Prologue

Getting into fitness should be fairly straightforward. Eat reasonably well, move around, lift something occasionally, sleep. Then you open the internet.

One person says breakfast is essential. Another says skipping it will fix your metabolism. Rice is making you fat, fruit has too much sugar, and apparently the walk you enjoyed does not count because your heart rate was in the wrong zone. All of them have a discount code.

I am a software engineer in my twenties, trying to understand what is worth paying attention to. There is plenty of information available. The difficult part is knowing what applies to an ordinary person with a job, a grocery budget, and no plans to step on a bodybuilding stage.

This series is my attempt to put the basics in one place. Food first. Then body composition, fasting, protein and carbs, lifting, and cardio. Some research, some questions, and hopefully fewer reasons to spend an entire evening comparing workout plans.

Scope / Attribution

These are learning notes, not an individual diet or training prescription. The explanations link to their sources. Personal preference is called out where it matters, and the numerical examples are examples (please do not mistake an imaginary person in a calculation for my transformation story).

The goal is to understand enough to make sensible everyday decisions. A health condition, an injury, or a complicated relationship with food needs more individual attention than a blog can provide.

A few terms before we start

Fitness discussions use several different goals as though they mean the same thing. They do not quite mean the same thing.

• Body weight: Everything on the scale: fat, muscle, bone, water, and the rest. The scale does not provide an itemised bill.
• Body composition: What that weight consists of. Body-fat percentage describes one part of it.
• Strength: The ability to produce force. Getting stronger at an exercise involves learning it as well as physical adaptation.
• Hypertrophy: An increase in muscle size. Usually what someone means when they say they want to build muscle.
• Aerobic fitness: The capacity to keep doing activity that depends on the body delivering and using oxygen. Relevant when the lift is out of order.

Why start in my twenties?

Because these are the years I am living through. It would be nice to use them for more than becoming increasingly efficient at sitting in front of a screen.

Looking better is a perfectly understandable reason to begin. So is being able to walk further, lift something without feeling helpless, or enjoy a trip that involves stairs. The important part is knowing which of these I am working towards. A lower number on a scale does not automatically answer all of them.

There is also a practical constraint: this has to fit into a life. A routine requiring unlimited time, a private chef, and a permanently enthusiastic version of myself is unlikely to survive contact with Tuesday.

So we will start with food. Everybody already has a relationship with it, long before somebody introduces the word “macros”.