So this week kicks off the beginning of Phase 2 of the Body Beast program.  This is considered the BULK phase which is the routine I’ll be on for the next 5 weeks.  I want to take a minute to give you an honest assessment of the first 3 weeks of Body Beast and where I stand now.

My initial goal was to gain 10 lbs of lean muscle mass through relatively clean eating (I swear by the Pareto Principle – 80/20 rule).  I’ve documented all my cheat meals which were twice a week as well as having at least 4-6 oz’s of whiskey on the weekend (I prefer to sip mine with 3 ice cubes) and about 8 beers (Guiness is my beer of choice) on the UFC fight nights; that UFC 205 though, what a fk’n great fight night!!  Then came Thanksgiving.

Let me spend a little time on Thanksgiving because I ate whatever the hell I wanted, seriously.  I ate 2-3 full plates every day from Thursday to Sunday.  I also made sure I got my dessert in so I had 2 slices of pie or tiramisu each day as well.  I need to caveat that though because I did do a little more prep work than normal for those meals. I did double days both Friday and Saturday…a Core De Force workout (kickboxing/shadowboxing routine) on top of whatever Body Beast Workout was scheduled.  I also made sure to drink my SHAKEOLOGY every day; not hard since this is a breakfast routine for me.  I also doubled up my water intake from 1 gallon to almost 2 daily because of the amount of salt I knew I’d be ingesting.

Now as far as my plates were concerned.  If you haven’t seen my meal plan video on YouTube, you should check it out HERE: 

Long story short, I’m using a 21 Day Fix Meal plan to get my macro’s in.  After calculating my caloric needs via the Body Beast meal plan I found that I need to consume 2900-3000 calories a day from a variety of sources.  Needless to say, Thanksgiving meals are light on veggies (GREENS) and heavy on carbs (YELLOWS)…yes you could count Green Bean Casserole as a semi-Green (which I did) but when you add bacon, fried onion strips, and all the other fixings it becomes much more of a YELLOW.  So here’s how I navigated each meal. 

Half my plate was protein (turkey) and rather than use the standard yellow for each side I simply cut it in half; the equivalent of about 1/4 cup for each side except Green Bean Casserole, I allowed myself a little more of that since it’s the only veggie on my plate.  So my plates looked like this:  half turkey, mashed potatoes/sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, mac and cheese.  I also poured myself a glass of V8 low-sodium to have alongside my meal.  Very loosely interpreted into 1.5 REDS, 1.5 GREEN, 3 YELLOWS and I didn’t track the blue/orange/purples.  I split each of my meals up by about 4 hours then capped the evening meals off with a slice of pie.  This is broscience at its best so don’t ask me to justify this!  Needless to say, eating this way allowed me to eat a helping of every single thing that was placed out and satisfy every one of my cravings during the holidays…for 4 days straight!!!!!  This bears repeating I ate every single thing I wanted to for the entire long weekend.  

  

When it was all said and done, my final weight and waist measurement for the end of PHASE I was a paltry 154.4 and a 29.5 inch waist.  So needless to say after 3 weeks, I’m gaining inches around the waist but not putting on as much weight as I hoped.  I realize the waist measurement could have been a measure of bloat after the 4 day binge but I may have to reanalyze my total Caloric Intake for the rest of the program, that or just trust the process…baby step guys!  Either way, I’m seeing definite strength gains across the board and am noticing much more vascularity and cuts throughout so that is a positive!  Can’t wait to see what the next 5 weeks have in store!     

Check out Week 1 here: