Frustrated and looking for some help.

[Sasquatch]

Hello all,

 

Im 6'5" 300lbs 28yrs old, I am a full-time student and have been vegan for about 6 years and I am needing some help with figuring out my fitness situation. I started getting big/husky probably in the 8th grade and have been ever since. My weight slowly increased up to about the highest of 315lbs back when i was just veggie before i went vegan.

 

Earlier this year i decided i wanted to try and get into shape before i turned 30. So i did some research and joined a gym and started a 3 day split routine doing about an hour of weights 3 times a week and an hour of cardio every other day between lifting days. Along with this i counted calories and stuck to a 2k calorie diet trying to get about 200g of protein a day. I took a multivitamin and used rice protein powder to supplement my food intake. After following this for 3 months i had lost less then 10lbs and had no measurable results (my weight fluctuated within that 10lb region), my clothes felt the same and i didn't look any different. Sadly i stopped going to the gym around june (my 28th birthday).

 

A few months later I heard about the stronglifts program and I decided to give it a try. After another few months had gone by, this time without counting calories but still eating pretty healthy I felt stronger but once again had no measurable results. Id like to be stronger but I feel losing as much weight/fat as possible is more important.

 

I dont know what I am doing wrong or not doing enough of but I just checked the scoobysworkshop.com calorie calculator and it estimated a daily intake of 2450 for a 25% calorie reduction. This is about the same value that most calculators have given me for a daily intake to lose weight.

 

Any info or suggestions for a routine or diet or even just pointing me toward some good info would be helpful as this is getting a bit frustrating.

 

Thank you in advance.

 

Apologies if this gets posted twice.

[Iron Clad Ben]

Hey dude, first off, mads up for giving it a go, hitting the gym hard and watching what you eat. Takes a lot of courage and resolve to make a big change like that. Sorry to hear it's not been working as well as you'd hoped.

 

A lot of people on here will agree, how many calories you eat is probably less important than how clean those calories are. Can you walk us through a typical day of what you eat?

[Sasquatch]

On my original routine i would start off with a cup of whole oats with about 2 tblsp of peanut butter 1 tbls brown sugar and a cup of soy milk (to drink). Later after hitting the gym i would usual do a cup of regular or vanilla soy milk with my rice protein powder for my shake and then eat some type of protein (gardein or boca or some cooked tofu) and usually frozen veggies, cooked with a small amount of olive or hemp oil or just a salad with. Dinner would be something similar or salad of greens and tofu or smartground (if doing more of a taco salad with olives and some salsa). Or i would make a batch of some kinda of whole grain pasta or brown rice with beans and tofu and corn and divide that up for a week of dinners.

[Baby Hercules]

Hey dude, first off, mads up for giving it a go, hitting the gym hard and watching what you eat. Takes a lot of courage and resolve to make a big change like that.

 

Ditto! This is big stuff, especially when you're essentially planning on overhauling your entire physical identity since your youth. That's major. Give yourself a break for not doing it right away, most people have to ease into that kind of thing in stages. I know I did. You've already made some big changes even though you may not be able to see them: you've been able to stand back from your situation and make a choice. You've been able to identify what you want and decide what you're willing to do to get there. You've put the time and energy and focus into doing just those things. You've educated yourself as you've gone along. You're smarter now and you have a much better understanding of your body. And, hey, you're a genius for coming here.

 

 

Something to consider...and this may not apply to you. It applied to me and others I've known. Do you still see yourself as "big and out of shape?" (Choosing Sasquatch for a nom de plume may be a clue.) Mental framing is huge and professional athletes hire trainers just to teach them how to focus. I happen to be one of those trainers, so here's a free lesson.

 

Wherever you look is where you are going. Sounds simple, right? It is, but it's also freakin' powerful and effective. Pro runners are taught to look at the place they want their foot to go instead of at the obstacle they are trying to run around. Golfers are taught to visualize the perfect swing and the ball sinking cleanly into the hole 200 yards away before they ever step up to a tee. Olympic athletes run through their courses and routines over and over again, training their brains to be ready for the exact motions that will be required of them. Get this: the brain doesn't need you to DO the motion, it can learn expertise just by visualizing something it's done before. How cool is that?

 

Here's why it works. Whatever you do regularly, mentally or physically, your mind gets ready for by setting up a more and more powerful path of neurons in the brain. Remember the first time you drove a car? How crazy was that? You had to focus on every damned little thing and you were a nervous wreck, trying to remember everything you had to do while negotiating traffic, signs, road conditions, and keeping a map of where you wanted to go in your mind the whole time. Zoom forward to today. How ridiculously easy it is for you to drive now? Do you think about how far to press the accelerator pedal down or do you just do it? Do you review all the traffic laws in your mind or do you just pull out and merge with traffic? Do you lay out a map and decide how to get home from the supermarket? (None of which may apply in Los Angeles.) I'm betting your vehicle feels like an extension or your own body by now. If they took an MRI of your brain back when you were learning and compared it to one of you now, they'd see all these beefed-up extra pathways in your current motor reflex area, your neocortex where you rationalize and make decisions, even in your amygdala where you process those emergency calls like idiots who slam on the brakes in front of you.

