Why I'm not Bigger and Stronger
A tough pill to swallow
Last week I went into the challenging nature of my fitness journey.
But it ended on a positive note — I’m feeling more positive, motivated, and inspired than ever to train and make progress.
I’m focused on building. And it’s about damn time.
An unfortunate side effect of the issues I’ve faced with my fitness journey is that it has negatively impacted my training.
The cold, honest truth is that with my amount of experience in the gym, I should be both bigger and stronger than I am.
In this edition, I’ll highlight where I went wrong, the common mistakes that are easy to make, and the best things to focus on for progress in the gym.
The Perma Diet
Perma dieting is the term I came up with to describe the main issue that has held me back.
A permadiet is when a diet phase gets constantly extended through cheat days, vacations, and falling off on weekends.
These moments of excess calories aren’t consistent enough to result in added muscle or increased performance but are sufficient to block fat loss.
The result of a permadiet is that you spend too much time training in a calorie deficit but don’t even reap the results of it.
It’s brutal.
There are two main bad habits that create a “perma diet” environment.
#1. Unrealistic/Unsustainable expectations
I’ve become convinced that one of the best things someone can do for their fitness is come to a realistic acceptance of how lean they can happily be.
In hindsight, the first few years of my training were spent trying to reach a level of leanness that made me miserable.
Sure, there is a time and place to push to the edge and see what you’re capable of — during a physique show, for instance.
But if you’re not specifically training for an event, it serves to be aware of where your happy place is in terms of body composition.
The common mistake here is to base your dream body on somebody else. This is a recipe for disaster.
You’re working with your body, and that’s the only body you should be focused on.
It’s taken me years to come to terms with the fact that 12-13% body fat is the magic spot for me, not 10.
If I could have accepted that sooner and better managed my expectations, I could have committed to a well-executed gaining phase earlier.
But I spent too much time in denial, trying to push myself into a territory that ultimately wasn’t realistic or sustainable for me.
And I’ve paid for this with missed gains.
#2. No Commitment to a time frame
My new motto is that “Life is too short to live on a diet.”
This is a hill I will die on.
Dieting sucks.
But it has to happen sometimes.
If you’re 50 pounds overweight, you will feel like a different person if you can drop that 50-pound tissue-ruck sack you’ve been carrying with you 24/7.
Whether it’s 10 pounds or 100 pounds, shedding that extra bit of weight will drastically improve your life.
And dieting — whatever specific approach you use — is how you’ll get there.
The issue we’re trying to prevent is that the diet phase extends to subsume your life.
You need to enforce the fact that dieting is a temporary tool — not a way of life.
And the best way to do this is always to approach dieting within a time frame.
This time frame will look different depending on how much weight you want to lose.
If you have over 100 pounds to shed, the reality is that you’re probably in for an 18-month ride. But regardless of whether it’s 6 weeks or 2 years, understand that it will be a phase and not something that consumes your life.
Make a realistic plan for your diet phase that considers how much weight you have to lose.
And if you “fail” your diet, make sure you take a break after.
The permadiet lifestyle comes in when diet timeframes get constantly extended.
Don’t let yourself fall for that.
If you didn’t get the result you wanted with a diet approach, take a break from the diet plan you were following and figure out what went wrong.
Unrealistic expectations and a flexible diet timeline are a recipe for a permadiet. Don’t base your ideal body composition on others, and don’t allow life events to constantly push back the end of your diet phase.
Stupid Bulking
Another one of my key mistakes was doing stupid bulking.
Stupid bulking ties right into perma dieting:
If you spend too long in a calorie deficit, you end up exhausted, fatigued, and frustrated.
It’s inevitable that you’ll say “screw it, I’m bulking,” and go off the deep end.
But if you increase calories too fast, you’ll store much more fat than you’d like, and then that little voice starts to creep back and say: “you need to diet again.”
This vicious cycle of restrictive dieting → uncontrolled bulking means that you probably won’t spend long enough in a gaining phase to make quality gains.
It’s ideal to spend months training in a moderate energy surplus.
But with the vicious dieting/bulking cycle, it can only take you a few weeks to feel fat again after a dirty bulk.
A key part of a sustainable solution is not seeing bulking as significantly different.
Problems occur when you bulk and see it is a green light to go on the see food - eat food diet with a no-holds-bar approach to food.
In reality, your gaining phase should look nearly identical to your maintenance phase or dieting phase, the only difference being that portions are slightly bigger and you have a bit more leeway with high-calorie foods.
Getting obsessed with matching people who were in photoshoots, constantly pushing back my diet time frames, and losing control of my bulking periods (when I did allow them) have seriously impacted my gains.
But I’ve learned my lesson.
Key takeaways:
Don’t train for fat loss - it’s not a fitness adaptation and it will ruin your relationship with training.
If you decide you want to diet, set a reasonable goal and a time frame
If you miss the goal in the time frame, at least take a diet break — don’t let the time frame keep extending
When you transition into either maintenance or building phase, don’t be stupid.
I hope somebody finds this useful. What are you currently struggling with in your training? Reply to this email and I’ll give you some tips to help out.
Have an awesome week -
Colin “don’t let dieting take over your life” Matson