Earlier in the week I was perusing the blogs I read and I came upon Matt’s confessional post titled “My name is Matt and I am a food addict!”. His post really struck a cord with me. If you want to go so far as to read the comments you’ll see that I left the first one, with a confessional of my own.

I’m rocking the Amazon mindset but it is not totally reflecting on me in the form of a rocking Amazon body. Right now I’m doing a 37-day strength-building program from Whole9 called the “603 Power to the People” program. I’m going for a new deadlift PR somewhere above 200 pounds. That’s my primary goal, I’m focused on it, I’m following the program, and I’m certain I will have that PR when I finish in three weeks.

The problem is that I had also hoped, and partly assumed, that I would see some fat loss on this program as well. I did a 30-day strict paleo challenge back in July and stripped off ten pounds almost effortlessly but somehow (pizza and peanut butter sandwiches) those pounds have crept back on. I thought that during PTP I could do a “sanity-preserving paleo” diet of my own construction: eat mostly paleo foods with occasional cheese and one non-paleo meal allowed every five days. The problem is that I’ve had a few episodes of “spinning out” and gone on full-day non-paleo food binges. Bad Amy.

So I posed this question to Matt – just what the hell are we supposed to DO? Well he and C Wiss chimed in with something that boils down to one word – goals. I felt like I had just been smacked with a fifty-pound sack of DUH. This whole month I’ve been working on my deadlift goal and like I said, assuming fat loss would follow. Maybe if I had a secondary goal, one for fat loss or another performance goal that would help achieve fat loss it would actually happen!

I also realise reading Matt’s post that when I hit my deadlift PR I’m going to be stuck out there in success land wondering “what’s next?”. I think NOW is the time to figure out what’s next, and that means new goals.

So for the record, I am setting some goals for the post-200-pound-deadlift-achieving me:

Performance Goal: My first pull-up. I don’t care how ugly it is or how much kicking I have to do, I will get chin to meet bar.
Body Comp Goal: TEN POUNDS – ten freaking pounds, and I will still have plenty to spare. That’s ten pounds of FAT, so I will be measuring weight + bf% to track this.
START: MARCH 16
FINISH: APRIL 30 (46 days)

Matt also mentioned setting a stretch goal. I really like that term. It’s a bigger, long-term goal. My stretch goal would be to hit 22% bodyfat.

Next week I’ll follow up on this and post about my actual PLAN to reach my goals, and a bit about my team of professional coaches. Team of professional coaches? It’s called a tease dearies, I’ll see you next week!