So I already asked a few questions to Jordan but now I’m looking more for other people’s experiences and maybe some emotional support.
I’m currently trying to add weight in a slow controlled fashion that keeps to the .5lbs (.227kgs) a week while doing the hyper trophy program and I’m running into some frustration. First, it was because my weight was jumping all over the place but now it’s because it hasn’t gone up in almost a week and actually has regressed from being 171.7 for 3 straight days to 171.0 for the last two days. I really don’t want to over bulk and have to go through another 6 month cut again to trim off the fat but this has been a kind of frustrating process. I keep adding a little bit more calorie but seeming go in the wrong direction. Jordan did somewhat suggest weighing and measuring everything but I don’t have particularly high cooking skills right now so I feel limited in doing that.
Has anyone had similar frustrations or has anyone had a great experience with a controlled bulk that can offer suggestions that helped make it easier for them?
Day to day weight fluctuations do not matter much. I don’t know what Jordan has said so far, but my first suggestion is to record your weight at the same consistent point in your day. The best time I’m aware of is immediately after your wake up morning piss.
It is very common for a salty dinner to result in a 3# increase on the scale for me the next morning, and I don’t let that bother me. Below is my strategy for taking daily fluctuations into account.
Do you use spreadsheets much?
One of the things I use for tracking my weight is an excel line graph with my weight progression. Each period with particular goals, say 0.5lbs/week gain or loss will have its own discrete graph on the chart, and I will “add a trend line” that is linear and display the associated equation. Next I will have a separate graph on top of that that will be just the last 10 days/data points, with it’s own trend line, with equation displayed.
The equation usually looks something like: y = -0.1842x + 8213.1
The only thing that matters is the value in front of “x” in this example -0.1842. This is the average weight lost per day over the period graphed/trended, and with the two separate trend lines, I know what my trend is for the entire period I’ve had this goal, and how I’ve been doing over the past 10 days. I usually keep a note on the side of what rates per day equate to what target rates per week. If the 10 day starts falling outside my desired rate of change by a certain window, and I know it’s not because of odd data points like a couple really salty meals, I’ll try to make corrections to my diet.
I’m also doing a slow bulk right now, and it can be a bit frustrating. I was gaining weight too fast (.75lb/week), so I have had to dial back a little bit. Which sucks because I am hungry ALL THE TIME.
(not what the doctors here recommend) I have gone back to my intermittent fasting schedule (basically just eating 8 hours of the day: 11am, 3pm, 7pm). 11am is the biggest meal, 3pm is the smallest. I just make sure that I get at least 25g of protein at the 3pm meal, and the other meals I don’t really worry about because I eat a substantial amount of meat/eggs/dairy. Also, for medical reasons I follow a higher protein version of keto (carbs affect my condition but higher protein does not), so the specifics of my diet are not something that I think any other person should necessarily follow.
I religiously weigh/track everything and enter it into cronometer.com (they have a mobile app too). I am not making fancy things. My spaghetti sauce is just ground beef + a no-sugar-added sauce that I get from Costco. I eat hamburgers. I make tuna salad which really is just tuna/mayo/mustard/chopped pickles. Scrambled eggs are a good go to for my 3pm mini-meal. Simple stuff. This doesn’t have to be complicated.
If you have a grill, switch up how you cook your meat (grill, stovetop, oven). Condiments can be your friend as long as you are keeping track of how much you use.
Do what Serack advises, because when making subtle changes you are looking for trends within a dataset. This meta data isn’t easily perceptible just looking at the data, and it is certainly impossible without consistent recording of data.
Also it takes 2 weeks to see the effect of any dietary change I make, so also patience is key.
I track my weight every day from my morning weigh in after I use the bathroom when I wake up. I put it in my BBM spreadsheet in the Nutrition Log section so I do also have averages but I don’t think it shows trend lines or will give me the slope of the trend. Possibly something useful for Jordan and the team to add in to a future revision in the Analysis section?
For reference my average from two weeks ago was 170.75 and as of today it is 171.157. That’s only a change of .407 lbs over a two week period so using averaged data to mitigate variability I am still behind the pace I want to hit by about .6 lbs. So if I average that difference over 14 days it seems like I need to up my calorie intake by around 130kcals per day. So I just need to tweak my calories up a little bit and keep patient with the averages?
The patience is definitely difficult especially because in previous bulks when I was (in retrospect) overdoing it a little bit, I could easily see my weight going up on a consistent basis. I just have to come to terms with the process and remember that it may seem slower now but it will save me a lot of time on the other end by making it so I don’t have to do a long cut on the back end again.
if your lifts are still progressing, I wouldn’t get overly stressed about a week of flat weight, just eat slightly more.
Austin isn’t as regimented in his nutrition planning as Jordan. He eats appropriately through the day without tracking, but at the end of the day he may eat a bit extra if he doesn’t weigh 3# more than he intends to in the morning, because he loses that over night pretty consistently.