4 Weeks In

Well its been 4 weeks and I'm still going strong on the weight lifting front.  I've been attending a 1-on-1 training sessions every monday and a group (3 people) training session on thursdays.  I've been getting in a few runs here and there while also trying to increase my awareness of my calorie intake.  The calorie intake has been suffering some and so I'm trying a new technique I've read about that will hopefully focus my mind on how many calories I'm eating by confining my eating window to an 8 hour period.  It's called intermittent fasting and I learned about it on leangains.com.  I've been at it for a week now and I am down some weight, not much, but it makes me think about my food choices a little more.  Essentially I just don't eat for a 16-18 hour window and then consume all my calories for the day within the next 6-8 hours.  I try to make the calories in the window have a good balance of carbs and protein.  Another thing I've been doing is consume a snack of chocolate milk right after my weight lifting as it is suppose to have a good combination of protein and carbs that your muscles are shown to have a high uptake of immediately following weight lifting and will increase recovery.  

Up until yesterday, my strength gains had been minimal.  Now its not that I haven't felt stronger but more that I haven't been reaching many of my goals when I go into lift.  I kept stalling out at 11 reps instead of getting 12 or something similar but yesterday I went it to work out and it was totally different.  I had felt tired all day and really not that motivated but being that I had a scheduled training session, I was going to go get my butt kicked no matter what.  This time they switched it up and I did legs first and from there on out, I either achieved or exceeded my goal reps for every single machine I had to do for the day.  It felt really great to see that progress and that had even happened on the few machine I had achieved my goal on previously.  I felt much stronger and encouraged.  Then I woke up this morning and weighed myself and saw a nice drop in weight, clocking in at 295.3.  I hadn't been expecting immediate result weight wise due to the muscle building phase that was occurring but I was hoping it would start taking affect sometime soon even if it was slower.  I also decided to take some measurements to keep track there and I'm going to do this Bod Pod to get an accurate assessment of my body composition.  My current measurement where 48" Waist (around belly button), 47" chest, 16.5" bicep, and 28.5" thigh (around upper thigh).  Hopefully keeping track of these will yield some other results that show progress over the next few months.  My goals are to lose 25-30 pounds decrease waist and chest measurements and increase bicep by the time I go for my trip in February.