Back to gym after a month away – and the damage is….

-1.4 kg of muscle and +0.4 kg of fat.

Actually, not bad! I thought it would be worse! Phew!

My weight is maintained, still hovering around 66-67 kg, or about 68 at the gym.

I only exercised infrequently while my trainer was away, definitely not enough to match gym sessions. I ate – there were birthdays and there was Chinese New Year. I failed in my half-hearted mission not to eat a single pineapple tart during the festivities. I ate five.

But at least, the damage seemed minimal. My fat % was 19.7% at the gym on Thursday. It was 19.1% at the end of 2011.

I felt my muscles – especially around the arms, “flatten” out through January, and am eager to have them rebuilt. Hard work lies ahead.

Salt

Trainer and I were a little mystified when my weight went up by 400 grams today, since Wednesday. Diet was fine… Sleep was ok…. and most important, I sensed no weight increase. (I can sense it when my weight goes up – a topic for a future post)

After a bit of thought my trainer decided it might be water retention. The weather’s been cold all day, by Singapore standards. I’d been drinking my usual amount of water despite that and didn’t pee much throughout the day. Finally there is that two sausages for dinner on Wednesday night and smoked salmon salad last night.

Well by the end of the gym session I’d lost 200 grams of what should be water.

Lesson learnt: water weighs a lot. Keep your sodium down!

5 Gym Sessions Later

It’s been 5 sessions at the gym, over the course of 12 days. My weight actually went up a bit from 81.6kg to 82.1kg (possibly to its normal weight?), then came down to 81.6kg again during this period. It did go a little further down to 81.5kg on Sunday, but as far as i’m concerned, I’m “back where I started” when I began on 15 July.

The problem I often face these days is trying to reorder and balance out my eating habits. I used to eat a heavy breakfast, then have fruits for lunch, and then dinner as normal. But dinner was often very late, and inconsistent. According to my trainer, eating carbo at the beginning of the day is fine, but towards night time this must be reduced drastically. The day my weight went back up did in fat, I mean fact, coincide with a regrettable late night carb-laden snack. I try very hard not to eat much for dinner (“More veges, less carbo”, says trainer), but then I have to survive the late night (say from 9pm until I go to sleep) as the light dinner usually means I get hungry before I sleep. I tried an apple once, I think that was a good idea. The buns are generally mistakes. So recently I’ve started to buy more fruits to keep in the fridge to fight night-time hunger. Otherwise all the carbo monsters will be smiling at me when I open the door.