I have a plateau that my body likes to live at constantly. It’s 212-217lbs. I’m 5’7″. In the journals of medicine, this is considered obese. I don’t even look close to obese when I’m clothed. In fact, people say that I look just fine, but I know the truth, cause I can frolick alone in the mirror!

I am a lean 165 lbs. This means that if I were to burn ALL of the fat off, I would be just goo, muscles, and bone, and that would be my weight. This is not an attainable goal. We must have some fat on our bodies. At this point, I believe I’m approximately 28% fat. That’s more than 1/4 of me. That’s a lot. 50lbs of fat. Have you see 50lbs of fat before? Have you seen 1lb of fat? It’s disgusting.

Anyway, the point of this post is to illustrate how quickly my body can drop weight when given a radical diet situation. While balance is key in my life for a healthy existence, I have struggled well through my 20′s and early 30′s with comfort foods. I love sugary foods.

I work out almost daily, including strength training and cardio, but my metabolism is very unkind. I cannot simply workout and lose fat. If I don’t change my diet drastically, I DON’T BURN FAT.

For the past 2 months, I have been at the gym kicking my butt with hard workouts and have seemingly made zero progress. I know that I’m putting on muscle and my body is changing, but I can’t really see that on the scale, which isn’t the first place we need to be measuring our success. However, I do know that I will burn off 50lbs of fat before I can put on 50lbs of muscle, so I HAVE TO BE GETTING SMALLER.

Last week I was 217. This morning I’m 209. I broke my first “10″ barrier. The next one is 199. For the past 3 days I have dropped my carbohydrate (white flower, refined flours/sugars) intake to about 60-80 grams. If you don’t know how many grams of carbohydrates you usually eat, just know that a bowl of cereal (american portion size) will usually sport you 60-80 grams alone. One serving of rice is 40g. So, we’re used to ramping up and gorging on carbs. My calorie intake over the past 3 days has been approximately 800-900/day. Each time I work-out I burn about 1000 calories if not more, which means with a resting metabolism of about 2000 per day (the amount I burn when I’m doing absolutely nothing) and an additional 1000 burned through activity at the gym, plus every-day-living burn, I’m chiseling out roughly 3500 calories/day from my fat gut. One pound of fat is 3500 calories, so I’m dropping a nasty yellow clod of wet, seeping, slithery fat every day.

Yay. At this rate, I will be at my target weight by the end of September, which is only a month and a half from now. By Christmas, I should be extremely ripped. But, we’ll have to see. There have to be free days in order to enjoy living.