At the start of this month I started to feel the weight loss. I had lost a total of 15 pounds at this point and I was noticing how much better/easier everything had become. I could walk up a flight of stairs at school without sweating, I was much more energetic, and I was happier overall.
As I was feeling better, I decided to increase the difficulty of my workout. I increased my cardio amount to 20 minutes and increased the weight and reps for all of my weightlifting activities along with adding in the weighted crunch and the leg extension machines. My regimen was changing constantly but by the end of the month it looked something like this:
Chest Day:
10 minutes of pectoral flys (10 sets of 5 reps at 120 pounds).
10 minutes of rowing.
10 minutes of weighted crunches (10 sets of 5 reps at 50 pounds).
10 minutes of rowing.
10 minutes of chest press (10 sets of 5 reps at 60 pounds).
Leg Day:
10 minutes of leg press (10 sets of 5 reps at 175 pounds).
10 minutes of rowing.
10 minutes of leg extensions (10 sets of 5 reps at 50 pounds).
10 minutes of rowing.
10 minutes of outward hip abductions (10 sets of 5 reps at 75 pounds).
This month saw some of my hardest work and most vigorous exercise as I was emboldened by my progress and my dream was starting to become a reality. In addition to changing my regimen, however, I decided to double down on my multi-faceted approach (Working out AND dieting) and, come the second week, I reduced my calorie intake to 1700 per day. This was rough. This quick reduction of calories caused me to feel tired and drained for the first week or so. That being said, I saw an immense amount of weight loss (mostly water weight – the accumulated weight that you intake from drinking water every day) and being as adaptive as the human body is, the tiredness slowly went away as well. The main thing that allowed my body to recoup so quickly was paradoxically my workouts. For the first few days my workouts made me even more tired, but from then on, I was reinvigorated after I worked out which is quite odd (There’s a medical reasoning for why this is the case which I will definitely get into in another article. For now, however, I recommend continuing to work out at the same frequency and intensity when you drop your daily caloric intake).
I finished this month with a diet of 1700 calories a day while burning about 450 calories per day from my workouts. My regimen changed to the one listed above, and by the end of the month, I had dropped to a whopping 185.3 pounds. This means I lost 9.2 pounds this month and a total of 24.2 pounds.
Right: This was probably one of my better months with utilizing both methods to lose weight quickly.
Wrong: I changed my regimen nearly every week during this month which means there were some weeks when I wasn’t working as hard as others. I could have instead sat down and made a new regimen at the start of the month instead trying to make one as I went along.
