P90X vs Weight Loss

I started replying to a comment from Nick to an earlier post and it got lengthy enough to warrant a full post. The question was with regards to calorie consumption. Like FT my initial target was the 2400 calorie range. Since then it has fluctuated more wildly than is advised.

P90X is the first product that Beachbody published that didn't have weight loss as a goal. It's actually quite common to gain weight by the time you're done. Those who are interested in weight loss should be starting with Performance 90, establish a baseline fitness level, then move on to P90X to polish the results.

While weight loss isn't a P90X goal, it is one of mine. While I am a geek that doesn't exempt me from the "must have bigger, stronger, faster" mentality that is so typically male. Once I knew that there was a P90X, the concept of doing the "easier" Performance 90 wasn't an option. As a result I had to tailor P90X to my needs.

Using the rough formula provided by the program I should have started at 3000 calories a day. That would have set me up to maintain my weight of 212 pounds. Since I was looking to drop weight I immediately moved myself to the next lower class, 2400 calories.

General consensus is that to lose weight you need to cut 3500 calories from your diet to lose one pound. It's advised you do this over the course of a week to achieve long-lasting weight loss. That's 500 calories per day. The 2400 calorie diet was right in line with my desire.

We're at day 47 and I've dropped 21 pounds total, which is triple the result that the above approach should bring. How does that work?

Fact is a percentage of this IS water weight and I could pick it back up over the course of a day. Another factor in this accomplishment is glycogen stores.

You glycogen (energy reserve) stores account for about one pound of glycogen and about 3-4 pounds of water. When your glycogen stores are empty your weight could potentially be 5 pounds less than when they are full. This IS a factor in my weight because I step on the scale first thing in the morning. A portion of my glycogen stores have been used up while I slept. The body does replenish these stores by burning fat but not as quickly as you use them up so I'm a little lighter than I was before I went to bed and it's not all "real" weight loss.

So what's the real deal? My best guess is that I've probably dropped 15 pounds and there are about 6 pounds of volatile weight loss that would very quickly be gained back should I change my regimen. That's why my "goal weight" is seven pounds lower than the weight I really want to be. Even though I intend to keep up a healthy lifestyle after I complete P90X I do expect to return to a more natural diet, particularly with regards to fat consumption. As a result I expect to gain back some of the weight I've lost. By shooting under my goal up front hopefully I'll slingshot back up and settle in where I "really" want to be.

But still, fifteen pounds is a lot for seven weeks. The reward is very gratifying but there are risks involved with my approach. That brings me to the downsides of P90X as a weight loss plan.

Using the previous formulas to lose 15 pounds over seven weeks I must be shorting myself by 1000 calories a day. Using the 3000 calorie plan as a baseline I needed to drop to 2000 calories a day. Problem is that since I dropped under 200 pounds my class changed and I should be on a 2400 calorie diet to maintain my weight. In order to continue my loss at the previous rate I needed to drop to 1400 calories a day, whew.

Drawback number one, as you lose weight you feel hungrier.

The worst habit I have is that I don't apply as much precision as I could in both keeping track of exactly what I eat. I tend to add "about" the right amount of ingredients when making my meals and have a "pretty good" idea of what I ate throughout the day.

Turns out I have a tendency to underestimate and after a few days underestimation compounds to become gross underestimation and you end up where I was last week. After my bonking episode I went back and duplicated my previous days eats using FitDay. Turns out I actually ate under 1100 calories two days in a row.

Drawback number two, you need to pay extremely close attention to your diet or risk making yourself sick (or worse).

The last big problem may not affect the public-at-large as badly as it does the geek sector. Geeks are notorious for bizarre schedules. Long hours in front of glowing screens of one sort or another are commonplace and time is frequently manipulated and stretched in bizarre ways to fit the needs of the geek (spending an hour working out tends to take an hour, spending an hour writing code tends to take a lot longer).

While I've been lucky enough to get myself into a nine-to-five style job that allows me to integrate into society a bit more smoothly than many of my brethren it does little to suppress my natural genetic urges. I frequently push the limits of the clock in order to satisfy the need to hit one more website, reply to one more email, read one more issue of Ultimate Spider-Man or conquer one more Super Mario Galaxy.

Weekends are where this really falls apart. Since there is no requirement to be awake at 6am to be to work I can push the night further than the rest of the week. The first downside here is that I avoid eating after 7pm. This allows the requisite minimum 3 hours between last feed and bedtime. On the weekends I can't say for sure when I'll be getting to sleep so I stick to the 7pm rule. As the night creeps on I find myself getting hungrier and hungrier. By 2-3am I'm starving but it's too late to do anything about it so I end up going to bed hungry with weakened glycogen stores. Now it becomes even harder to wake up the next morning because those stores have now been completely eaten away and you can actually wake up bonking.

Drawback number three, and the most difficult for the geeks of the species, you need to maintain a regular schedule.
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