Ep 90 | My Fat Loss Journey End of Week 1 Check In
One week in, and I'm already learning things — some expected, some genuinely surprising. Here's my full Week 2 end-of-week reflection from my six-month fat loss journey.
If you missed the first episode, you can catch up here. And if you're ready to start your own fat loss journey, my Fat Loss Transformation Program is open — sign up here!
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Jayd (00:00):
Okay. So it's been one week since I started my Fat Loss journey and overall I had a really good week and I'm really happy with the progress that I've made so far. So let's take a moment to do my end of week reflection. Welcome to the Coaching Corner Podcast. My name is Jayd Harrison. I'm a personal trainer and I created this podcast to share with you tips and strategies as well as inspiration to build a body that you love without shame and without burnout. Today's episode is the second installation in my Fat Loss Vlog series. I'm going to be sharing my week by week check-ins as I go through my six month fat loss journey. My goal with this journey is to reduce my body fat percentage while maintaining muscle or building muscle if I can so that I can achieve a more lean physique that shows off all of the muscle that I've built so far in the last two years.
(01:06)
This is the second installation into the series. So if you missed the first one, you can go back and watch or listen to it. And the link for that is in the show notes or in the description of the video below. Now real quick, before we get into the episode, if you are looking to burn fat and keep it off for good, I would love to have you join me in this journey. You can find the link from my Fat Loss Transformation program in the link below this video if you're watching on YouTube, or you can also find it in the show notes if you're listening to the podcast. If you're watching this on YouTube, make sure that you hit like on the video and that you subscribe to my channel so you always get the latest episodes and other videos that I release throughout the week.
(01:44)
If you're listening to the episode, make sure to follow the show so you always get the latest episodes delivered right to your device. Without further ado, let's get into my week two end of week reflection.
(02:01)
So the first week of the Fat Loss Transformation is all about getting our starting point and our bearings. So one of the things that I was tasked to do was to begin tracking everything that I eat and drink using the ABC Trainerize app. In this first week, I wasn't really necessarily trying to change anything about what I was eating. The goal was to try and get a sense of what my body was used to getting in terms of energy and protein. So every day I tracked everything that I ate and drank in the ABC Trainerize app. And today we're going to take a look at how many calories I'm eating on average. Another thing that I did over this past week was I did daily weigh-ins where I stepped on the scale. Now doing the weigh-ins while also tracking everything that I was eating and drinking allowed me to get some real data and numbers around how much energy I'm taking in and also how that is impacting my body weight.
(02:59)
Body weight is something that tends to fluctuate for most people. You might see your body weight go up or down three to five pounds even within a single day or within 24 hours. And a lot of that has to do with how much water weight you're holding. So if you're only tracking your weight once a week, you might end up getting not as accurate of a view of like what your body weight is actually doing because maybe the day before you ate a lot of carbohydrates or maybe like you had some really salty food that will make your body retain more water and so you will weigh in heavier. But when you do a daily check-in and you check your weight stepping on the scale, keeping everything the same at the same time of day, wearing roughly the same thing or the same amount of clothing, this really gives you a better, more accurate sense of how your body weight is trending.
(03:49)
So we're going to compare the numbers of how many calories on average I'm eating every day and we're going to compare that to what my body weight is doing on average. Now the goal here would be for us to try and figure out what my maintenance level of calories is. That is the amount of energy that I need to eat for my body weight to stay the same. Once I know what my maintenance level of calories is, this allows me to plan for what my deficit might look like and how I might reduce my calories to get my body trending downwards to burn some fat. And finally, the other main task for week one was to get into my new exercise routine. So one thing to keep in mind is that if you want to burn fat, you need your body burning more calories than how many calories you take in on average.
(04:36)
So one way that you can get your body into a calorie deficit is by increasing the amount of activity that you do every day. The more that you move your body, then you burn more calories. So it's not always just about reducing what you eat. If you increase the amounts of energy that your body is spending, you can get yourself into a calorie deficit without necessarily having to reduce how much you're eating so, so much. So we have to keep that in mind as well when we are looking at the numbers of how many calories I'm eating every day and how my body weight is responding because the exercise routine is also going to have an impact on that. So as an advanced exerciser, my routine is going to look a little bit different from how it might look for someone who's just starting with exercise.
