Coming into Week 3 of the 90-Day Challenge, and taking last week’s plateau into consideration, I was really not sure what to expect in terms of my weight loss this week. Happily, my body seemed to adjust well to the regimen and I’m happy to say that after some tweaking to both my calorie input and output I’ve shed another 5lbs off my slightly smaller butt !!
What Changed with My Eating
It’s really important to pay attention to how many calories you are consuming each day when you are losing weight and working out. Depending on your body size and activity level you can very easily eat too little when you are on a low calorie meal replacement system like the 90-Day Challenge. With that in mind I went back to one of my favorite sites for calorie tracking and used their calorie burner tool. A dude my size (6’4″ Large Frame, 285 lbs) burns about 2800 calories a day, just existing. That’s before any added exercise. If I factor in 30 minutes of jogging for someone my size that’s another 450 or so calories burned. Which means for me to stay static I can safely consume roughly 2800 – 3200 calories a day. Ideally you want to create a deficit of about 1000 – 1500 calories to safely lose weight and men don’t want to go under 1500 calories a day. Taking that into consideration I realized I was eating too little for my body to remain happy. I needed to increase my calories to lose weight! So I changed a couple things. 1 I started adding some all-natural peanut butter to my shakes to give myself more protein and calories. 2. I stopped skipping snacks. 3. I increased my portion size for dinner. Those three things alone seemed to get my body back on track and back to losing weight!
What Changed with My Workouts
Once I figured out what was going on with my calorie input, I took a closer look at my output as well. Typically I am a jogger. When I was my fittest I was doing 4 miles a day, 4 days a week and 6 miles once per week. When I started focusing on losing weight, my natural inclination was to start jogging again. While I enjoy it, I did some research and found that I would be better off adding variation to my routine to make sure my body was burning at an efficient level. Because of this I started doing some light circuit training on different cardio machines and I picked up a couple workout systems I am planning to try out soon.
With those couple tweaks and changes I’ve gotten my body back up to speed and I lost an additional 5 pounds this week and am feeling better than ever on the road to fit!
My Week 3 Progress report
Weight at Beginning of 90-Day Challenge – 300.2 lbs
Weight as of this writing – 284
Total loss = 16 lbs!
Exercise – 4 Days of Interval Training (bike, elliptical, jogging), 1 Day of Zumba, 1 40 minute Jog, 1 day of rest.
