Christmas! As much as I love the holidays, they certainly don’t do my weight loss any favors. That being said, I was still able to lose this month through a combination of the reduced caloric intake I established last month and increases to the amount of weight I lifted and the amount of cardio I did.
My regimen changed a little during the jolly month. I increased the amount of cardio I did from 20 minutes a day to 30 minutes a day. In addition to this, I increased the amount of weight I lifted for each rep while keeping the overall rep/set amount the same. This allowed my muscles to bulk up a bit instead of lean out which allowed my clothes to still fit me. Speaking of clothes, it was this month when I realized that I was going to need new clothes. Being nearly 25 pounds lighter than when I started had caused nearly everything I wore to look kind of baggy. I resolved to buy new clothes come the new year but more on that later. Long digression aside, my regimen looked a little something like this:
Chest Day:
10 minutes of pectoral flys (10 sets of 5 reps at 135 pounds).
15 minutes of rowing.
10 minutes of weighted crunches (10 sets of 5 reps at 70 pounds).
15 minutes of rowing.
10 minutes of chest press (10 sets of 5 reps at 70 pounds).
Leg Day:
10 minutes of leg press (10 sets of 5 reps at 200 pounds).
15 minutes of rowing.
10 minutes of leg extensions (10 sets of 5 reps at 70 pounds).
15 minutes of rowing.
10 minutes of outward hip abductions (10 sets of 5 reps at 90 pounds).
As you can see the amount I was lifting in some categories has nearly doubled in the 3 months since I started. This didn’t sink in right away as the change was extremely gradual from my perspective. It did, however, hit me quite hard in the coming months as the amount I was lifting further increased by a large amount.
Moving on to food, I was eating about 1700 calories a day and had forgone the cheat day on Sunday and limited it to a cheat meal on Sunday. I will go more in-depth on this in a different article, however, I would certainly recommend a cheat meal instead of a cheat day.
To recap, this month was quite uneventful with a slight increase in both weight and cardio while seeing a slight decrease in calories ingested due to my cheat day becoming a cheat meal. I ended the month at 178 pounds for a monthly weight loss of 7.3 pounds and a total weight loss of 31.5 pounds.
Right: I made good progress this month increasing both my weights and cardio while decreasing the amount I ate each week.
Wrong: I should have changed the cheat day into a cheat meal a lot sooner as it was most likely the biggest factor in my weight-loss this month.