(05:22)
I already have a very active lifestyle. I'm on my feet every day for a couple hours a day teaching clients. I already have kind of an exercise routine, although I wasn't doing resistance training as often as I would have liked before. So one thing that I changed about my exercise routine in this last week was I just added more because I have the time now, right? So I did a lot more cardio by walking my dog. I tried to walk my dog 20 to 30 minutes every day and then once a week we're going on a big long walk of 45 minutes to an hour on one of the greenways here in the trangle of North Carolina. And then in addition to the cardio and getting some more steps in, I wanted to get into my new four day workout routine where I'm alternating between doing upper body and lower body training.
(06:09)
Now this is different from someone who maybe is just beginning with fitness. Normally I start people with a two to three day workout program where they're doing resistance training for their entire body for each day of training. For me as an advanced exerciser, I need more stimulus to my muscles to keep them strong and to get them to grow. I have split out my workouts to upper body and lower body focused days, which allow me to get the stimulus that I need to keep my muscles strong and to combat the muscle loss that is a little bit inevitable when you're in a calorie deficit. So we'll take a look at how my workouts went this week as well. So before we do all of this, let's make sure that we hit our end of week reflection. So at the end of every week of the program, there's an electronic form that my clients fill out to answer a few questions to let me know how they're doing, what they're learning and what obstacles they faced in the first week of the program.
(07:03)
So let's fill that out now. Okay. So the first question is, what did you learn this week? Did you notice anything surprising about your eating habits, your energy levels, your emotions or your mindset, what patterns started to emerge? One thing that I did notice as I was tracking my food in the ABC Trainerize app is that just as I suspected I was under eating on a lot of days before. When I wasn't really paying as much attention to what I was eating, I did have a lot of days where I undershoot my calories. That pattern emerged within the first two days of tracking and I noticed, especially on day two, I didn't really put a whole lot of thought into what I was going to eat. And then I also got distracted by work and life. So at the end of the day, I ended up going to bed without actually having eaten dinner and I ended up waking up in the middle of the night really hungry, really warm and just like wide awake.
(08:09)
So that was something that I was sort of subconsciously aware of, but it wasn't quite at the forefront of my attention. And it's a really familiar pattern that a lot of people experience. If you have a really irregular eating pattern where you're not really planning out your meals and you don't really know when you're going to eat, this can often lead to overeating, which is definitely what happens for some people. It also can lead to undereating and both of these habits are really not great for fat loss and you might think, "Oh, well, if you're under eating, doesn't that mean that you're going to be like losing weight?" No, not necessarily. Because one, if you're chronically under eating, your body is going to adapt to whatever amount of calories it's used to getting and eventually reaches a point where you're not actually burning calories the way that you think you are because your body has slowed down your metabolism because it knows that it doesn't know when you're going to actually eat enough calories.
(09:05)
So it slows everything down. So by eating irregularly or massively undershooting your calories, like how many calories your body actually needs over an extended period of time, this can actually cause your metabolism to slow down where your body doesn't burn as many calories and you hang on to fat. Of course, overeating means that you'll be taking in more calories than what your body's burning and that also will cause you to accumulate fat. So neither of these things are good for fat loss or just for health. So I recognized pretty soon that I needed to be more intentional and plan out what I was going to eat and make sure that I was doing it. And so even though the goal of the first week of tracking isn't necessarily to change anything that you do when you are just tracking what you're eating and drinking, that was an adjustment that I did decide to make and I became more intentional after day two or three about making sure that I was eating as much as I needed to, that I was eating three or four meals a day to make sure that my body had the fuel that it needed.
(10:13)
And the reason I made this adjustment was because I knew that I was going to be exercising more and I really didn't want my workouts to feel like bad. When I don't have enough calories or protein in my body when I work out, I feel awful during my workouts and then I also have a really hard time recovering. So I went ahead and made that adjustment of making sure that I was being intentional about planning what I was going to eat and making sure that I ate it. And that's definitely a different behavior than what I was doing before. I did notice though that it kind of seems like I'm already in the calorie deficit that I want to be and I want to maintain over the next six months because when I did my daily weigh-ins, I did see a trend of my body weight going down very, very slowly from the beginning of the week to where I am now.
