the beginning
April 2026, having suffered a knee injury at work, my injury was a Meniscus tear and Quadriceps tendonitis, due to this I had to start weight training and it was suggested I should lose weight to help my knee, this was when I had to face the reality that I was obese, my knee injury needed me to be a lot lighter and I literally had to look in the mirror and decide to either lose weight and strengthen my knee or look at being a knee replacement candidate in the near future. My Weight at this time was 121KG!!
I know some people will say how does one get that big and not know it or do something about it, to be honest it is pretty easy, I have always been someone who wears loose fitting clothes so I can put on weight and my clothes do not feel tight, then of course the point comes and you realize you need bigger clothes, of course the next size up is bought to be loose fitting and really by the time that size gets a little tight I have put on a more like 3 sizes in clothing.
Of course no exercise and a horrible diet of eating junk food gets you there pretty quick, I have always had a sweet tooth, my issue is there is no “stop”, I do not simply open a bag of chips or biscuits and have some, I eat the lot, I could very easily smash a big bag of chips a bag of lollies and then have an ice cream.
I was seeing a physio once a week for my knee when the suggestion was I should join a gym and look at weights for my knee 2 to 3 times a week.
With that I joined a gym and started doing weights, I decided I did not want to just go to the gym and do my knee exercises, I figured I might as well use this as the driving force to drop weight, so I started at the gym 4 days a week.
My routine was pretty basic, 4 days, upper body – lower body rinse repeat, I figured at my age I should train each body part twice a week, my physio wanted me to do my legs twice a week so doing every muscle twice a week made sense.
I was rather surprised at just how weak I had gotten, I recall in my early 40’s I was working out with weights, not seriously, I probably had a couple of months there going to the gym or lifting at home, I remember I could bench 80kg for 10 reps which I thought was ok for someone with limited training.
I went light for my first two weeks back into the gym as I did not want to be sore to the point I could not train, so the numbers here are coming from my 3rd to 4th week in the gym as it was this time I started to push harder.
April 28, 2026
Bench Press – 45kg x 6 Reps
Shoulder Press – 25kg x 12 Reps (I had to stop shoulder press it was to hard on my shoulders, I moved to Cable Lat Raises)
Cable Lat Raises – 4.5kg x 8 Reps
Lat Pulldown Wide Grip – 49kg x 10 Reps
Preacher Curls – 31kg x 8 Reps
Tricep Pushdown – 20kg x 8 Reps
Leg Extensions – 38kg x 8 Reps
Leg Press – 80Kg x 8
Leg Curls – 36kg x 8 Reps
I was also starting to do hip thrusts and RDL’s as my physio wanted me to do those as building glute strength apparently will help my quads, I struggled with those exercises, I felt like a tool doing hip thrusts as no other male in the gym did them, only the girls, I tended to avoid doing them, RDL’s was the same, it dawned on my the men did deadlifts and squats, the girls mostly did all the other exercises. In the end I simply stuck to leg extensions, leg press and leg curls, I could not do squats due to the tendonitis in my right knee and I was simply over weight and weak to do any heavy lifting.
As expected my knee slowly began to improve and I also started to drop weight, adding to my training I worked on doing 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day and I changed my eating habbits.
My diet at this point changed from junk food and takeaway to eating at home, I basically ate the following
Breakfast – a Coffee (Latte)
Lunch – 2 Eggs + 1 Piece Bacon
Dinner – Chicken, 6 to 8 String Beans a couple of Baby Potatoes, or a Steak and some Chips or an Egg.
Now and then I would have a 4 Egg Omlette for dinner, if I had Eggs for dinner I likely had 200 to 250g of Chicken for lunch, with nothing else, just grilled Chicken breast. Of course now and then was the odd cheat meal, maybe a 1/4 Chicken and Chips from the local shop, maybe go out to a pub and I would have a steak or a parmi.
For the most part I was consuming around 1600 calories a day, according to my fitbit I was burning 3200 calories a day, I kind of figured my calorie counting was not 100%, it was close so I felt if I was out by a couple of hundred then worse case I was consuming 1800 and burning 3200, even if fitbit was out a little maybe it was 1800 consumed and 2800 burned, so I felt comfortable with that and I understood that a 1000 a day calorie deficit was a weekly deficit 7700 calories which was going to lose 1kg of fat.
Now, I should point out, I have lost a lot of weight before, a few years back I go out to 130kg and managed to get down to 100kg pretty quick, I was dropping 2kg a week, funnily enough that too was April onwards, so the end of April 2023 I think it was, I weighed 130kg, by the first week of August I was at 100kg.
I did that by walking, I would walk 10,000 to 15,000 steps a day, I only ate once a day, I would have a morning coffee around 7am, I would have another coffee around 1pm and dinner at 6pm, my dinner would be low carb high protein, so maybe steak and eggs, omlettes, chicken, pretty similat to what I am eating now. I would have been consuming around 1200 to 1400 calories tops and burning around 3800 to 4000. The weight literally fell off, as said 2kg a week, some weeks 1.8 other weeks 2.5, but the average was 2.1 over the 3 month period, lossing 30kg in 3 months.
This time around however I was doing weight work 4 days a week and walking a little on those days and walking a little more on the days I did not go to the gym.
I actually found the weight much slower to come off, my first month I went from 121kg to 116kg, that was only 5kgs in a month, now keep in mind previously I was able to lose 2kg a week, which was 8kg a month, I was not real happy with this, it worked out to be 1.3kg a week, I started to look into this, why was I not dropping weight as quick as before when I was now doing weights on top of walking.
I had started to take Creatine as it apparently is good for muscle building, I reas Creatine holds water so I understand some of my weight is now water in the muscles so that was impacting my weight loss, but still, as the weeks go the weight was just not coming off like it did previously.
I looked deeper, the theory became simple, the previous time I lost weight I was on a calorie deficit of around 1500 a day, sometimes more, due to that the fat fell off, but I was only consuming around 50 to 70g of Protein, so apparently the theory is I was losing muscle as well as fat, so when I got down to 100kg I likely had lost 20kg of fat and 10kg of muscle. When I look at that and consider the time frame, that is the 15 weeks I took to get to 100kgs means I was only losing 1.3kg a week in fat and of course the rest was muscle.
This time as I am lifting weights my muscles are trying not to be consumed for calories, having learned of my error above I decided to up my Protein intake to 2g per kg, but I looked at the weight I wanted to be, so I picked 90kg as a target weight and then 2g per that goal meant I would consumer 180g a day of Protein.
Further study into the subject showed that my calorie deficit was too extreme, so I changed that too, I increased my daily calorie intake to 2200 calories, ensuring that 200g was Protein and worked on buring 3200 calories according to my fitbit, keeping in mind fitbit does have a margin of error so I am highly likely more around a 800 to 1000 calorie deficit but at least I am high in Protein.