Are you able to give us some idea of what you eat right now. Do you have a set routine or number of meals per day? Is there any consistency in what you eat now? The obvious answer is to reduce your overall calories whilst keeping protein high enough to recover from your training. The detailed answer is a bit harder if we don’t know a bit more.
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This question is key if you don’t want to count calories. As an example, I eat mostly the same few meals every week. Depending on if I want to gain or lose weight, I only need to increase or decrease my servings of rice/pasta/potatoes etc, meat and veggies stay the same. Super simple, but I guess if you eat a very wide variety of meals it gets harder to do without looking at calories more closely.
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But is fun to be big
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Hey, first of all, kick ass job at the comp dude. You beasted that log up. I’m always going to admire that when I see it, haha.
Appreciate you reaching out to me dude: means a lot.
Here is what has worked for me as a non-calorie counter that still wants to kick butt in the gym.
-The only time I eat carbs is before my 2 hardest workouts of the week (squats and deads), and even then it’s not a huge amount. I was settling on 1.5 cups of rice based breakfast cereal (Chex here in the states) mixed with skim milk and a spoonful of raw honey. I like cutting carbs out of my diet because it’s just 1 less macronutrient to deal with. If you’re not counting calories, keeping things simple makes things, well, simple.
-I REALLY like food lists. They make things simple. “You can only eat THESE foods”. Even if there’s no science behind it, it just takes away the necessity to think and plan. “If It Fits Your Macros” goes so far against everything for me, because I don’t WANT to try to figure out how to fit an ice cream sandwich into my daily nutrition count: I’d rather be told it’s just off the menu but I can eat all the beef I want. My favorite nutrition list is the one included in the Deep Water e-book. I highly recommend it.
-On that note, now that I’m not eating carbs, my meals are basically meats and veggies. I keep a structured life and try to eat the same amount of meals each day around the same time if possible, so this means, if I want to lose weight, I can either eat less meat at a meal OR eat the same amount of a LEANER meat at a meal. I’m going to make fun of being German here for both of us, but if I was eating 2 pork sausages and a big plate of sauerkraut for lunch, I could either switch to 1-1.5 sausages with sauerkraut OR switch to 2 turkey/chicken sausages. We’re either manipulating portion size OR the fat macro at this point.
-The other thing I can do is eat the exact same thing at each meal but eat FEWER meals. I eat small meals frequently (like every 2-3 hours), so if I want to lose fat, I’ll do something like cut out the meal I have between my first meal (breakfast) and my midday meal (lunch). Or I’ll cut out the snack I have at the end of the day before bed.
-Playing around with macros some more, I have basically 3 different “days” in a week. My “high” carb day (the day I actually eat carbs, on squats and deads), my high fat day (bench and press day), and my low carb/low fat day (non-lifting days). I keep protein on the high side on all of these days regardless, because I want to keep as much muscle as I can. On the high fat day, I eat a high fat meal of nuts/nut butters before training.
-Really, the best thing for me is to try to eat around the same time and frequency each day so that I can make changes as needed. If things get chaotic, it can be tough to figure out. However, as time goes on, I’ve been able to make adjustments pretty well. I had a big lunch yesterday before lifting, so I told myself “Ok, cool: that was lunch AND the pre-training meal put together, so now we’ve had 5 of our 7 meals for the day”, for example. If I’m going to have a really big/cheaty kind of meal, I try to time it so that it happens either right before or right after one of my big workouts.
I feel like I could flood your log with brain vomit at this point, haha. Let me know if I can drill down into any specifics.
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I second Pwn’s approach
Also, since you seem to eat quite a bit, you could start with some “low hanging fruit” For example, swapping fatty meats with leaner ones, cutting down on/cutting out beer (sorry, German stereotyping), replacing high calorie snacks with low calorie ones…
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Excellent work dude!
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I’m not as knowledgeable or as effective at fat loss as pwn, but I have successfully lost plenty of weight over my life. For me, fat loss is all about planning and consistency. If I allow myself to make spur of the moment decisions, they will be the wrong ones.
When I’m all in on fat loss I will:
- Plan all my meals in advance, and prep as much as possible in advance.
- Limit variety as much as possible. For me, the sweet spot is one “different thing” a day to stop myself getting bored. In the past that’s been a case of having breakfast and lunch the same everyday and changing dinner daily, but I’ve tried a lot of different ways and the ones that stick and work involve minimal variety.
- Remember that weight doesn’t change linearly so I don’t panic over one weigh in.
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Great work in the competition! You were especially kicking ass within the yoke.
I don’t know about those bags.
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@simo74 breakfast is usually oats with fruit, skimmed milk and a spoon of protein powder, although lately during the hospital internship I have had a lot of bread and buns, which need to go.
Lunch is usually meat (smth. like beef burger patty’s, chicken legs or some beef cut - so on the fattier end) paired with veggies and carbs (potatoes, tomatoe rice, potatoe pasta and the like).
