Physique Update #1

A current snapshot of my progress! Be grateful, this may be the first and the last physique update ever posted to jellylift.

Not gonna lie, I’ve had this idea drafted for my blog since I first booted up the site, but have been actively avoiding sharing it as content ever since.
While I made this blog with the intention of documenting and sharing my fitness progress, when it came down to posting content about lifting, I realized I had no desire to actually share any personal information regarding my progress.

Why?

Because I LOVE to gatekeep.

Ooooh yeah baby, there is nothing I love more than than a little bit of self-righteousness mixed with manipulation, sprinkled with just a dash of insecurity. Yep, I sure do love to actively and consciously limit access (provide no details) to the public (friends and family) to a category or status (my progress) in an attempt to uphold exclusivity and/or maintain a sense of novelty about said category or status as a means of elevating myself to offer a sense of superiority (I’m tremendously insecure and do not wish to be judged.)

But alas, my gatekeeping era is coming to a bitter-sweet end as I reluctantly swallow my pride and share the following images.

Physique Update #1 – February 9th, 2023

These images were taken on February 9th, 2023, just under a year after I had been consistently working out. For almost five years, I had been very on and off about working out, and only ever did so at home using Youtube videos, apps, and Instagram fitness challenges. In the 11th grade at the peak of COVID-19 online learning, in my Health and Physical Education course we were encouraged to create our own workout program at home and implement it for the rest of the semester. This forced me to learn about fitness beyond the scope of trying a new sport every year and never sticking to one, high school dodgeball, and the Zumba class I would join in with my mother once in a blue moon.
I’ll spare you the dry sob story of how I slowly learned to fall in love with weightlifting. That can of worms can be dumped onto a future jellylift post.

Back to the present!

Right now, I am training for hypertrophy and am in a caloric surplus, more commonly referred to as a “bulk.” I’m consuming around 2600-2800 calories daily, with the intention of dropping into a 300-500 calorie deficit in a few months – the “cut.” To be completely transparent, my bulk isn’t going quite as smoothly as I would like. Let me break it down

• Days I forget to pack extra food on my 7:30am-5:30pm school days really set me back
• When I’m at work, I can’t eat for 4-5 hours
• Days I burn more calories due to more intensive training or lots of movement throughout the day puts me at maintenance with the calories I’m consuming (input = output, rather than, input > output)
• Food and groceries are expensive
• Healthy food is not typically high in calories, therefore maintaining a healthy diet and trying to eat a lot of food can be tricky
• My family does not eat in the same way that I do, and do not often cook with whole foods but rather with what is cheaper and convenient (which I truly can’t blame them for)

If you look closely at this list, you’ll notice a trend between each of them.

They’re all excuses.

Don’t get me wrong. It isn’t easy. I’ll be the first to tell you that the hardest part of being healthy and fit (and big and strong) is diet. By far.

I’ve never been the type to eat poorly. At a young age, I grew out of having a sweet tooth, and quickly discovered how much better I feel when I eat good food. The difficult part now, is simply consistency. Keeping up with consuming 145g of protein and 2800kcals every single day affects you mentally just as much as it does physically. For someone my age, height and size, It’s a LOT of food, no matter how much you’re training. It’s hard, and mentally draining, and challenging.

But I love it. I’m learning to love the process in anticipation of the results, and it’s only a matter of time before I truly get to enjoy the fruits of my labour. I think the best part of this journey is that once I reach my destination, I get to set a new goal, and go through hell all over again.
But, as Daddy Noel says:

If you’re going through hell…

Keep going.