100 Pound Transformation!

Thanks everybody!

Watched your video...cannot believe that is the same guy at the end! Well done! Please share your philosophy on all this & some meal examples/how many calories you ate each day (or your macros) + frequency and length of workouts, it would help a lot of people! Amazing job! x

So when I first started out at 260 pounds in August of 2011 I did not know very much about nutrition and diet, only that I had to burn more than what I consumed in order to lose weight. So I did cardio and weights three times per week and took all "junk food" out of my diet. This approach allowed me to get down to 200 pounds. At this point I was unhappy with how much fat I was still carrying and the lack of muscle and strength I had. I was a high school football player and wrestler, and always known as the "big guy", so this lack of muscle and strength really hurt my ego. So I decided to go on a lean bulk which was successful as I put on 14 pounds in 7 months. I followed Wendler's 5/3/1 bodybuilding split, which is a great program and allowed me to put a lot of weight on my lifts and add size as well. During this phase I spent countless hours researching proper diet and nutrition, and decided to join myfitnesspal in July 2012 to finally get rid of this fat, no matter how small I got and no matter how low the scale weight had to get.

When I first started tracking my food, (before myfitnesspal) in April of 2012 I was bulking on 3700 calories. At this point in time I was paranoid about losing muscle so I wanted to keep my protein at 300 grams, which was unnecessary. I joined myfitnesspal to start my cut, and I started off by dropping my cals to 3200, with 300p, 340c, 70f. I kept this up until weightloss slowed, then I reduced calories by 200 per day. I made sure to be lose 2-3 pounds per week, which allowed me to keep the majority of my strength in the gym. I continued this approach all the way through until my final macros were 1800 cals, 175p, 162c, 50f. At no point did I let my protein go under 1g/lb of bodyweight, and fats under 50g. I also made sure to get at least 25g of fibre everyday, which was easy at first but got increasing difficult as my carbs got lower. Some of my favorite ways to get fibre are raspberries and oats, as well as lots of green vegetables. My meals were mostly the same every day. I liked to have two eggs and a half cup of egg whites with one cup of oats for breakfast. I am a university student living at home, so I took a packed lunch everyday to school. I made all of my lunches for the week on Sundays, which consisted of 180g cooked chicken breast, with 2 servings of brown rice and 100g of broccoli. For dinner I ate whatever happened to be in the house that I could make fit my macros.

I switched off of Wendler early in my cut as I could no longer progress with the weights. So I switched to a 4 day bodybuilding split. I did this for the entire cut, as well as cardio twice a week at 45 minutes per session.