We’re one week into my 2019 cut, and so far good! Weight is coming off, and that’s the name of the game.

As I detailed in my previous articles, my training regimen has largely remained the same while I’m dropping my calories down rather significantly to 2,400 a day to begin.

Through one week, I tried to be mindful of the process and all of the adjustments I’ve made to the daily routine. I thought I’d detail those here, as I think the observations and lessons learned can help anyone else trying to go through their own weight-loss journey.

Nutrition:

Let’s start with nutrition, as I understand that’s the most difficult aspect of the weight-loss process for a lot of people. To sum up the first week, I’d say things went relatively well.

I dropped calories pretty significantly to start. One of the reasons I did this is because I know I’m at a high body-fat percentage (somewhere between 15-20 percent) and can afford to start a little more aggressively with my nutrition. What I mean by that is I think I can afford to drop my calories significantly without worrying about losing a ton of muscle along with fat. I should be able to maximize fat loss early on, and later in this process I can get more detailed.

Getting used to having dramatically less food each day (previously, I was eating 2,800-3,000 calories a day) has been an adjustment. I’ve tried to be extremely mindful of the signals my body sends me each day in regards to being hungry.

When I want to reach for food, I ask myself this question: Is this an urge to eat, or is it hunger?

I’ve evaluated my answer to that question by looking inward and thinking about how I feel in that moment. Is my body asking for food? Does my stomach feel empty? Does it maybe hurt a little bit because I’m hungry? Or, am I just used to eating at this time? Is this desire to eat out of habit? Do I actually NEED to eat right now?

Almost every single time I felt the urge to eat, it was because of just that — an urge. I wasn’t truly in need of food.

Just being able to make that realization over the first week will help me moving forward, I believe.

I don’t expect to make any reductions in macros/calories for a while. My hope is that I can add activity in small increments over time to keep the weight loss progress moving in the right direction. Those increases in activity will come in the form of cardio. I’ll get into that in the next section about training.

Training:

The first week of training brought forth some interesting observations.

Specifically, man did I feel tired this week! My body ached and my muscles were more sore than usual. My leg day kind of obliterated me.

It opened my eyes to a lot of things and how this plan will eventually change over time.

Since I’m not planning to drop calories any time soon, I think I’ll be able to maintain this current training split. I think my body will adjust to having less energy coming in and I’ll be able to get through my training sessions.

However, I think inevitably I’ll have to drop my training volume.

I was shocked at how sore I was. My leg day was what really kicked my butt. Granted, I missed my leg day the previous week (and missing a leg day always makes the next leg day that much worse), but I was surprised at how gassed I was.

Little things can cause your training to feel different. If you’re less hydrated, if you get poor sleep, if you miss a session (hello), if the weather outside changes, if your nutrition changes… So many things can make you feel inadequate in the gym.

With that said, I’m going to be more mindful of my process in Week 2 to get a better read on how my body feels in regards to training. The big change and most logical factor is that I suddenly dropped calories and my body needs to adjust. However, continuing to evaluate this to best perform in the gym is going to be important.

Should I continue to feel highly fatigued over the next few weeks, I may need to drop my overall training volume slightly (cut out some sets, reps) to make sure I’m not overtraining.

And in terms of increasingly activity, as I mentioned earlier, I’ll likely add to the duration of my cardio when needed. I’m currently doing two 20-minute cardio sessions a week on the spin bike. I can increase those to 30 minutes a session and then 40 minutes a session. Deeper into this cut, I’m sure I’ll add a third session each week as well.

Decisions to add cardio will come in due time. I’ll read my progress and adjust accordingly. It’s safe to say that as this process continues, I’ll be slowly adding cardio while at times slightly reducing my overall training volume.

Conclusion:

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Overall, it was a good week. As you can see above, my weight came down. My lowest weigh-in was five pounds down, though I take the average of my weigh-ins each week to get my weight for that week (does that even make sense? haha).

So, I’m three pounds down (189.6 pound average in Week 1, down from my first weigh-in of 192.6) after one week.

A steep drop in weight at the beginning is to be expected when your body fat percentage is higher. Often, it’s due to some combination of fat loss and water weight.

That steep drop won’t continue for long, and it probably will even plateau this week. But that’s OK. This is a long process, and fluctuations are going to happen constantly. It’s all about sticking to the process and believing in the plan!

When needed, I’ll make small adjustments and see how things evolve.

Looking forward to Week 2!

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CG