Hey ladies! Can you believe it’s already time to welcome March and say goodbye to another month. Time has been flying by, hasn’t it? It’s funny how as a child you count down the days, anticipating Christmas break, summer break and even your birthday.. It just doesn’t come fast enough, right?! Then you get older.. and suddenly everything comes way too fast.. And for me, I’m even starting to feel that way about my birthdays.. I don’t know about you, but at some point getting older doesn’t seem so cool anymore! I feel like my age froze at 23. But, hey, maybe that’s just me š
So, in January I decided that I would solely strength train 3-4x a week without any cardio what so ever and no tracking of my food intake (with the exception of protein here and there) to see the changes in my body come March. Well it’s already here, time to do a cut with cardio and strength training combined. I wasn’t expecting this to come so fast, and already feeling like moving on, but I already made a commitment so here I am stickin to it!
My plan during this cut is to strength train during the process. With that said, I don’t plan on gaining much strength because I won’t be eating as much as I normally would but rather maintaining where I’m at up to this point. If there are any of you cutting (trying to lose weight) right now, try not to be so hard on yourself with strength training and expecting to hit PR goals. Unless you just started training, it’s probably not gonna happen during this time. And that’s ok because cutting isn’t forever! Yay to that, right?!
As far as cardio, I don’t plan on running long distances at all. I plan on doing HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) which is a great form of cardio, at small bursts with timed breaks in between. If you’re not sure about this and would like to know more on it, let me know and I could go into more detail in another post.
So, the main attraction for this cut would be the obvious:eating, which will consist of flexible dieting. I always hear people talking about eating clean. I’m not sure exactly what this means as it seems to change person to person. So, for me, my “diet” will consist of making sure to eat sustainably, counting my calories, doing my best not to go over, and making sure to get close to meeting my daily macro nutrient needs (carbs, fats and proteins). If you’re interested in counting your calories, just google calorie calculators. I used freedieting.com and just went to calorie calculator and added all my info and it calculated 1 of 3 choices which are maintenance, fat loss and extreme fat loss. I’m personally choosing to use the calculations for fat loss. The second tool I’m using to track my calories and macros is called My fitness pal which is an easy on the go tool as it is an app so you can input your info on your phone. The third tool would be my food scale. You can’t track without weighing your food, right? This may sound like a lot, but really, once you get in the swing of things, it’s quite simple. Especially if the majority of your meals rotate between similar ingredients.
This is the start of my 2 month journey that I will be sharing with you all as I do my best to commit to this cut. It will be challenging, as I’ve done this exact cut last year but the difference this time is I will not be on a treadmill every day, I will be eating about 300 calories more a day than that time and be committed to strength training in the process. I am looking forward to seeing changes as I exercise the mind and body and practice self control. I also would like to do this to share a diet that is sustainable and flexible, not totally denying self of yummy foods, and still being able to shed some fat.
I hope this process will be an encouragement to you. It’s truly not easy to share these types of things as it is very personal and obviously puts me in a vulnerable position. Putting up before or even after pictures is not easy, and especially for mommy’s. I debated on sharing this for these reasons and even thinking what if I fail, but with the encouragement of my husband, I figured to just embrace it knowing from my own experience, reading other women’s progress has really encouraged me. So I really hope to do the same through sharing this with you.
Just a side note, I will not be doing any crunches, targeting specific areas to try to lose fat (that’s pretty much impossible, no matter what all these IG people say LOL), using any dietary supplements of any kind and I won’t be denying myself on treats here and there =). So no worries if you see me, I won’t be grumpy Alma who’s starving or totally deprived! LOL. Also, I’m only looking to lose about 8-10 Lbs, which might not sound like a lot but will take a lot of commitment for someone my size.
Thanks for stopping by. If you’re going through this process also, let me know and we can definitely cheer each other on! Here’s to 2 months of good times!
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