Fifth monthly roundup of measured data and analysis.
Since blogger is annoying in how it handles images, I’m going to upload an Excel (2003) spreadsheet. Here’s a link:
http://www.forefrontpb.com/phildiet/Diet%20Records.xls
The "Weekly Graphs" worksheet shows the weekly average of weight and the weekly average combined BM score and quantity. Also added average frequency.
The "Weight Chart Daily Graph" worksheet shows the daily morning weight.
The "BM Score Daily Graph" worksheet shows the daily combined BM score and quantity.
I'm keeping a food log and notes in a written notebook, which for the sake of putting off an annoying task, I will scan and upload when I'm done rather than every month.
Analysis
Month five was a relatively boring month. I played in two one day paintball games and didn’t suffer the exhaustion that I did from
The interesting note from month five comes from the weight lifting program. After a disappointing November in terms of strength gains, I decided to step back and look at my diet more closely. I created a spreadsheet to track calories and discovered, to my great surprise, that I was only eating 2200-2500 calories a day. Subjectively it felt like I was stuffing myself – I only felt edgy hunger in the mornings, and then only for a few minutes before it went away – yet I was actually eating a fairly restrained amount of food.
Since virtually all weight programs call for increased consumption of food (a gallon of milk a day on top of what you already eat is a common prescription), I decided to increase my consumption of food and see what happened. I added in more cheese to my burgers and started drinking cups of heavy cream to add in even more fat calories. My hope was that this would allow my body to spare the maximum amount of protein for muscle repair.
In the month of December, my weight went from 159 pounds on 12/1/09 to 173 pounds on 1/1/10, a gain of 14 pounds. My squat went from 130lbs to 165lbs, with a steady gain of 5lbs per workout. So it appears that eating more really does solve that problem.
My only concern here is that I’m beginning to suspect I might have some sort of very mild reaction to the heavy cream. It’s difficult to describe, but sometime after drinking a cup of it I begin to feel thirsty and have a sensation of dry mouth. Maybe the lactose in the cream is enough to set off a minor reaction. For now I’m going to continue using cream to supplement fat calories and see what comes of it.
January promises to be an interesting month – I might end up in
Five months down, seven to go!