(11:01)
My goal in setting out in this program was to lose about a half a pound per week. I started out the week weighing in at 141 and then by today my body weight was tracking and averaging out to about 140.5. And so I may not necessarily even need to change anything about what I'm eating right now. And in looking at the actual nutritional content of the food that I was eating, I was getting a pretty good, decent amount of protein at every meal, but I was being very intentional about it and I think more intentional than I was before I started tracking. I made sure that I added an egg or two to my meals to make sure that I was adding some more protein, but my meals themselves were pretty lean, plenty of protein and I was getting vegetables most of the time that was in the form of beans, although I did make some lentils and chickpeas that I'm going to be having this week.
(11:59)
But yeah, I actually think that there's not really much that I need to change about how I'm eating at this point. I did kind of already make the changes that I was thinking I needed to make. So I think we're probably just going to stay at the current calorie intake that I am at and just make sure that I'm staying intentional about eating four times a day, making sure that each meal is at least 25 grams of protein and the meals are about 500 to 700 calories each. The one thing that I might do if I wanted to accelerate my fat loss by going from a half a pound a week to maybe a pound per week is I might need to cut out the hot chocolate from the coffee that I have. So I drink a lot of coffee. I drink three or four coffees a day and I add a tablespoon of hot chocolate mix to that because it's like my little treat.
(12:57)
I have a sweet tooth so I just know from living with myself that I'm going to need something sweet. I'm going to need a sweet treat every day and my sweet treat has been my coffee and so I really don't want to give that up because that's kind of my ritual that helps me reset and take a break from life, but it is something that I'm willing to consider changing. I don't think I'm necessarily going to stop adding chocolate to my coffee because that's a habit that I really like. But if I wanted to reduce the number of calories that I'm eating every day enough to burn an extra half pound per week, the tablespoon of that hot chocolate is adding 87 calories to my daily intake and that three times a day is about 260 calories. 250 calories is the amount that I would want to drop for my daily intake in order to burn an extra half pound of fat.
(14:05)
So that is something I'm thinking about either cutting out or maybe I make my own hot chocolate mix using cocoa powder and then like a zero calorie sweetener like monk fruit. At the moment, what I'm doing is working, but like I said, if it's something that I want to accelerate, if I want to move a litle bit faster in my fat loss, then that's something that I'm willing to do. It's kind of like on the horizon or something that's like a tool that I'm keeping in my back pocket. What do you find most challenging? I am surprised that I didn't actually find it challenging to track what I was eating. I got to a really nice routine. The ABC Trainerize app makes it really simple and easy to track your calories. I have a food scale that I use to measure my food when I eat.
(14:55)
It makes it so, so easy to just very quickly see how much I'm eating. So I track the ounces of everything that I eat. So if I'm going to pour myself a bowl of cereal, I'll put the bowl on the scale and then I'll set it to track how much cereal goes in there and then enter that into the ABC Trainerize app and then I'll reset it and then pour it in the milk and then record how much of that is. It's so simple, so fast. Another thing that I really like about the ABC Trainerize app is that it allows you to scan the barcode of any packaged foods that you're eating. So this really makes it so simple. So I didn't really have any problems actually entering the foods that I was eating. I think it helps that I tend to eat the same rotation of foods.
(15:40)
I think it's a little bit harder for people who eat very different things all the time and that is something that is a struggle for some of my clients when they first start working with me. This is an adjustment that they really have trouble making because they're used to eating a bunch of different things all the time and not really thinking about it. But if you're trying to make changes to your body, you do have to become more systematic. You do have to become more conscious of what you're eating. You do have to pay attention more and that is itself, that's the hard thing for a lot of people. It's not the measuring and it's not the tracking itself. It's the, oh, now I have to actually think about what I'm eating and be intentional and plan it. And if you're not used to that, it can be really challenging.
