet spot’ that feels most functional, sustainable, and satisfying.

RP, year one: cut, short maintenance, cut again (to a slightly ill-advised level). RP, year two: maintenance, short cut, maintenance while training for a marathon. RP, year three: maintenance through the 2019 Open — then took a deep breath, hid the scale for six months, and trained for heavy strength while ‘eating to recover’ — FULLY aware that there would be another cut on the back side of that. (And here we are.)

The gradual narrowing of the pendulum has had the (unanticipated) effect of showing me the inherent beauty in the functional capabilities of each iteration. The 130s were too tiny to be sustainable (or healthy) for me — but damn if I didn’t cheat my way into a couple of muscle-ups while I was there. And I may not have been ‘comfortable’ in the 160s aesthetically — but never have I ever felt so strong under a barbell.

Turns out, it’s possible to appreciate my body at more than one size. And that is a pretty cool takeaway, too.

Looking at the visual representation of the entire past three years, I can also see something that (I now realize) I knew already, which is that 140# really wasn’t as ‘easy’ of a maintenance weight for me as I was choosing to believe. I did ‘hold’ it reasonably well (and it was a great size for 2018 NYC Marathon training), but during periods of ‘normal’ strength training, I consistently drifted upward. So I’m curious, now, to see whether 152-154# will be a more natural long-term maintenance zone. (I find it interesting — and probably not coincidental — that my ‘happy spot’ seems to be exactly in the middle of my unhealthy high and my unhealthy low.)

I’m also still very curious about my current body fat percentage, mostly because (visually speaking) I ‘look’ as lean as I did at 17%, when I weighed 140# — except now I’m 150#. Based on that, I’m estimating 16%… but we’ll find out in a few weeks, once the DEXA folks are able to reopen. As with scale weights, the specific number really doesn’t ‘matter’, because it doesn’t change my self-management — whatever the ‘label’ for this spot ultimately is, it represents a ‘leanness threshold’ that I probably shouldn’t ever get too much beyond — but, relative to the past three years, it’ll just be interesting to have an updated ‘marker’.

Immediate next steps, though, involve a homemade cheeseburger for dinner (been craving one literally since Week Two!), and then a deliberate reverse-diet starting tomorrow.

This is where we’re ending things. And while this statement is the epitome of more than one type of privilege — I feel physically and mentally WRETCHED on this paltry amount of food.

Basically, we go up the same way we went down: incrementally, while continuing to watch the scale to make sure progress is staying within an expected range. I’ve kept the same numbers for the past five weeks (!), so my first macro bump will be something like 30g carbs and 10g fat, to step me back up to where I was in week 6. This will still be a caloric deficit relative to where I’ll ultimately be maintaining, yet it’s a mathematical certainty that the scale will increase — because I’m carb-depleted right now, and physiologically, the body holds 3-4 grams of water for every 1 gram of stored carbohydrate. But those carbs and water also mean that I’m going to start feeling so much better in training, and I can’t wait for that. After all, that’s what this was all for.

I don’t really have any inspirational words to end with. The world looks pretty different now, at peak COVID-19 social distancing, than it did when I started this adventure, and a lot of people I care deeply about are currently hurting badly. So, in the midst of that, there’s a big part of me that feels selfish, shallow, and insensitive — for having the audacity to claim personal pride over something (that could be seen as) comparatively superficial.

But if we look deeper — the reason this ‘aesthetic’ result exists today is because of prolonged consistency, resilience, and BRAVERY. It’s not just about these past few weeks. A cut only reveals what’s already there. It can’t create muscle that the owner hasn’t first put deliberate time, effort, and calories into building.

And, deeper still — it’s not about the quads or the obliques anyway. It’s about the YEARS of physical and mental work that they represent. This is a rather unusual climate in which to be crossing the finish line — but it’s still about the character traits — and the effort — that have allowed me to get here.

So this post is in acknowledgement of the fact that those things aren’t any less important — or less deserving of respect — now, during COVID times, than they were eleven weeks ago. That I’ve done an impressive job here and am allowed to be proud of myself, even now.

…And that it’s also going to be really nice to get back to blogging about some other topics again. ;)