After 11 months(more like over 20 years), I finally found something I know I will stick with for a lifetime. I have read the stickies above. Read both BFL and BFL for women, have bought muscle and fitness hers magazine.
I go to the gym 3 times a week and alternate upper body and lower body with abs and I do cardio 5 times a week for 30 minutes(interval usually)
I eat whole healthy foods, lean protein, carbs 40% each, fat 20%, track my calories.

Mel and others, what have you learned in the past years do you wish you would have know at the beginning? Or is it a trial and error kind of thing like figuring what calories work and then adjusting?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Wow - sounds like you are on a perfect plan. What you outline is what many people here have found success with. I guess my biggest learnings are that even though you don't see immediate results, good things are happening from day 1 when you weight train. Where you see this in action is if you ever go "off" plan - it can be very damaging because for awhile, you still look good and notice results even though you've slipped. So I guess that would be my learning #2, which is, don't be deceived into slacking off just because you don't get immediately caught. Just like in the beginning, there is a lag time to see results (or damage).

Great question, btw. I will enjoy reading what others respond with.

Thanks Sportmom for the advice. I don't plan on ever going back to the old me. I love myself this way and I don't think I did before.

Hi Sharon. I'll just echo what Fran says. It's a great way to live.

You're probably more knowledgable than I am but I'll tell you what I learned. Don't be afraid of the heavy weights. And while heavy is certainly a relative term, I will likely never again do a set of 15 repetitions. If I can make it easily past 10, the weight is too light. I'm still learning that it's not the worst thing if I can only struggle through 6. I know the weight vs. the repetitions produce different results but in the past, I would have automatically assumed that if I could only do 6 reps then the weight was too heavy.

What else? Switch it up every now and then. Try different exercises. And if you don't see any results at all, after a period of time (what that exact time is, I'm not sure), question what you're doing. I'm not saying that you'll be buff in 6 weeks but I think you should see or at least feel something...feel stronger, be able to lift heavier etc.

I'm still learning too so take what I say with a grain of salt and wait for the more experienced players to join in!

I wish I'd found the combination of eat clean, lift heavy and do cardio from the very beginning as you seem to have found. I didn't lift SERIOUS weight until I hit my goal scale weight, looked in the mirror and said "yuck" That was the year that the BFL book came out.

I guess one of the most important things that I've learned has nothing to do with any specific routine or plan- but that a slip is not free fall. I've never slacked on the exercise because I absolutely love it and go crazy without it. But I certainly have had my ups and downs with food and have learned how to pull myself together and get back to what works.

What works for me is just about any "plan" that is based on at least 4 days of heavy lifting, clean eating and 5 days of cardio. Kinda sounds like your plan

Congratulations on your success and liking yourself! That took me longer and was the hard part.

Mel

Thanks Mel for your honesty about hitting your goal weight and still seeing "yuck"! A couple of years ago, when I was just getting close to my goal weight, I asked a good friend - what if I hit my goal weight and still don't like what I see? Do I keep reducing my goal weight? Where do I stop? What my friend said to me, with the best of intentions, was "if you reach your goal weight and still aren't happy, you might have a problem."

I appreciated her honesty and gave it a lot of thought but the truth was much simpler than that, and I wish someone would have told me...what I needed to change was not necessarily the number on the scale but the shape of my body and I didn't really realize how much exercising, and specifically weight training, could do that.

I subscribe to a BFL-W forum and one of the posts that came thru this evening was this, and I wanted to share it with you all:

Focus on your BF percentage instead of your scale weight, because that's the true measure of fitness.

This spoke to me and I think it's good to be reminded of the holistic value of body fat vs a sometimes random number that can be affected by so many variables. Even the ladies on the Biggest Loser referred to that tonite. People who have the biggest success and then one bad week get voted off, yet they are in fact the most successful female loser, for example. But because they go by one number instead of measuring body fat reduced or inches lost, it kind of is an unreliable data point at times.

Thank you all for your information.
When I was only concentrating on scale weight and not body fat I found I could post anywhere. Now that the scale is not that important too me and my body fat is, it is harder to find areas to post or people to talk to that understand that. My family looks at me and says you don't need to lose anymore weight. I look and know what the possibilities are with lifting, cardio and good food habits and it is so hard to explain to others. I wish you were all here so we could have a great chat about this. Thanks

True Sharon, it is a different kind of goal. Against my better judgment, I sign up for challenges on this site in different forums, but being a wl'er I know I will never be at the front of the pack. But I enjoy the challenges and the comraderie they bring, so I do it anyway, even if my goals are not going to do me well in the competitions.

As you can see from my ticker, I focus on %BF for my goals. I do keep track of my weight, because weight is something I can track every day whereas BF% requires a trip to see a trainer. The ultimate goal, though, is to be lean rather than light.

I wrote a post about this on my blog that some of you might be interested in. It's here: http://3fatchicks.com/diet-blogs/kaw.../11/19/why-bf/.

Happy to chat more on this, if there's interest.

Kim

I think you found the right place I have a "goal weight" in my head, but in reality it is a goal look. Because the scale messes with my head so much, I use the visibility of certain landmarks on my body- visible abs, quad cuts, visible triceps cut, visibe hip flexors and shoulder vascularity, as well as the way my clothes fit to determine whether or not I'm on track.

Mel

While I guess we're on the topic - where does one go to get their bodyfat tested and which method is considered "reliable but practical" for regular testing? By this I mean, I don't think most people consider the body fat scales to be too accurate, and I don't need a new scale so there goes that anyway. I'm not sure what/if my gym offers but I don't want to waste my time and maybe money on something that's not that accurate. On the other hand, I have no idea where I would find one of those dunk tank testers that I thought were supposed to be the best.

I would have loved to know the change in my BF% over the past year but I'd settle for knowing what it is now.

Thanks!

I think those tank tests are really expensive. As with most body-related measures, body fat is also somewhat relative. So I just get mine tested with calipers at the Y every couple of months. They do it for free and while there are more accurate tests out there in the world, the calipers are accurate and accessible enough for me. Besides, the more important thing is the trend--am I losing fat? maintaining? gaining muscle?

Elisa -- I also just get my BF tested by one of the trainers at my gym. Sort of. She's actually based in an affiliated gym, so it requires an appointment and an extra stop, although it's free. Because of the inconvenience factor, I get it done infrequently, no more than once every four months or so. The rest of the time I just go by definition, how my clothes fit, progress on my lifts at the gym, etc. What Mel said.

Sharon -- you asked in a comment on my blog how I learned to focus on BF%. Believe me, I went through years of the whole low-fat/starvation yo-yo dieting thing, followed by a period of the low-fat + excessive cardio thing in the 1990s. For some reason -- I can't even remember why now -- I signed up for a weight training class in 1997, and fell in love. I started reading misc.fitness.weights (a usenet group that's still around but IMO ruined by spammers & adolescent boys) and "met" bodybuilders, powerlifters, and my heroine Krista Scott Dixon, aka the Mistress of S'quat. I still have a *lot* to learn, but reading what these folks had to say was eye-opening.

Kim