Hello my fit friends! I just wanted to make a quick thread to show off some of my recent progress. I recently finished my cut (a week early, even!) and lost over 13 lbs. in 11 weeks.
There was a period in the middle where I was crippled with anxiety due to work where I fell off the workouts and a tiny bit with the compliance. However, I was able to bounce back! I’ve still got about a month and a half left in my blast, so I’m going to try to use that time to maximize the gear. I should enjoy some great gaintenance from this.
I hit a neat physique milestone just within the last week or so: I can see my serratus. It’s absolutely nuts to be able to see where they tie into the lats. Gotta enjoy it while it lasts, because maintenance inevitably involves regaining a pound or two and taking on water weight. That said, I’m at the lowest weight I’ve been for a decade and looking way more jacked than I ever was before.
@Poppy I guess I’m should articulate the long term plan so that it puts the short term plan into context. The long term plan was always this: get Instagram/beach lean long enough to attempt to shrink this paunch in my front once and for all.
Okay, so here’s the dealio: I’ve got saggy skin. No bones about it. However! When I caliper these areas, I find they are still holding quite a bit of fat. Hence, the hypothesis that I’m working on is that my skin is saggy because it’s still weighed down by fat and that my fat is unevenly stubborn.
I think most of us are aware to some extend that there’s two different kinds of fat: yellow fat and brown fat. Yellow fat is much more readily burned than brown fat, which forms after years of continuous maintenance of yellow fat in an area. This is what results in what people commonly refer to as cellulite — I think. Thus, if I were exercising my whole life and staying fit, my brown fat would be more evenly distributed across my body. I didn’t do that though. Instead, hormonal imbalance began to take over and cause me to start forming brown fat deposits in the lower portion of my body (lower back, abdominals, thighs). You see the same thing in women by the way, but way worse for them because estrogen is so good at retaining body fat.
Anyways, the only way to get rid of this fat is to give my body no other choice but to use it for energy and burning it. That means losing every ounce of yellow fat that I can… and then keeping going. Assuming all goes well, I’ll be able to get to a near-contest lean state to lose that stubborn brown fat once and for all. Even if I gain a little bit back after dieting down, the hard work will have been done: I’ll start to accumulate yellow fat as normal and more evenly due to hormonal optimization.
At that point, a new tool becomes available to help the sag even more: bulking. You see, I can simply specialize in abs for awhile while I’m bulking and fill out my midsection with gigantic bulbous abs, hopefully returning the skin to a more natural look. Same goes for my rear end.
In the short term, I’ll be maintaining for a couple months and then I’m gonna try and take off another 7-12 lbs and see where that gets me. If it leaves me in a good place, great! But I think I’ll need at least one more cut after that to really bring out the muscle.
@Poppy Indeed there are! There are two different avenues one can go with this: cosmetic or health.
I can’t recall off the top of my head the names of the procedures, but basically you can get a full tuck around the problem areas — back, buttocks and abs if you go the cosmetic route. Best way to do this would probably be to update my passport and find a reputable Thai surgeon, as full tucks for those areas go for around 10-20k domestically. If I go international, I could shave that down to a take home price of around 4-5K including flight.
Second avenue is convincing a doctor that the extra skin is causing health issues — stuff like irritation, other issues that arise from loose skin. Then you can get a non-cosmetic tuck that does mostly the same thing as the cosmetic one but without the liposuction finisher and only on the abdominal region. The nice thing about this approach is that it is covered by insurance.
If I get surgery, it would be the last thing I do after the bulking intervention — filling out my hams, glutes, chest, back and abs with enough muscle, over time, should be enough to fix the issue. I wouldn’t be considering this intervention until I’m 45-46 at the earliest.