(16:22)
I've been doing this for a really long time. I've gone through different phases of my fitness journey where I've tracked and then I've gone through periods where I haven't tracked and it's very easy for me to switch between the two modes. And so far I haven't really found anything super, duper challenging at this point. All the adjustments that I've made have been easy and have actually led to me feeling better because like I'm not going hungry like I was before I'm maintaining focus, I'm maintaining my energy levels and I'm also getting more exercise, which is really great for my ADHD brain. The more that I move, the more level and regulated I feel. So that's it for the end of week reflection.
(17:04)
So like I mentioned before, one of my main tasks in getting more active this week was to go on more walks with my dog every day. So on most of the days I was able to hit this amount of activity. It's a lot easier for me to take him on longer walks over the weekend. So I took him on a big long walk on one of the Greenways on Friday of last week and he and I both had a lot of fun. It was so beautiful and just so good for my mental health to be out walking around a lake and with all of the trees and he did a really good job of not being really reactive when he saw other dogs. I think we both benefited a lot from that and I think we're both benefiting a lot from just our daily walks.
(17:50)
We're going for a little bit longer than what we were doing before and I'm letting him get all of the sniffs in. It's got to be good for his body as well as for mine and we're both a lot more relaxed when we come back from our walks and I feel like I'm able to focus. So this is having the benefit of helping me to burn more calories, but I'm noticing a big mental health and just like clarity effect from going on these walks. For my first upper body day, I did a press and push focus day. Because my primary goal with resistance training is to be strong and I really enjoy power lifting I've organized my workouts around movement patterns. So my press in my pull day is to help me develop that overhead pressing motion and my bench press. And then I also had some accessories to help support those movements.
(18:41)
I've started adding in some Arnold presses at the beginning of my press days just because it's so good at loosening up my shoulders. I have that common issue that a lot of people have, which is because I sit in front of a computer for part of my work. My shoulders tend to be kind of rounded forward and if I go into trying to do heavier bench presses and my shoulders are kind of like this, that spells pain for my shoulder and I can strain a muscle or get an even worse injury. So when I take the time to do exercises that involve external rotation at the beginning of my workout and go ahead and just do my overhead pressing exercises, this helps me to perform the bench press part of my workout so much easier with so much less pain and I didn't feel my shoulder at all during this workout.
(19:34)
I did a little five by five with 95 pounds on the bench press, which is a nice little high volume format that I'm enjoying right now with my big lifts. After I finished my bench press, then I did some shoulders and tricep accessories starting with some reverse flies for the back of my shoulders because this helps to stabilize my shoulders and strengthens the muscles that hold my shoulders back in an external rotation. And then after I did my reverse flies, I did some tricep dips. Now I haven't really done tricep dips in a while, so I wasn't sure what level of resistance I should app, so I kept my knees bent. What this does is it makes it so that you have les of your body weight in your hands and so you're not having to lift as much of your body weight. I realized that this was not enough resistance because I had to go to 25 reps before I felt the burn in my triceps.
(20:27)
So after I rested in the second set, I extended my legs to put more of my body weight back in my hands and this was a much better level of resistance and I felt the burn and I only needed to go to about 15 reps to get the stimulus to my muscles. I felt really good after my first upper body day because I had fueled myself properly and I felt really excited and focused for this fat loss journey that I'm on because I'm really trying to maintain that muscle if not build that muscle. Leg day, I hate to say it, but I made a little bit of a mistake. I don't know where my head was at. I think I was just tired and so I ended up skipping the dynamic stretches, which I usually do at the beginning of every workout. Dynamic stretches is something that I have all my clients do when I train them in person and when I design their workout plan, but for whatever reason I just didn't do them.
(21:16)
I just forgot. And so I jumped into my squats and I felt my hip felt really tight and I thought, I'll just keep going, which is you should never do that. Never push through pain or discomfort. You should always address it, right? I thought it would loosen up and it didn't. And so I did my entire leg day. I didn't have really any pain, but that tightness in my hip began to kind of radiate down through my quadricep, my thigh and kind of into my knee and I was able to do all of the workout fine, but that night I had some extra inflammation in my thigh that ended up making my knee feel really, really tight that night and the next day. So don't do that's not smart. Don't do that. You should always be listening to your body and always do your dynamic stretches, especially like leg swings.
