Diet Trying

One of my goals in this first 12-week phase is to lose some body fat. I've lost weight before, but never seriously tried to reduce my body fat percentage. Probably because I've never cared about my body fat. I looked good enough in the mirror and was running plenty fast, so I just assumed that I was lean enough.

But the guys who advance on Ninja Warrior aren't the strongest, but they are the leanest. It certainly seems that the guys who have less to carry enjoy a definite advantage over the stronger, heavier contestants. And it's not just Japanese competitors who are so darn skinny. The only white guy I've ever seen make it to the fourth stage, Bulgarian gymnast Jordan Jovchev, was as lean as anyone else to make it that far.

So where do I need to be, and how far away am I? The consensus among Internet sources suggests that anywhere below 8% is elite athlete body fat, so we'll take that as a goal. Now it's time to finally learn how to properly measure my body fat.

For years I've had a Tanita body fat scale, but I've never measure body fat the way I know they recommend: At a regular time, when you're properly hydrated, and therefore not in the morning. So I'm doing it every Monday night at 10:00 pm, at least two hours after eating anything.

Last Monday 7/5/11 I took the first measurement: 213.o lbs., 12.5% body fat. Sounds like a good place to start.

Then I began a week of a weight-loss diet. That means eating 500 calories a day less than what's needed to maintain my weight, with a diet loaded with protein. For the calorie limit I relied on LoseIt!, the calorie-counting app I got for my iPhone. It also lets me log my meals and track calories, protein, and other good stuff.

But how much protein to eat? The RDA is like 0.5 grams per pound, so for me that'd be 106.5 grams. But the Internet consensus is that to build muscle and burn fat you need 0.7-0.9 grams per pound of body mass. That'd put me at roughly 170 grams of protein per day. And that is darn near impossible to reach.

Try it. You'll be eating meat and eggs three meals a day and protein shakes in-between. Seems like the Atkins Diet, from what I've heard. But I gave it a shot for a week. And while I approached those protein goals most days, what I couldn't do was keep the carbohydrates out of my diet. The Men's Health Big Book of Exercises had a good section on fat-loss diets, and they recommended something like no more than 75 grams of carbs a day. Keeping your carbs that low means no pasta, fruit, or even milk. Now maybe I could adopt that Spartan lifestyle if I were a single guy in law school again. But with a wife and daughter who love their pasta as much as I do, am I supposed to make a separate meal for me?

Well, I tried for a week. And when I measured myself last night, what did I find? 210.2 lbs., 12.6% body fat. If that's anything like accurate, then in the first week of my fat-loss diet I lost  about 2.5 pounds of muscle and 0.5 pounds fat -- and my body fat went up a hair.

This is probably why the instructions that came with the scale say not to measure body fat more than once a month. Think I'll follow that; I don't want any more bad news for a few weeks.