Overweight Female, Nutrition, and Lowering Body Fat

Hello!

I began SS 2 weeks ago, and it's going quite well.

My body stats: 5'4" F, 187lbs, 27 years old; I regularly sleep 8-9 hours a night.
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My lifting stats (as of last training session on Wed): Squat--85lbs; OHP--50lbs; DL--125; Bench Mon was 60.

My question/problem:

I began SS because I understand that strength is the foundation of all other physical attributes/endeavors. I also understand that the more muscle you have, the more fat your body burns. The problem is that I've been overweight my entire adult life--I was 215lbs a few years ago but lost it (and kept the 40lbs off) doing keto. Keto was good just to lose weight, but I'm over it.

Anyway, my ultimate goal is to have better/more healthy body composition. I wear my weight well, but I'm still overweight, and I still need to lose weight. The scale has bounced up a few lbs since beginning SS (I expected it; I started 2 weeks ago at 184), but I suppose I'm wondering what I can do to walk the line of recovering properly from my lifts, yet still lowering my body fat and potentially losing weight during SS. I'm eating about 2k calories a day (lift days sometimes 200 more), 180-200g protein.

Any help/advice is appreciated!

Congratulations on the weight loss. Certainly a fine accomplishment. What I generally recommend is starting out by restricting your calories, running the program, and seeing how far you can go on the calorie restriction. Spare as many carbohydrates and protein calories as you can and do it on as low of fat as you can realistically manage. If you start crapping out on your lifts then just move to an intermediate program until you finish losing the fat then go back on the novice linear progression once caloric balance is restored. If you'd like some coaching I would be happy to work with you as well.

Thanks, Robert! I don’t have issues tracking macros generally, and it seems to be the only way I make real progress. In your opinion, what is a reasonable deficit percent to be eating in?

You are very welcome. I usually start at ~200-400 calories under maintenance and build from there.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by alishagrace

Hello!
Anyway, my ultimate goal is to have better/more healthy body composition.

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I would also suggest you start working on your mindset. You weight is a unit of mass. You cannot see mass. What you really care about is units of distance. That you can see. Get a measuring tap and start taking weekly measurement and record them. I was in a similar situation, I dieted down about 30 pounds and then started lifting. I gained mass while lifting. The scale said I weighted more, the tape said my chest was larger but it also said my waist was smaller. Hmm, if I had listened to the scale I would have not realized that I looked better!

The changes in your body composition are measured in inches not pounds. This his hard to get through our heads, I still have to work on it myself. I encourage you to start measuring your progress with composition with a tape, and obviously mass of the bar still in pounds, haha.