Quote (bitg_pj @ Feb 18 2011 09:48pm)
So by november I was 200+ pounds, 5'11...quite fat....pic for reference if required..
I was tired of being the overweight loser... and Started running twice a week, situps 50-100 per day, and pushups...started with 10 girl pushups...up to 3 sets of 20 a day now proper
Restrcited my diet to water and 1200 cals a day, weight came flying off...im now down to 157...and i can feel muscle everywhere...but especially in my midsection its covered by excess skin..or flab or something..and its not going away.
Please give some advice to finish my self improvement goals
My biggest piece of advice is Bolded = Epic fail.
Of course if you starve yourself you will lose weight fast, your body thinks you are dying. There's something you should know about all of that weight you lost, most of it was muscle mass son. WHen your body goes into starvation mode, due to that scrawn diet you got into.. the first thing it does is panics and kills off anything that drains too much resources on the body, not fat. This means you lose muscle mass first, not fat. If you think about it; this makes perfect sense that the body does this, because if you WERE in a survival situation, you would get a lot more mileage out of your body if you lost muscle first, since muscles burn incredible amounts of fat just to maintain your BMR.
#1. What you need to do is stop being impatient, fitness isn't like a box of donuts you can just jump into and eat right away. This shit takes time if you want to do it properly. The way you're doing it will end you up in very poor health, and you won't see any actual muscular gains that matter. You need to find out what your actual BMR is right now, then make sure you at least eat that many calories per day. Then make corrections to your food intake based on physical activity (This is why you drink protein shakes etc, it makes doing this easy)
I'm not sure what your required daily calori count will be, but I guarentee it's a hell of a lot more than 1200, especially if you are working out. You need to accept that if you want to feel and look your best in the end, you are going to have to stay fat for awhile, while you pack on fat burning muscle through consistant effort in exercise. What you're doing now will turn you into a weak scrawn with no muscle in the short term, not make you "Ripped". Also another thing: Crunches are a waste of energy IMHO, you can get so much more out of exercises like squats, even standing curls probably put your core under more stress than a crunch could, just remember to keep it flexed through these exercises.