This is just my gut opinion, but I think you are WAY over-complicating this whole process. For someone as fat as you are (which I’ve been before), I’m not sure there is all that much value in getting too deep into the weeds with all of your fancy spreadsheets and calculations.
I’m 120 kilo today, down from around 140 kilo last November. I lift HARD 4x/week. I EAT mostly meat, eggs and vegetables, but some crap now and then too. I don’t measure our count calories. I just eat when I’m hungry and stop when I’m full. I’ve never heard of AMPK or mTor, I just worry about executing my very basic plan. The fat has been falling off me all year, and it still is.
I have two questions for you.
How has your strength been over the last year? Have you gotten stronger? Weaker? No change?
Have you ever tried simplifying your whole approach? I’ll briefly outline what I mean by that below.
Lift HARD. Push yourself and always try to get stronger. Don’t skip unless something really important comes up. Be consistent.
Eat meat, eggs, protein and as many low-carb vegetables as you can, in as great of variety as you can find. Eat when you’re hungry, stop when you are full.
Sleep well.
Keep this up over time. If progress stalls, examine your behavior and make an adjustment. I’ve never had too look to hard to find something I could do better.
This has been successful for me. Perhaps it could be for you as well.
I wish it were that simple
Its not that I havent tried EVRYTHING
1: I lift hard 3x 2h and have gotten stronger
2: I eat meat, eggs protein and low carb veggies all the time, thats the problem
3: I do
4:thats what I am doing… wanting to adjust
so… no clue what else it could be
I eat cleaner and workout harder than ever before in my life but have no progress
Everyone just tells me I am doing it wrong and I should change,. I change and they tell me I should have done the other. then I do this. and so on …
So why am I NOT losing is the question if all is that simple
I’m not trying to be mean here, but I think one of two things is going on. Either…
You have some medical condition that makes you a special person who can’t lose weight through improved diet and strength training. If that’s the case, get off the internet and see a physician.
You are missing some rather obvious improvements you can make, but don’t want to. Trust me, it is very easy for large men to lie to themselves about their choices. Are you chugging a six pack of beer and pretending it doesn’t count in your fancy numbers tracking? Downing a two liter of soda? Snacking on candy? Anything like that?
I asked about your strength because I was entertaining the possibility that you got dramatically stronger in the last year while maintaining your bodyweight. You gave me an extremely vague answer to that, so I’m guessing that you haven’t, say, put 30 kilos onto your squat in the last year or anything like that. If you have, that tells a much different story than a year of unchanged bodyweight and unchanged strength.
You are measuring all of this other stuff, are you measuring your strength? You say you’ve gotten stronger, but how much progress have you actually made with that? I have a hard time believing that you can be experiencing strength gains eating under 2,500 calories while simultaneously having an unchanged bodyweight of 130 kilos. That just doesn’t add up to me.
You say you are prioritizing your upper body. Why? It has been my experience that squats and deadlifts are superior for long-term body composition changes. Don’t get me wrong, you should be training your upper body, but I’d be really curious to know what you are actually doing 3x/week for 2 hours at a time.
Unless you are a special snowflake with special medical issues, which you may be for all I know, I would encourage you to take a real close look at your eating and, to a lesser extent, your lifting. It doesn’t matter one bit if you’ve calculated some numbers that give you the idea that you are executing perfectly if you are not, in fact, making any progress that can be measured.
1: will check that out next week with the doc, might all be possible, hashimoto, reduced T3 through keto, who knows what.
2:dont drink alcohol, only drink diet coke, if I “cheat” its in the averages and also ALL tracked, yes ALL of it, therefore like I said. eating cleaner than ever before and not losing which drives me nuts.
upper body because I am a student and lacking strength with all the PC work
I did squats and deadlifts before but tried to change around a bit my workout routine for more biceps, triceps and shoulder workouts.
old workout:
squats from 0 → 35kg
deadlift from 0->30kg
overheadpress from 0-> 12kg
abductor 0->95kg
adductor 0->90kg
bench press 0-> 15kg
rowing 0->60kg
Right now I am doing:
reverse curls
dumbell press
rowing with rope to face
lat pull
squat
overhead press
Okay I am not saying this to be mean at all, but you are very, very weak. It is possible that your metabolism is in a bad state. That is way beyond my ability to address.
