TLDR: Dadathon and Diet Breaks

Too Long Dad Recap

8/1/81 is a pretty cool date, and not just because the numbers repeat and sound cool. Two incredibly cool things happened on that day:

The cable television channel MTV launched
I was born

Today, on my 39th birthday, I deadlifted 390lbs in an MTV shirt to celebrate. I also did a bunch of other fitness things related to the number 39, which I’ll detail later.

Birthday deadlifts! — 390lbs on my 39th birthday!

Things I Read This Week

Honestly, nothing about fitness, I was too busy doing things
Also, it was a busy week of earnings releases related to my day job

Things I Ate This Week: Time for a Diet Break?

So this week, I was really good with calorie adherence, and my weight dropped again. My trailing 7-day average weight is 171.6 pounds, which is down 15.2 pounds in 15 weeks.

I am considering a “diet break”, which is when you eat at maintenance calories for a week or two before resuming a calorie deficit. Really famous fitness influencers like Jordan Syatt and Layne Norton are big fans of the concept. The idea is that you are likely to be able to adhere to a diet that includes periodic diet breaks rather than try to be perfect for long time, because that tends to lead to a big binge and a diet fail.

I googled and found this article at rippedbody.com on the concept that includes some great illustrations of the concepts, like the one below.

Weight changes during a fat loss phase with two diet breaks — Great illustration of how using diet breaks is supposed to work over time…

I have also read that the lower your body fat level is, the more frequently you should take diet breaks to see progress. I think this has to do with the challenge of continuing to drop your calories over a long fat loss phase. Eventually, you just can’t cut calories anymore, and you hit a wall.

The issue with a diet break is at this point (15 weeks into a cut and 15 pounds down from when I started), I have no idea what my maintenance calories are anymore. I can make an assumption, but it could take me a couple of weeks to re-establish what level of calories keeps my weight constant.

By then how much of my progress over the 15 weeks will be lost?

Things I Lifted This Week

This week, I completed the first week of what I’ll be doing for the next 12 weeks. Here are some basics of the program and its structure:

Goal: Focused on building strength (vs. size or work capacity)
Frequency: 4 days a week
On off-days: GPP (general physical preparedness) stuff, including: cardio, arms, abs and extra upper back volume

The base of the program is the Barbell Medicine 12-week Strength Program. I have run that program a few times in recent years with some good results, although I may take some liberties with how the blocks progress as the program goes along.

What’s different this time around will be deadlifts. I replaced all the deadlift slots in that program with the prescribed deadlifts from Jonnie Candito’s free deadlift program, which you can find here. It matches up perfectly, given that Barbell Medicine has the deadlift and deadlift accessories as the focus of 2 of the 4 days.

The goal of the next 12 weeks is to build my strength back up after losing nearly 20 pounds from my peak. Early returns show that I have a long way to go. My estimated 1-rep bench press max is down to like 235 based on my single at RPE 8 for week 2 of the program. I maxed out at 275 just a few months ago! It’s still very early, and I am making a concerted effort not to overshoot on the prescribed RPE, but clearly I have some room for improvement.

I’ll keep you posted, but these are the trade-offs in fitness. If you want to be as strong as possible, it is hard to be as lean as possible. I look forward to being strong, jacked and lean when I grow up some day…

Dad Report: Dadathon

I had the random idea a few days before my birthday to do another fitness challenge, this one to celebrate my birthday. I settled on 8 events, including:

390 lbs deadlift
390 lunges
390 push-ups
390 sit-ups
3.9 mile run
3,900 meters row
390 seconds of jumping rope
39 pull-ups

Final event, onlookers couldn’t be bothered

We dubbed it the Dadathon, and it was a ton of fun. As usual, it motivated the kids to participate in their own age-related events (11 deadlifts at 110lbs for the 11-year old, 0.9 miles for 9 year old, 130 seconds of jump rope for the 13-year old).

I highly recommend these types of challenges to keep the fitness fun and get everyone involved.

Calorie Challenge Fail

I had grand designs of trying to consume 3,900 calories, too. That was one part of the challenge I did not achieve. The issue with completing that part of the challenge was the anabolic recipes I’ve been using. The calorie density of the things I was eating were just so low that I was too full after eating 2,700 calories to continue.

My big present this year was a Ninja blender, which is critical to making protein ice cream recipes, like the Oreo McFlurry I made yesterday with just 450 calories. Also, I made and ate 75% of the giant Pizookie pictured below. All-in the Pizookie had around 900 calories, because it was mostly egg whites, pumpkin and protein powder.