(22:09)
That's the one that always helps me to loosen up my hips. Because I sit the way that I sit while I'm working, I almost always end up with tightness in my hip and I have to spend time on it at the beginning of my workouts, especially my squat days to make sure that I can perform these exercises without really straining a muscle or straining the ligaments. Overall, despite that, the workout felt really good. It was very challenging. I did my heel elevated Smith machine squats. I love doing these because they allow me to get a really deep knee bend to stretch out my quadriceps so they get a lot of activation. This exercise is, I think, one of the main reasons why my muscles have grown so much in the last year because being able to do these deep knee bends like this has really been so good for my quadriceps.
(22:59)
I followed these up with some bulgarian split squats, which is another really good exercise for developing overall strength and building muscle throughout your legs. I'm in a stability endurance block right now, so doing some balance training is a good idea. It's always going to be part of my workouts and I just use the Smith machine to elevate my back leg on these. I was feeling pretty tired after this because I was lifting kind of heavy and doing some high volume. So for accessories, I just did hip abduction on the abduction abduction machine for my hip abductors or my gluteus medius and my gluteus minimus. And then I also did the abduction for my inner thighs. We sometimes call this the good girl, bad girl machine because you are practicing opening up your legs and closing your legs against resistance. Like I said, I walked out of the gym feeling really good, although I did feel like, "Ooh, my knee is kind of tight." It didn't feel hurting, like I didn't feel like pain, but it was tight.
(24:00)
So that's how I know I kind of pushed it a little bit too hard and I really should have warmed up and made sure that my muscles were properly able to elongate fully before doing all of those heavier heel elevated squats and the Bulgarian split squats. So I will be careful of that next time. My third workout day is a back focused day. It's a pulling day. I do rows and I do pull ups. I also added in some Romanian deadlifts and deficit deadlifts here because I really wanted to challenge the posterior chain since it is a back day and I also wasn't really sure if I was going to be able to do another leg day this week because my knee was still feeling kind of tight a couple of days after my previous leg day. And it's also like not a bad thing to practice Romanian deadlifts on a back day because it's really great for training your core stability and your spinal erectors as well as your lats in addition to your glutes and hamstrings.
(24:57)
So I started with some pendly rows, which are barbell rows where you start each rep from the platform. This is really great for helping you to train your spinal erectors and your core stability and your grip strength. After I finished with the penly rows, I did some Romanian deadlifts and these felt really strong. I added some weight after doing a warmup set and I just felt really good about these and I noticed in the mirror that my arm definition was looking really solid and it's getting me kind of excited because I can't wait to burn some more fat so I can see those muscles a little bit more. I did end up actually adding some elevation to my legs because I didn't feel like I was getting enough of a deep stretch in my glutes and hamstrings at the bottom of the movement. So I did my last set from an elevated position and I'll be doing them with deficits moving forward for the rest of this program.
(25:51)
After I finished up those movements, I went over to the assisted pull-up machine. I love this machine so much because it's so great at helping you to train the movement of pull-ups if you're not quite ready yet to do full body weight pull-ups. I'm doing narrow grip or neutral grip pull-ups here because it just allows you to get a deeper stretch in your lats at the bottom of the movement. I did notice with this machine though, I think I need to add like a little pad or something to the knee pad because I wasn't able to get my elbows as far down as I would like when I'm at the top of the movement. So I'm going to have to track down a booster seat or I don't know, maybe like fold up a towel or something to give myself a little bit more of a boost here.
(26:36)
Most gym machines are designed for men who are at average height. So being a 5'3" woman, it's not uncommon to find that the machines don't quite get the range of motion that you need. So feel free to like use booster seats if you need to, which I will next time. By booster seat, I just mean like a thick pad. I could have taken like a thick exercise mat and folded it up and used that to give me just a little bit more of a lift so that at the top of the movement I could get my elbows down a little bit more. The dumbbell rack room was really crowded. I was a little bit surprised at this because it was a Friday and it was like late morning, but I guess because it's summertime and kids are out of school and the college kids are all back, they're all working out at this time and I didn't want to take my camera and set up in that crowded area because I really do try to not have anybody else in the view of the camera when I'm working out in my public gym.
