Done With "Steak" and Eggs, Next Adventure Is Eighteen Hour Daily Fast, All Day Body-Weight Calisthenics

I've concluded that the Steak and Eggs diet is a great way to shed water and to learn to hate steak and eggs.  It's fine, and I have no doubt that it works and worked for bodybuilders.  But it's not suitable for a 51 year old who likes variety and food adventure and has no interest in competing in a contest.  I lost 9 pounds in the 1.5 weeks that I endured this diet.  I also never ate steak, so maybe my mileage varied because I did not follow it to the tee.  But man, what a miserable way to torture yourself for dubious gain.  I would guess that the water weight loss would eventually morph into fat loss, but I have neither the gumption nor the drive to find out.  I do really want to make myself understand and remember that the ultra low carb approach just really isn't the best one for me.  I think it's best for those with a lot of body fat, particularly sub-cutaneous as opposed to visceral, and with blood sugar / insulin issues.  Certainly for people with a lot more at stake (so to speak) than I have.

But my mission has not been dropped, dammit.  I'm more fired up than ever to lose weight and width and the gut and the bloat.  And I think I may be settling on a two-week cycle approach.  Try it for two weeks (if you can) and see how you feel.

I'm going back to familiar territory, but I'm going to hit it harder.  This feels right.

The one "radical" dietary move that I've made over the last few years of looking into this, and stuck with, is fasting.  But, although I can count on one hand the number of times I've had a meal before noon in this time period, I have never really pushed it.  But it feels great and I love it and it feels positive and natural (unlike "steak" and eggs every day).  So in terms of diet I am going with a longer fasting window - 18 hours.  Generally that will mean for me no calories before 3:00 PM and often more like 4:00 or 5:00 depending on what happened the night before.  The rest of my diet I will not really worry about.  And on the weekend I will certainly not eat before noon, but won't worry about the window size.  This will be a great experiment because it's not foreign to me, I know I will feel great, and I will have an opportunity to see what fasting alone does for my body composition.

I also seem to have merged into a two week cycle on exercise.  I used to torture myself because I thought I was supposed to find the final answer in all this experimentation and stick with that until the sun sets.  Body-weight training or weights?  Body part splits or whole-body?  Days off or not?  To failure or not?  It's hard to avoid this kind of questioning, but if you have an active mind and like variety, then you are playing a losing game sure to heighten your confusion and misery if you try to find the one final answer and then stick with it and only it without wandering.  Maybe the answer is "yes" to all these questions. Maybe the answer is never say never.  Don't sell your weight bench.  (I do the same thing with musical equipment and guitar playing, but that's another story.)

So for these two or so weeks I have a renewed interest in fasting and in body-weight training, whole body all day every day, and progression to more advanced movements.  The advanced movements are the muscle-up, the one-arm push-up, the one-arm pull-up, the front lever, the L-sit, the pistol squat, and maybe some day some hand-stand and back-bridge stuff (although I've never tried any portion of either of these and they intimidate me.)

9:00 AM - A Grand Century

• Body-weight squats x 40
• Russian push-ups x 30
• Knee raises x 20 (hanging from a bar is preferable but I have nothing to hang from so I did them while sitting on a bench and doing a modified crunch at the same time)
• Pull-ups x 10 (VERY challenging)

11:30 AM - A Big Fifty

• Dips x 20
• One-arm rows (Australian pull-ups) x 10 each arm
• Relaxed non-working leg split squat x 6 each leg (similar to a Bulgarian split squat or shrimp squat except that the non-working leg is relaxed and bent at the knee rather than being pulled back by the hand as in a shrimp squat or top of foot resting on a bench like Bulgarian split squat; both of these tend to aggravate my foot)
• Knee raises on dip bar x 14 (could have done more here but wanted everything to add up to 50)

I didn't bring any food to work today and I'll be here until at least 4:30 PM.  I have some sunflower seeds in the car so I'll likely break my fast with them around 4:30 but won't have any kind of "meal" until well after that.

1:15 PM - The Big Ten

• One-Arm "Incline" Push-Up (on weight bench) x 3 (VERY difficult)
• One-Arm Pull-Up x 3
• Assisted (Minimally) Pistol Squat x 3
• Parallel Bar L-Sit and Hold (5 seconds) x 1

3:00 PM - The Miscellaneous 44

• Diamond push-ups (strict form) x 20
• Bicep curl/row x 12
• One leg dead lift x 10
• L-sit hold on bench (10 seconds) x 3