Losing some weight, with a different focus

First, let me say a big THANKS to my friend and business partner Tim Huntley.  A while back, he and I were trading notes about getting in shape.  For him, it was about sprinting 400 meters.  He said he needed to build muscles and lose weight, but of course he couldn't do the two of them at the same time.  Luckily we were doing this over the Internet or he would have seen me cock my head and look confused the same way a dog does when you make a squeaky noise.

I went out to the source of all known things (the Internet) and read up.  Turns out that to increase muscle mass, you need to eat bonus calories, especially lots of protein, to give the muscles the energy they need to get bigger.  In contrast, when you diet to lose weight, you not only burn fat, you also burn away muscle.  If you do it wrong, you actually burn away a lot of hard earned muscle. You weigh less, but you are weaker.  Not exactly my goal.

So, for the past six months or so, I have been lifting weights a lot more and consuming more protein.  The biggest bump comes from adding protein powder to some of my food and also drinking a protein shake most days.  I love this particular brand of powder.  I only get it in chocolate.  Of course I have been supplementing this diet with snacks, pounds of nuts, and lots of wine and tequila.

Now the trick is to start losing some winter weight, but without losing muscle, or at least much of it.  I am dropping my calories while increasing the percentage from protein.  I am also continuing my lifting so my body knows that I really don't want to lose the good stuff.  This is a very different approach than my traditional "run further and further and you simply can't eat enough".

I carry my fat around like a little fanny pack.  It wraps around from my belly to my back, right above where you would wear a belt. I am sure some high portion of it is the subcutaneous fat that is much worse for your health.

I am one week into this and hopefully can make progress in the next month.  Then it is back to trying to build muscle.  Yeah eating!