As it stands, it’s been about 8 weeks now since Operation Get Dan Diced came to an end. And as you know, I have been “reverse dieting”. This is to gradually get my metabolism, food intake, and activity levels back to “normal”. Of course, Christmas time has brought with it a few extra “challenges” as expected! But don’t worry, I’ve been following my own advice! The advice that me and Jake Weekes gave in our Brain Gainz Christmas series!
Reverse Dieting
Just to remind you, “reverse dieting” is the process of gradually increasing calorie intake, and / or reducing exercise levels. The idea is to make small changes week after week, to give the body’s metabolism time to adjust. This is to minimise unwanted fat gain. This would occur if I were to simply immediately up the calories and reduce the training. I.e. how often do you see people diet down to a target body weight. Only to “rebound” hard and pile the weight back on after!
Christmas
Keep body fat in check over Christmas involved a little bit of planning, but nothing too outrageous. I spent the week over Christmas with family and relatives. It involved a lot of travelling. And there was lots of delicious food around and lots of temptation! But it wasn’t too difficult.
As per the advice from the Brain Gainz videos, I kept my step count consistent. Though it involved some early morning and / or late evening walks. I continued to fit my workouts in. This was through sneaking off during quiet times in the day. Because I was travelling, I would get gym day passes.
But probably most importantly, I ate mindfully. I roughly tracked my food using MyFitnessPal. Portion sizes were just guessed, and I filled up mostly on vegetables and protein (lots of sprouts and turkey!). I opted for mainly lower calorie options like sugar-free jelly for dessert.
But eating like this did allow me to “save” calories for things I really wanted. Like pigs in blankets. And for the fact that on Christmas Day, I ate like 2 of these big Lindt chocolate bears myself!
My Stats
My body weight right now – now that the Christmas water retention and bloat has gone – is 74kg.
Daily calorie intake is on average around 1,800 calories. But to be honest, I haven’t been very strict on sticking to this lately. So some days are higher and some days are lower. But it balances out to average about 1,800 cals a day.
My training doesn’t really have a strict schedule right now. But I do try and do some kind of exercise most days. Some days this is really easy stuff, like just my knee rehab exercises and some stretching. And other days I’ll do some hard bag work (to the best of my ability, since I have to still be very careful about moving around on my bad knee). Weight training has kind of come to a halt over the last few weeks. I’m just having more fun right now. I am doing other forms of exercise rather than lifting weights. And I’m still getting a good sweat going and still burning calories!
My step count is about 15,000 steps most days, which is what it was before I started getting “diced”.
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