2020 Hindsight

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2020. A night of, well, indulgent food, beer and champagne certainly impacted the scales with a weigh in of 81.7 kg. Oops.

Now that we have a starting point, I can work out a rough schedule. I was working to sub 70 kg by the end of March, but since a BMI of 22 is just under 70 kg, I figured a BMI of 21.9 made for a neat target.

Working to 1 kg a week, the timing works out perfectly. From previous experience I should, if I maintain the diet and exercise regime, make that pretty comfortably. There are a couple of factors in my favour here:

usual weight loss during strict observance of diet is around 1.4 to 1.6 kg a week. If I can maintain that I’d hit the target in the first week of March
starting a keto diet will usually see a drop of 1 to 2 kg in the first couple of days as the water weight associated with muscle glycogen stores comes off. If it’s 1.5 kg worth of weight, that’s a week and a half margin there. We’ll find out in the next day or two, I guess!
I suspect there’s quite of food from last night still being processed (particularly cheese) and today was a heavy weigh in. Again, that will make itself known in the next day or two, or more likely the next couple of hours

Date	Jan 1 (Start)	Jan 1 (Today)	Target 1	Target 2	Target 3	Target 4	Target 5	Target 6
Weight	81.7 kg	81.7 kg	79.2 kg	76.0 kg	75.0 kg	72.8 kg	70.0 kg	69.3 kg
BMI	25.8	25.8	25.0	24.0	23.7	23.0	22.1	21.9
@ 1 kg a week			Jan 19	Feb 10	Feb 17	Mar 3	Mar 23	Mar 28
Current rate

Weight Tracking Chart

This table’s very much a work in progress so the format is likely to change. I could include the various analyses done by the Garmin scales but the numbers are really only estimates. I may include them later, maybe as a weekly/monthly summary but for now I’d like to keep it simple.

Right now, though, I’m running the clock out to 11 am until I can eat. The joys of the intermittent fasting “eating window”…

Let’s Talk Briefly About Food

My number one lesson from 2019 was “you can’t out run a bad diet”.

My weight had been trending upwards from around the mid 80’s (kg) or four years ago before starting to ramp up from the start of 2019 to peak at 90.1 kg at around the end of April. It was a combination of getting through around a 24 can carton of 500 ml Asahi cans every two to three weeks plus regularly indulging in ‘treat’ foods.

I have been battling back issues since around 2013 so this has been limiting my physical activity, particularly running. That said, I went through a period where I was doing decent bicycle mileage through the second half of 2018 but my weight wasn’t moving, so that gives you an idea of what was going on diet-wise.

Hitting 90 kg was a wake up call and I resolved to do something about it. After some research, I adopted the keto diet, working seriously on carb limitation and calorie restriction. It worked very well for me and I was able to get to around 75 kg in late October, just in time for a 17 day trip in Hawaii.

I deliberately came off the diet during the trip, and to be honest have been pretty undisciplined on the food front since then, so I know my weight will be around 80 kg or so come January 1. That’s a choice I made, so I’m fine with that as I know how to get weight loss results now.

I’ll be following these rules come January 1:

a target of 1200 calories input a day
a target of less than 20 grams of carbohydrate a day
an eating window of 8 hours, with 16 hours of fasting. This would typically look like dinner at 1830, and no food until 1030 the following day
no alcohol unless on a once-a-month ‘cheat’ day

If I combine this with an average of 3000 calories burned a day, this should give a deficit of around 1800 calories a day. A very rough guide of 7700 calories in a kilogram of fat should see a loss of around 1.5 kg a week.

That sounds tough, and it is, but it’s no more than I what I managed back in June-July-August last year. As mentioned in the introduction I’m aiming to get under 70 kg by the end of March, but it is entirely possible to make it by the end of February.

The hardest part is actually the fat adaption for running and cycling, which will take a couple of weeks. I had some pretty massive ‘bonks’ during the adaptation in June so that will be ‘interesting’ to go through again.

I’ll go into more detail on how I’m tracking calories, but as mentioned, I’ll be using the MyFitnessPal app which has some excellent tools on counting calories, fat, protein and carbohydrates.

A Man Needs a Program

So, I need to think about a rough training program. I am literally thinking this through as I type so pardon the “stream of consciousness” vibe.

So, I’m looking at a mix of running, cycling, swimming, weights and pilates.

‘Hard’ points are

Pilates on Monday evenings
Cycling Saturday mornings. This does get swapped with the afternoon weights session if it rains.

A ‘soft’ point is swimming on Friday afternoons.

I’d like to target four runs, two rides, one swim, one pilates session and three weights session a week. That’s 11 sessions over seven days, so four days need two sessions. Saturday and Sunday lend themselves to double ups just through more time being available (this would be way easier without having to work, but I need money to live).

Let’s build a table and have a look…

	Morning	Afternoon	Evening
Mon	Weights 1		*Pilates*
Tue	Run (short sharpish) 1
Wed	Weights 2	Run (long if race Sun) 2
Thu		Cycling 1
Fri	Run (short recovery) 3	Swim
Sat	Cycling 2	Weights 3
Sun	Run (race or long) 4

My only issue here is that I start work at 6 so the gym sessions are going to be very early. I’m fortunate my employer offers Fitness Passport and I have access to 24 hour gyms at Oxley and Indooroopilly. It does constraint available times for longer activities, though, such as longer rides or runs.

Obviously this is idealised and there are going to be weeks where work or personal matters make it difficult, but let’s go with this and see how it goes.

December 31, 2019

Alright, let’s do this…

As per the home page description, this blog is intended to journal my journey through 2020, with a focus on my running, fitness and diet.

The intent is to track weight and activity daily, done via a set of Garmin Index Smart scales which automatically log my weight to Garmin Connect. I use two Garmin devices, a Garmin Fenix 5S Plus, and a Garmin Vivosmart HR+ (I swap between the two as needed) to track activity levels and heart rate.

I’ll also use MyFitnessPal to track calories, plus protein, fat and carb intake. This talks directly to Garmin Connect so I’m able to track calories in and out to get an idea of how my weight loss should be going.

My two goals right now:

get my weight under 70 kilograms by March 31
run the Brisbane Road Runners‘ half marathon championship event on May 3

I’ll go into more detail about those goals, how I intend to achieve them and what challenges I face in further posts.