Dinner is usually meat again or fish (often salmon) with some kind of carbs and if I’m a good boy veggies. Sometimes I’ll eat an omelett instead or rarely bread.
I dont snack that much, which I realize might actually be hindering because I wouldn’t go as big on my regular meals if I snacked more (healthy/ low cal stuff).
@dicksharpe I think simplicity will be a big help for me although I need to make sure I don’t get too bored because… well I know me and my cravings. Plus I want to leave a little room for social occasions.
@guineapig it is and long term I don’t plan on being small. But there are downsides to being big as well. Mainly in the world outside of competitive strength sports, haha. Screw those muggles!
@T3hPwnisher thanks chief!
Dude that’s all excellent info and really helpful. Please don’t limit yourself!
This is perposterous. We shall duel at dawn! Haha yeah I know I should cut out some of the drinking but I’ll also say I have no intention of stopping drinking all together.
Good argument about the replacements. I actually already do some of that. The thing is just that I eat HUGE portions. So even lower caloric foods adds up. I think eating more meals could help that.
@dagill2 another vote for simplicity and good point about planning meals and fluctuance in progress.
@FlatsFarmer thanks mate! Yeah I don’t know about them either, haha. Coach said there’s really not much one can do to get better besides actually practising. Unless you’re super tall and/ or incredibly explosive. 6 people zeroed the event completely, so atleast I wasn’t the only one struggling
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I have plenty of thoughts to offer, but I’d like to know more about how you are currently eating. It’s important to point out I’ve never been 100+ kilos, and I don’t want to lead you astray with bad advice that’s not yet applicable to you. It can be quite easy to create a very aggressive deficit by applying certain rules, and I’m not a fan of “crash” diets.
People have already asked, but it’s a good question:
- Is there any dietary consistency?
- How much alcohol do you drink per week?
- How many other caloric beverages do you consume (milk, juice, soda, …)?
@T3hPwnisher s suggestions are good, as is his blog post on leaning out, but I think he started at a bodyweight lower than yours? Maybe some 20-30 kilos. Which, even if you’re inactive (sedentary + weighttraining) translates to about 500-900 calories a day.
I’m finding it increasingly difficult to post on these boards about fat loss because I know there are readers to wit what I write will not apply and if they adhere to the numbers it’ll cause detriment to their health, however I quote and emphasize this applies to people with a healthy level of bodyfat
You should weigh yourself every 7 days after waking up. Shoot for a weekly loss of around 2-3 pounds. Of course use your judgement. If you’re a lean individual or a small person, losing 1-1.5 pounds per week might be satisfactory.
- Aim to lose 0.5 to 1% of bodyweight per week. For a 215 pound guy, that means to aim to lose roughly 1 to 2 pounds per week.
Either of which can contextually be too aggressive. If you don’t weigh “enough” then absolute terms in poundages is too harsh, but if you weigh plenty then the percentage based model gives you more leeway to be somewhat more aggressive at no significant health risk.
If you don’t want to count, the model I like best to start with is finding a frame of reference that you can apply to your current eating and then scale up/down.
As a very simple example that probably does not match the nuance of your life (I’ll describe how to elaborate on the model to match “reality”):
Let’s say you eat 4 meals per day, and you happen to find that each meal is composed of (roughly)
- 2 cupped hands of carbs
- 2 palms of protein
- 2 thumbs of fat
- 2 fists of vegetables
(Yes, the ideas stem from Precision Nutrition of which I am indeed a fan)
And that’s adequate for you to maintain weight, and it doesn’t really matter if those cupped hands are rice, potatoes, pasta, …, if however you eat matches that model roughly and allows you to maintain weight then only the averages matter even if you rotate foods that are inherently different in caloric density (i.e., a cupped hand of rice has way more calories than a cupped hand of potatoes, but measured over the week it’ll be the average that matters).
If you were to find that this (or some other number with regards to the servings) it what allows you to maintain your weight you can start by reducing the carb portions not adjacent to workouts. That should kick off a deficit. When it no longer does, you can remove another piece of the puzzle, and so forth.
So you read this, and you go “great, but I always have a bowl of yoghurt and it’s really hard to gauge if that’s one cupped hand or two?” and then I suggest either use a bowl that you can consistently fill to the brim or get smaller bowls as your diet progresses. I’ve done this with for instance pumpkin seeds. I’d have a tablespoon measure inside my packet of pumpkin seeds and then replace that with a teaspoon and have two (one tablespoon is three tablespoons).
If nuts and avocados are part of your diet, then I highly recommend pre-portioning these out (especially nuts as it is so calorie dense and the difference visually between 30 and 40 grams isn’t much). I keep old plastic containers of a seasoning I tend to but which incidentally fits 50 grams of diced avocado (freezer) and ~30 grams of walnuts. I weight these out at the end of Sunday and grab them on the fly during the week.
Probably morning, but the answer is:
whenever your physique is the most likely to not be subject to short-term changes.