(27:35)
So decided to do my last accessories in this little cable machine area because it was a little bit more private and to be honest for the exercises that I'm doing, it's probably better for me to use a cable machine anyway because you get a constant stimulus to the muscles. Yo get constant resistance through the entire range of motion, which is a little bit different from when you're using dumbbells. Dumbbells have kind of a different amount of tension that your muscles get depending on where you are in the movement and how long of a lever your arm creates. So all in all, it ended up being for the best. So again, I did some reverse flies focusing on my external shoulder rotating muscles because I really want to make sure that I'm developing those and keeping them strong. But I used the machine for that today.
(28:23)
So it was slightly different stimulus from what I did on my push day. And I also did it from a standing position so that I could really focus on challenging my core and my legs to stay stable in that hip hing position. And then I did some bicep curls with the cable machine, which really gave me a good stimulus to my biceps. And then after that, because I had such a great pump in my arms, I decided to practice some of my bodybuilding posing. So I did a little bit of front relaxed pose, some double front biceps and I felt like my muscles were looking really good. I can't wait to see what they look like once we burn some fat and shrink wrap those guys. Overall, I'm really excited. So today is like day seven of my first week so I haven't actually gone through my full resistance routine and I've put it off a little bit because I want to just be very careful with my legs since I did kind of strain it in my last leg day.
(29:20)
I'm going to go to the gym today later on and see about doing some leg exercises. I may deload just to be careful so we'll see. I'll include some footage for that in next week's check-in. Overall, I'm feeling really excited and I'm feeling really happy about my progress so far. It's really cool to have already lost a half a pound while eating more than when I was eating before. As I said in the last episode, I kind of suspected that that would be the case and that's often the case for a lot of the people who come to work with me because if you're under eating, it tends to make your body hold onto fat. So it's really cool To be able to eat more while losing weight. I feel really good during my workouts as well, but I definitely learned my lesson about skipping dynamic stretches.
(30:10)
I will not be doing that again. So yeah, that is my week two check-in. So this coming week my goal is to keep tracking. I'm going to continue to eat 1,800 calories on average. I'm going to keep tracking it, keep measuring what I'm eating. I'm going to keep stepping on the scale every day. And this week in the resistance training, I'm going to try to match what I did this past week and see if maybe I can push a few more reps on each exercise or at least on one or two exercises for each set.
(30:45)
Thank you so much for going with me on this journey. I'm really excited to be sharing it with you. If you enjoyed this video, if you're watching on YouTube, make sure that you like it and that you subscribe to my channels. You always get the latest episodes as soon as they drop. If you're listening to the podcast, thank you so much. Make sure that you follow the show so you always get the latest episodes delivered right to your device. If you have any questions about your own fitness journey or things that you want to share, please feel free to leave them in the comments below the YouTube video. If you're listening to the podcast, the link for the YouTube video will be in the show notes. And once again, if you are looking for a coach who can help you in your fat loss journey, I would love to have you join me on my fat loss transformation.
(31:28)
You can apply to work with me in the link that is below this video on YouTube or in the show notes. And that's it for today's episode. I hope that you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one. In the meantime, I hope that you're taking good care of yourself. Make sure that you are drinking plenty of water and that you're eating your protein and your vegetables and being nice to yourself and I will see you soon.
What Week 1 Was Actually About
The first week of my Fat Loss Transformation Program isn't about restriction or dramatic changes. It's about gathering data. The two main tasks: track everything you eat and drink, and do daily weigh-ins. Together, these give you a real picture of what your body is used to getting — and how it's responding.
I use the ABC Trainerize app for tracking, and I step on the scale at the same time every day, wearing roughly the same thing. Here's why that matters: body weight can fluctuate 3–5 pounds in a single day based on water retention, sodium, carb intake, and more. Weighing in once a week gives you a snapshot that might not reflect reality. Daily weigh-ins give you a trend — and that's what actually tells the story.
The goal of this first week was to find my maintenance calories — the amount I need to eat for my weight to hold steady. From there, I can calculate what a sustainable deficit looks like.
