Accidental recomposition

I tweaked my back deadlifting about 9 months ago and had to stop training like I normally do. Then I got busy with work and really cut down on working out, and I gained a weight. I am 6’1" and went from 36" waist and 204 to 215 and 40" waist.

For whatever reason I have a really hard time sticking to a diet when not training seriously. When I train seriously the diet is easy.

Anyways, about six weeks ago I got back into lifting again, my back feels great and I am sticking to a diet again.

One of the issues with my diet is my wife does all the cooking five nights a week and I am really at the mercy of what she is making for the family. And I am not complaining, everything is made from scratch (besides pasta), and I rarely eat out or eat processed foods. Lots of vegetables and legumes. However when it comes to portion control I use a nutrition app to kind of guess portion size in order to stay under my total calorie goal, and supplement protein with a shake if needed to hit my protein goal. I’m shooting for around 2500 calories and 150 g of protein each day. But I think my calorie estimates are probably off by quite a bit as I’m just guessing for most meals how much I am actually taking in.

I’m hungry most of the time, and the weight loss has been kind of unremarkable. In six weeks I have lost four pounds, and I was hoping for between 1-1.5 pounds a week.

However, I have lost 2" off my waist and that’s a higher rate then I was expecting. I am under the impression that I’m doing a bad job at weight loss and a pretty good job at recomposition, which was not the initial goal. I don’t really care about a final weight number, but getting my waist to 35" would be phenomenal.

I’m getting 150-165 METs in a week, 10,000 - 15,000 steps a day, and I am lifting 3 days a week.

Should I just keep at this as long as keeps working? I feel like I accidentally hit a pretty good strategy for me

Sounds like you’re slowly losing weight, enjoying your workouts, and being consistent with your food. It’s hard to be upset with that…

I do have some concerns about being hungry most of the time and a report of 150-165 MET-minutes/wk. It’s difficult to adhere to a diet when hungry and we should be targeting at least 500 MET-min/wk…though there may be a calculation issue there. Save for these concerns, I think what you’re doing is fine.

Just my 0.02

My mistake. Not 150 mets. 150 minutes of conditioning.

My METs are about 750-1000 depending on the week.

Copy that. Carry on!