What do I mean? Well, for me, the evening is bad because maybe I’ll have a big dinner with friends, maybe I’ll have sunbathed and be smoothened from a little sunburn. Maybe I’ll have had a lot of water to drink, and so forth. The morning offers me the most consistency. I also weigh daily, but I hear once per week is adequate. I just know that I could undereat substantially in a 7 day period so I tend to favour the daily weigh-ins.
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I missed this. I used to take a photo from exactly the same spot in the gym changing rooms everytime I went. At the time, i was lifting twice a week. The thing i tried to keep in mind was something I saw in @jackolee log in which he’d created a slide show of every daily progress photo for months at a time. Really helped me to see it as a data point within a trend, and not an isolated picture.
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Improvements are huge across the board. You look like an absolute athlete these days. I will say, I dislike weight over bar. It’s just too technical and siphons from the appeal to strength. Though, it’s trending right now.
Always a pleasure to watch you improve. Remember the big picture. Cheers my friend.
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Well in that case…, haha
-I never mix fats and carbs. So on the few meals I have carbs, there are no fats there, and I try to also make it so that the meals immediately surrounding them are lower in fats, if possible. The first thing I have in the morning is fat free greek yogurt mixed with powdered peanut butter/protein powder, so very low fat, high protein, limited carbs. Then I tend to eat my pre-training meal after that, then a post training shake, and then a small meal an hour or 2 later. If it was my higher carb day, that meal will be high protein/low fat. If it’s my bench or press day, it’ll be a high protein/moderate fat meal.
-One of my meals on my non-high carb days tends to be a “pure fat” meal, that I refer to as “supplemental fats”. The source is always some sort of nut/nut butter, but the point is to get in healthy fats. This was more for heart health, but it’s also VERY satiating. I like having it later in the day, so I’m not hungry for the rest of the evening, but second meal of the day (after the yogurt) can be helpful on non-training days to stave off hunger.
-I imagine you’re in a location where sauerkraut is bountiful: it’s my favorite way to get in veggies. No prep at all. I eat a TON of it. I highly recommend it, especially if hunger is an issue.
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- not beyond what I’ve already outlined.
- This varies a lot depending on social occasions etc. but to give an estimate at all: 8-10 drinks for sure (1 drink being either beer or liquor)
- Not many. Alcohol free wheat beer (which is pretty low cal. and which I use to replace some of the regular beer lately). Other than that mainly calorie free beverages (sugar free ice tea/ soda, water, coffee, tea occasionaly)
That is true, so following his guidelines the portion size would need to be adjusted.
That’s hars to gauge but my physique usually looks worse in the morning, so I guess that’s best then.
For me it’s more the overeating that’s problematic, haha . But I think I will go with daily and then the weekly average.
Thanks for all the tips!
Thanks boss, means a lot coming from you!
Yeah I’m not too hot about the throws either but I will say it’s good to get more variety in. Strongman here could really use a broader mix of events.
If you are a visual person do a Google search for “Precision Nutrition The best calorie control guide. [Infographic]”. At the end of the guide it outlines what to do if you’re big and strong (which applies here). That might help with the problematic overeating as well. FWIW though the model falls apart if your idea of carbs is french fries. It only “works” when the constituents of the meal are somewhat “pure”. I.e., a slab of chicken is without question just a protein source but a fatty bit of salmon might necessitate you reducing the amount of fat you add to a meal as the protein source has both.
And then french fries would necessarily impact that maybe you don’t want as much dressing.
Feel free to @ me with your diet progress whatever methodology you decide to employ.
Also, I have to mention — even though it generally takes a while if one has some bodyfat to loose — eventually diets, counting or not, can make you feel like ass and if you end up there I don’t think you should continue as it might be too much given everything else that is weighing you down.
Best of luck fam.
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Is there a specific reason for this?
Thanks for the reminder, I love Sauerkraut! Fun fact: If one stereotype about Germans is over blown, it is our supposed love for Sauerkraut, haha. You have no trouble getting it in supermarkets but it is not nearly as popular as the Brits and Americans think. The misconception (next to historical origin “the krauts”) probably stems from Sauerkraut today being most popular in Bavaria and to the rest of the world Bavaria = Germany, which couldn’t be any further from the truth, haha.
I will have a look at that graphic, thanks!
Wait: I didn’t even mention any, haha. Since I don’t measure anything, I don’t have portion sizes to mention. I do things by eyeball.
As for the fats and carbs thing: nothing scientific. Seen enough big and strong dudes recommend it to listen to it. It keeps me from making bad choices. “Carbs mixed with fats” is basically every “bad for you” food. Ice cream, pizza, cheeseburgers, nachos, pastries, donuts, etc etc.
How tee-total are you with carbs & fats? Will you have fatty protein sources (cuts/salmon/eggs) with carbohydrates like a pasta salmon bowl? Would you have butter on bread or opt instead for salsa?