About 4 months ago, I stumbled across the idea of Intermittent Fasting. Specifically, the Leangains approach, as coined by Martin Berkhan. If you have not heard of it, go here and read. Don’t worry, it’s all free. I’ll give you another chance at the end of the post if you are stubborn and haven’t gone yet.

Anyways, I never thought I was in that bad of shape. Maybe a few extra pounds but nothing ghastly. To confirm my suspicion of average chubbiness, I decided to get a BOD POD Body Composition test.  This test uses body volume and density to determine your Body Fat percentage. Pretty neat. My guess at my body fat going into this test? 15%.

Unfortunately, here are the results:

19.7% BODY FAT!!!

Devastating.

I started the Leangains protocol 6 days later, March 19th, because everything starts on a Monday.

On June 5th, I went in for a different body composition test, this time a DEXA scan. Its actually an x-ray that scans your entire body to determine bone density but can be used to compute body fat. The results are almost identical (+/- 1%) to BOD POD results, so it was pretty dang close to an apples to apples, before and after snap shot.

The fruits of my 11 weeks?

11.8% BODY FAT!

Un-devastated!

In table form, here are the results of my Leangains experiment. As a side note, I was never hungry, weight trained only 3 days a week for about 30 minutes a pop and performed ZERO minutes of cardio. Hallelujah.

*the additional 6.57 lbs added to the “After” lean mass is the weight of my skeleton, which was accounted for automatically in the “Before” due to the differences in the body fat testing methods

 

One thing that Martin Berkhan mentions as a benefit of Leangains is the high adherence rate. For me, P90X always turned into P12X. This is easily the most consistent I have ever been on a diet/workout regiment and I wasn’t even that consistent. Cheat days every Saturday, some weeks weight training only twice.

The results speak for themselves.

Most likely I will be posting the exacts of what I did for workouts and food, but probably not now as this blog is still leads imaginary followers. If enough interest is garnered however, I’ll make it sooner rather than later and include pictures (maybe). But there is nothing I will say theory wise that Martin hasn’t already mentioned on his blog.

Go. Read. Un-devastate yourself.