Finally, 200lbs. Now What?

Well, after many months of hard work and big eating, I have made it to 200lbs. Some of this is clearly fat as Erika has pointed out the return of my double chin (an unfortunate artifact from my mother's side of the family). Here is a quick rundown of how this progressed.

Last summer I was quite lean, tipping the scales at about 183. I found I was not only hitting walls on my strength stuff, I was gassing during metcons as well. I had been doing some intermittent fasting, eating pretty clean, and probably drinking a little too much. Since part of my goal for being lean was to improve on those metcons, I decided I needed to do something about it. The video below is of me a little leaner and lighter. One would have though I would be moving a little faster given my size. Notice that I am NOT, in fact moving faster. The 1:30 to 2:30 mark is a good example.

I still have trouble embedding video, so here is the link:

http://vimeo.com/1286882

Oddly, people said I LOOKED bigger at this time which I assume is the result of my muscles being more prominent, though less useful. My solution to this was to increase the amount of food I was eating, paying little attention to blocks and just trying to eat as much meat, veggies, fats, and fruit as a could. I IMMEDIATELY gained about 7lbs and stabilized at 190lbs. It was a decent place to be. This also coincided with PCF feats of strength month. I improved on my big lifts increasing from something like 870 to 915 on my CF total, and set Fran PRs as well. My Cindy did not improve as much. People may have mentioned I looked a little bigger, but not that often. i didn't feel much bigger.

This is more representative of how I looked at this point.



Because of the trouble I was having with overhead lifts, I decided to take it to an extreme. I tried to eat 5x fat (nearly 300g of fat a day) and up my total calories to as close to 5000 as I could. I usually topped out at 4300. I drank milk, though no where near a gallon. I did not resort to eating bad foods, so still little sugar/bread/starch, though I may have cheated a bit more often. At this point people said I LOOKED bigger. My BF% went up and I made a bit of progress on my lifts. Not a ton of progress. I tried to lift heavy a little more often. Where it really helped was in being able to maintain at a higher pace when I was dealing with heavy weights, so high rep squat cleans improved as did moderate rep 155lb overhead stuff. I don't feel like there are great pictures to demo this stage other than a few in which I just look like I have a fat face. I guess you can tell I'm not as lean in this one.





So now what? Hopefully I put on about 4-8lbs of good muscle over this experiment and can keep it as I shed some fat in prep for competition.

I will do a lot of updates on this though they may be short. I'll let everyone know how it goes. Hopefully I stabilize at a LEAN 193-195lbs. We shall see. maybe next summer it is time to try a gallon of milk a day!