The Surprising Thing I Discovered
I suspected I was undereating before I started tracking. One look at the data confirmed it.
Day two was the clearest example: I got distracted by work, didn't plan my meals, and ended up going to bed without eating dinner. I woke up in the middle of the night hungry, overheated, and wide awake — a really familiar pattern for a lot of people.
Here's what I want you to understand about chronic undereating: it doesn't automatically mean fat loss. When your body doesn't know when its next meal is coming, it adapts by slowing your metabolism down. It holds onto fat as a protective measure. So irregular eating or massively undershooting your calories over time can actually work against fat loss goals — not for them.
By day two or three, I decided to get intentional. Even though the goal of week one is just to observe, I started planning three to four meals a day and making sure I actually ate them — especially since I was adding more exercise to my routine. Training on an empty tank feels awful, and recovery suffers too.
What the Numbers Showed
After a week of daily weigh-ins alongside tracking, my average weight moved from 141 lbs down to about 140.5 lbs. Slow, steady, exactly what I'm aiming for — about a half pound per week.
And here's the thing: I was eating more than I was before I started tracking.
This is something I see with clients constantly. When you're undereating irregularly, your body holds. When you start fueling consistently, your metabolism wakes back up — and fat loss follows. Cool to experience it firsthand again.
My meals were already pretty solid: each one hitting around 25g of protein, plenty of vegetables (lots of beans, lentils, chickpeas), and 500–700 calories per meal. I added an egg or two here and there to bump protein, but nothing dramatic.
At this point, I don't think I need to change much. I'm going to stay at ~1,800 calories/day and keep the same structure.
The one lever I'm keeping in my back pocket: I drink three to four coffees a day, each with a tablespoon of hot chocolate mix. That's about 260 extra calories per day. If I want to accelerate from half a pound to a pound per week, swapping that for cocoa powder and a zero-calorie sweetener like monk fruit would get me there. I'm not making that change yet — that coffee ritual is genuinely important to me — but it's there if I need it.
How Training Went
My exercise routine as an advanced lifter looks a little different from where I'd start a beginner. I'm doing a 4-day upper/lower split rather than full-body days, which gives my muscles the stimulus they need to stay strong during a deficit.
Upper Body Day 1 (Push/Press): Started with Arnold presses to open up my shoulders — essential for me since sitting at a desk rounds my shoulders forward. Moved into a 5x5 bench press at 95 lbs, then reverse flies (for external shoulder rotation), and tricep dips. I underestimated how much I'd regressed on dips — had to extend my legs mid-set to add enough resistance to actually feel the burn.
Leg Day: I made a classic mistake: skipped my dynamic warm-up. I knew my hip was tight, thought it would loosen up, kept going anyway. It didn't loosen up. By that night, the inflammation had worked its way from my hip down through my quad and into my knee. Nothing serious, but it was tight for a couple of days.
Lesson relearned: always do your dynamic stretches. Especially hip swings on squat days. This is non-negotiable for me because of how I sit while working. I tell my clients this. I should have listened to myself.
The workout itself was solid — heel-elevated Smith machine squats for deep quad activation, Bulgarian split squats for overall leg development, and hip abduction work. But I paid for skipping the warm-up.
Back Day (Pull): Pendlay rows, Romanian deadlifts (added a deficit on my last set and loved it — I'll be doing all of them from a deficit going forward), and assisted pull-ups on the machine. One note for my fellow shorter women: I'm 5'3" and most gym machines are built for average-height men. I need to add a thick folded mat to the knee pad on the pull-up machine to get my elbows fully down at the top. Don't be afraid to modify the equipment to fit your body.
Finished with cable reverse flies and bicep curls — and okay, I also practiced some bodybuilding posing because I had a great pump and I was feeling myself. No regrets.
What's Next for Week 2
Continue tracking at ~1,800 calories/day
Keep daily weigh-ins
Match last week's training, aiming to push one or two more reps per set
Do my dynamic warm-up every single time
That's it for Week 2. The big takeaway so far: eating more consistently is what's moving the needle, not eating less. Data over assumptions, always.
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