!tech
yesterday i completed around 5 months of working out 5 days/week. this has been incredibly hard as i never worked out for more than 2 days in my 24 years on earth.

but i took a pic of mine in the mirror and my fat belly gave me the most depressing sight to see and question whether it was worth the effort.

i mean, surely i can do 50+ pushups now and have started seeing a few changes in shoulder/ chest area, and a few friends/collegues have appreciated my working out habit , but not getting out the only area that i want to go away, this sucks :/

tbh my plan was to see where this experiment of creating a new hobby goes and i did not do the hard steps (like doing cardio more than body part workouts and taking calorie deficit diet). am also a vegan and didn't consumed any fitness products like creaine nd stuff, so not a very nutrition rich diet.

guess i can't ignore the hard steps anymore . just once in my life if i could get a split chiseled stomach :/ (and maybe some cute girlfriend)

I used to be a gym instructor, here's my 2 cents.

Few things. One of the biggest challenges when you start working out is diet, you're suddenly doing more, so much more hungry, so you can easily over compensate and eat too much.

Losing body fat is *slow*. You can't lose it from one area, you have to lose it from all over your body. 1kg of body fat is about 8,000 calories. A sustainable calorie deficit is usually about 200, you can go higher but I wouldn't if you're new.

You're building muscle. That's *awesome*. Muscle is metabolically active, ie burns calories to just exist. Body fat isn't metabolically active.

Don't worry too much about the chiseled chest. That's a lot of work. But what is much easier is having enough muscle for the body fat you have that you look good. And a balanced diet (don't worry too much about calories, more about what you eat, avoid sugar and alcohol as much as possible).

Don't worry too much about fitness supplements, protein shakes are only worth it if you're not getting enough protein in your diet, about 1g per kg body weight per day.

Other stuff, but it's late.

Awesome!

You can easily take a 500 kcal deficit daily, that's one pound of fat per week. Fat loss only comes through a caloric deficit, that's inevitable thermodynamics. Not just meals, also drinks and snacks count.

As for building muscle as vegan, there are vegan protein powders - the probably best combo is made from pea/rice because they perfectly completent each other's amino acid profiles.

Vegan protein powder also has the advantage that it doesn't cause acne because there aren't any garbage remains from industrial live stock farming. Highly recommended over whey also for non-vegans.

However, muscle growth requires doing more so that the body has a reason to grow. That translates into lifting with progressive overload, but still clean execution form. And a day of break between workouts for recovery. Plus proper sleep.

@Fast-Nop at my fat level max calories per day is 1500 .
i eat most of that in breakfast only (1 stuffed potato bread (aloo parantha) + 1tbsp yellow butter + 120 ml tea with 2 tbsp sugar) .

its still a control againts my usual breakfast of 3 paranthas + 3-5 tbsp yellow butter

i stopped counting calories after 1 week of working out, its a lost cause. i am almost at the verge of collapsing everyday and yet i am 1000-2000 calories exceeding my max calory level

@dotenvironment If you have a carb-rich nutrition, the reason you "collapse" is too much carbs. You can first change to complex carbs, then low-carb. That transitions your body to actually use the fat metabolism. The first one or two weeks can be unpleasant, but it will normalise.

I mean, we wouldn't have made it through evolution if we had energy storage for weeks but collapsed after days.

@dotenvironment how tall are you/how much do you weigh? 1500 calories is low. Like, if you weigh 50kg I'd still say that's low. If you're exercising as much as you say you are, then that's very low.

You'd be better off having meals spread through the day, you're basically intermittent fasting while exercising. That's tough.

As important as when you eat, is what you eat. Your diet doesn't sound very balanced. Not much veg, not much protein (based on what you've listed). That's also going to make you feel worse. You might have felt fine before, but you weren't doing that much exercise.

@atheist 70kg(+-3) and 5ft 4inch . i got this 1500 calories value from some health app which calculated based on these values