 

Okay, now switch to your athletic plans to become an intimidating mountain of awesome. You are mastering the skills of learning to drive the Awesome Mobile. It's gonna be a few months of "Can I eat this now?" "Does that twitch mean I need to back off or can I do five more reps?" and "Should I stand up straight and pretend I am a gift to the female race or should I hide in the background for another year until I'm perfect?" Plus, your muscles are laying neuron pathways to pick up that dumbbell just a little more efficiently each time, lift your knee just a little more easily with every lap, move the bar up and down in the ideal press curve. Learning a new sport, especially something as total-body as weight training, is on par with learning a new language in terms of how hard the brain has to work. You're gonna feel like a kindergartener at first, everyone does.

 

There's no trick to it, really. Just. Keep. Doing. It. Did you take a Master Course in Turn Signals? No, you just learned how to flick that little blinker on over time. Did you attend a Braking for Black Ice Seminar? No, I'm guessing one or two rear end spin-outs and the subsequent stream of profanity and fear was enough to instill that lesson. You weren't born programmed to be a vegan bodybuilder but as a human you ARE set up perfectly to learn anything. Plus, your body really, really wants to feel good. That combo makes a steady progression into athleticism a no-brainer, if you'll excuse the pun.

 

So, in a nutshell, if you do it long enough, whatever it is, your brain becomes an expert at it and so does your body. It just gets easier. Neurons take a little while to set up pathways, so it doesn't happen overnight. But it does happen, guaranteed. Consider: you've been thinking the same thing about yourself and doing things the same way for a long time. You've become an expert at something you longer want. No problem--just begin training yourself to become something else. You're like Juggernaut in the Marvel comic books: once he gets some momentum going, nothing can stop him. Give yourself a break for everything you did in the past and then just let that go. You didn't fail because you haven't stopped. You are just one more of a thousand athletes who will have a long, exciting story to tell about how you got to the finish line.

 

It DOES work. This WILL happen. You are freakin' unstoppable.

 

 

Baby Herc

 

PS: 6'5"?! Holy crap, I'm already impressed.

[precision female]

Sasquatch....

 

Muscle weighs more than fat so if you saw very little overall weight loss it doesn't mean you didn't lose a bunch of fat and gain a bunch of muscle...Maybe you lost 20 lbs of fat but gained 10lb in muscle simultaneously resulting in only 10lb drop overall?

 

The better way to track that type of progress is with body fat percentage. Had you done a body fat calculation when you started and another one 3 months later you might have seen a substantial drop in body fat percentage - a better muscle to fat ratio - despite not seeing much drop on the weight scale.

 

If you are starting out with a layer of fat on your body then you won't visually see the muscle gain progress until that fat burns away...which will probably take more than 3 months....I think you were on the right track but need to stay on it longer and pay attention to body fat percentage more than weight....its quite possible for people to slim down and lose fat, get nice toned muscle, and weigh the same or more than they did when they started becasue the muscle is heavier than all the fat they lost....that's what happened to me!

[Sasquatch]

After more reading and talking to my friend that is vegetarian and very into fitness who insists i need like 200g of protein a day, I really cant figure out what i need to eat and how much. I think carbs are a problem for me as i seem to gravitate toward them when I snack and think of meals. I am trying to get a 5 day meal plan worked out so that I have something to stick to so that ill have data to using as I track my progress this year.

 

I am looking at tofu and salad as my main meals and oats for breakfast and 1 rice protein shake, with the list that I've made I end up with only 1125cal 76prot and 97carb, I want to aim for the 1800-2000 cal/day range 5 days a week and then on the other 2 days a max of like 2500 still eating healthy and such but just maybe different foods (like more carbs or something depending on what my girlfriend wants to have for dinner or whatnot). 1800 to 2000 with 200g of protein seems like a stretch and i just dont know that from other stuff I've seen that that level of protein is necessary.

[Gaia]

Are you ever hungry? or tired during the day?

[Sasquatch]

When not in school or being busy i get hungry and or tired, when i was on my previous workout and meal plan i didnt get hungry really and slept great but didn't get tired during the day.

[MartinVegartin]

Ditto! This is big stuff, especially when you're essentially planning on overhauling your entire physical identity since your youth. That's major. Give yourself a break for not doing it right away, most people have to ease into that kind of thing in stages. I know I did. You've already made some big changes even though you may not be able to see them: you've been able to stand back from your situation and make a choice. You've been able to identify what you want and decide what you're willing to do to get there. You've put the time and energy and focus into doing just those things. You've educated yourself as you've gone along. You're smarter now and you have a much better understanding of your body. And, hey, you're a genius for coming here.

 

And so on. This is the way I think but I sometimes forget. Thanks for reminding me.