Annoyance Update

I'm really starting to get tired of all this. The last two months, fitness wise, having done nothing but make me angry.

On Jan. 11 I got my body fat tested and was all the way back up to 15.05%, presumably thanks to the holiday eating. So I absolved to be extremely good for the next month while continuing with my running and lifting and see where that left me.

I was pretty confident going into my body fat test today as I had lost 5 pounds this previous month.

Then I got my results....

Turns out I only lost 2 pounds of fat and burned 3 pounds of muscle. So after all that I'm now at 14.25% body fat and 3 of my hard earned pounds of muscle are gone. Needless to say I was not very pleased with that result. According to the trainer, the running is going to cause me to burn some muscle and there isn't much I can do about that. I want to complete my goal and run the half marathon but I feel like my idea of setting an athletic goal has taken me farther from my fitness goals instead of closer.

I'm really frustrated right now and I'm not sure where to go from here. Have you ever heard someone say "I tried tons of different things for years before I found something that worked"? Well I think that's where I'm at.

So far my lowest body fat percentage came after a month of really heavy low rep lifting, in which I was not really trying to create a calorie deficit. Obviously I can't go back to that right now because I have a half marathon to train for. I'm still going to finish that goal but my eating is going to have to change. If eating less is going to cause me to burn muscle then the best I can hope for is to eat more so that the food gets burned instead and I hang onto the muscle. It probably won't work, like everything else I've tried, but I have to try to keep from losing as much muscle as I can until this half marathon is over and then I can go back to heavy lifting.

This is all very frustrating. No wonder people just give up and quit. Being fat and lazy is a lot easier.

I'm not going to quit, but I'm definitely frustrated. If I hadn't paid for this half marathon I would probably just quit and go back to lifting but I hate to say I'm going to do something and then not do it. At this point though, it's looking very unlikely that I will get to my body fat percentage goal for a very long time.