Friday, June 12, 2015

Jiu Jitsu and clean eating are a good combination for getting lean!

From 2003 to 2011, I was a competitive powerlifter.  When I started that journey, I weighed 195lbs and at the end, I was able to get up to 282lbs:

At this point, I was pretty strong with my best lifts in the squat, bench, and deadlift: 860lbs, 500lbs, and 672lbs.

Then I tore my pec clean off the bone.  After that, I stopped competing in powerlifting (although I still lifted) and re-arranged my priorities.  I didn't have to force-feed myself anymore and as a result, started to lose some weight.  Then I got married in 2012.  Then had a baby soon after.  All the while, I kept losing weight simply because I didn't have to eat big anymore.

I joined a jiu jitsu place in June of 2012 (Elite Team East Bay in El Cerrito) and was really having a great time.  When I started, my body weight was around 250.  As the months went by, I kept losing weight.  If you've ever done jiu jitsu, you know it's really tough and involves a lot of hard work.  Eventually, I got down to around 220lbs at the beginning of 2015.  At this point, my wife and I got the amazing news that we were expecting another child.  So, I decided that this would be a good chance for me to compete in a jiu jitsu tournament. I picked a lower weight class (208lbs with a gi on) so I had to cut weight to about 203lbs.  With the tournament happening on June 20th, I had several months to clean up my diet a bit and drop the 17lbs.

Well, it is about time.  I have a little over a week to go and this is the result:

My body weight is around 200lbs and I'm the leanest I've ever been in my life.  I weighed 165lbs at one point in college, but I didn't have any muscle so while I was light in weight, I wasn't really lean.

Here are a few pictures detailing the results of about 5 months of hard training and a pretty good diet:








I'm going to certainly try to lose a little more body fat after the competition and see how lean I can get BUT, who knows what will happen. Without a competition to keep me motivated, it will be tough.  I am pretty sure that this will be my best chance to do this because when kid #2 comes, I sure as hell won't be worried about diet or exercise.




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