Nutrition, Performance, and Weight Loss: A Reflection

I’ve been working with a nutrition and performance coach (the amazing Morgan Voz) since last summer, and at the start of 2023 we embarked on a weight cut - a deliberate effort to get leaner by lowering my body fat percentage. When we started on January 1st of this year I weighed in at 207 pounds, and when we stopped I was right at 189 pounds. Here are some reflections going through that process.

When we started in January, I was eating around 3300 calories a day and by the end my total daily caloric intake was around 2200. That sounds like a lot, but we did this by gradually decreasing 100-200 calories every couple of weeks rather than crash dieting. I think the primary result of this is that throughout the last four months I cannot really recall any instances where I was absolutely starving throughout the day.

My performance in the gym (in addition to the nutrition coaching, I’ve been doing powerlifting four days a week) actually improved significantly during the cut. While I lost about 18 pounds in total, I still added to my one-rep maxes on all three main lifts on top of significantly improving my overall work capacity - I was comfortably repping my old one-rep max for 2-3 reps, and sometimes 5. This was one of the bigger surprises for me, because I think the popular wisdom is either you’re bulking and getting stronger or cutting and settling for becoming weaker. Perhaps this is true for folks with a higher training age, but I continued to gain strength while losing weight throughout the process.

There were effectively no hard restrictions on what I could actually eat during this process, which I think also contradicts the established lore that while cutting, the only thing you eat is chicken breast, steamed broccoli, and white rice. (To be fair, I did eat a lot of that.) Other than remaining within +/- 5 grams of my protein, carb, and fat macro targets, we focused on getting 2 servings each of fruit and vegetables per day and trying to mainly eat food I prepared myself (because while restaurants often do provide nutrition info, there’s no guarantee it’s actually prepared that way).

Those guidelines meant that my food choices tended to evolve towards fewer processed / fast food options and more single-ingredient choices. It was sort of like Tetris for me: knowing that I only had so much “space” to fit foods in, a fast food meal became a lot less appealing since it meant I could be using up half of my fat budget for that day (or more). Sugars were another item that I naturally evolved away from - I was getting most of my carbs from fruits and vegetables by the end of the cut, and it sort of re-adjusted my taste for sweetness (a McDonald’s Sprite would likely kill me instantly at this point).

Overall, the end result is something I’m really satisfied with - I definitely look different in terms of body composition (I turned 37 this year, and many folks have commented that I look way younger) which is a nice thing, but the thing that really excites me is how my ability to perform in and out of the gym has improved. I love the fact that I’m not just moving more weight than I was at the beginning of the year, but that I’m doing so almost 20 pounds lighter.

My personal power-to-weight ratio has improved a lot and made me a much more effective athlete, which carries into many more dimensions of my life than just looking leaner does: I don’t actually do any regular cardio work, but my blood pressure and resting heart rate are both a lot better than they were before. I went on a hike with some friends and they commented that next time, they’re going to make me wear a backpack full of weights in order to keep up with me. Possibly counter-intuitively to folks that have a particular image of “powerlifter” in their mind, my flexibility and overall mobility is better than it ever has been as well. Between having good mobility and an overall stronger body, I’m shrugging off and avoiding the kinds of nagging aches, pains, and injuries that start to plague folks around my age.

I think for me at least, having not just the expertise but the support of a fantastic coach was well worth it - there’s an overwhelming amount of info about nutrition and performance online, and I personally found it hard to figure out where to start. Working with someone who’s got deep expertise on how to keep an athlete fueled but can also explain the science behind it all and give you moral support when things feel tough absolutely made the difference for me, and I’d recommend it to anyone else.