In your first thread you had some FANTASTIC advice and insight. Since your situation hasn’t really changed, you may want to go re-read that. Don’t torture yourself with zero progress and paralysis by analysis. Get the right help figuring out your issues, and tackle them however you can.
As obese and sedentary guy which never ever liked fitness at all (school bullying) and never touching a weight in 30 years.
Raising my weight lifting to 2-3x a week for 2h and pushing 35kg in a squat or deadlift feels great for me (btw: we are talking ONE side; because I thought this is how it is counted, right? So 70kg sum+20kg for the barbell) AND also being consistent + progressing for 7 months now.
So FOR ME these are huge improvements, even if not on a BB lvl of course; & keeping the workouts up at all; seems awesome for me, considering I quit multiple times after a few weeks.
Ok maybe another thing then:
WHO could I ask for a coaching?
I feel like I tried all, known to me, coaches here.
Weights are typically listed as the total weight lifted. A 90kg squat or deadlift is still quite weak for a 130 kg man. A sedentary, unathletic woman I used to lift with was able to deadlift 100kg after about one month of training. Again, I’m not trying to be mean here, just giving you my perspective.
You already managed to get a lot of great advice from two of the best in the business, Bill Roberts and Christian Thibaudeau, a world-class strength and conditioning coach. Did you follow any of it?
The best thing I can advise you to do is to seek out a competent in-person trainer to work with. You won’t get better answers than you’ve already gotten by fishing around on the internet.
Ok, you’re going to see a long chain of replies from me. You’re probably not going to like what I say because most of it agrees with Colucci, 2jar, Thibaudeau (who I have have massive respect for).
You need to quit sandbagging. 70 kg is approximately 165 lbs. And I have a 55 year old woman who deadlifts more than that at a bodyweight of 60 kg for reps. She squats that too. I have trained 65 year old guys who squat 100 kg for reps. I am currently training a 54 year old doctor who started with me at 30 kg and now lifts 160 kg in the deadlift. Your definition of progress needs to be re-defined. It’s good that you got increases in strength. It’s also not something you just ‘sit on’ as being the end of the road.
You haven’t tried everything either–so don’t say that you have. Have you tried training every day? Have you tried higher volume workouts? Have you tried training to failure? Have you tried bodybuilding workouts? Have you tried strongman style conditioning? The list goes on and on.
Go to the search function on this site, type in beginner workouts, and look at some of them. Or–more simply–go up to Chris Colucci’s posts and find the link that he gave you to workouts.
You say you lift 2-3 times a week with a cardio warm-up. Well, the other 4 days of the week you’re not doing anything. If it’s important, do it every day. It doesn’t even need to be the same thing every day. Add a 40 minute hike to the days you are not doing strength training. Sitting around on your ass for 5 days of the week is a great way not to make any progress.
AMPK and mTor are not hormones. Insulin is a hormone. AMPK and mTor refer to either signalling pathways or enzymes. You are not overtraining. Overtraining looks like this: 12-18 weekly workouts. Overtraining is not a short-lived thing, it is a major issue that takes place mostly with competitive athletes or those with eating disorders that are not eating enough, thus impairing recovery and their body’s functioning. Which brings me to…
Because if you’re not eating enough to fuel your body’s basic processes the metabolism shuts down in an effort to preserve body mass. Your body is not a static mechanism. It adapts and adjusts, and there is a floor for calorie intake below which your body will SHUT DOWN processes in order to survive. It doesn’t know you live in civilization and are simply choosing not to eat–it thinks you’re in the fucking Sahara and you’re dying because there’s no fucking food around. So it shuts metabolism down to preserve more essential functions and give you time to get out of the desert.
Refer to above. If your body doesn’t know when to expect food intake it has no predictable way to burn calories. THAT’S why you should eat if not hungry. You need predictable meal times so your body can adjust to having what it sees as guaranteed food intake. Averages apply–the problem is that your averages are wildly varying. Averages also apply to meal TIMES and to training.
Quit wildly fluctuating your calories. Quit skipping meals. Quit eating gigantic meals 1x or 2x a day. Train more often. Move around more even when you’re not “working out”. Get stronger.
