A little over a year ago I was 210lb at 6ft.

I didn’t do a dramatic cut or a big bulk. I did a recomp, losing fat and building muscle at the same time. For anyone skinny-fat reading this: this is the path. The scale barely moved for me (210lb → 195lb), which is exactly why recomp is so demoralizing early on and why most guys quit. You have to learn to trust the mirror over the scale.

What I actually did:

Training - 4 days a week, progressive overload on the basics. Nothing exotic. Compound lifts first, tracked every session, added weight or reps whenever I could. Consistency over intensity. I never missed two weeks in a row the entire year, and that’s the whole secret.

Nutrition - I ate slightly under maintenance and hit 0.8g-1g per lb bodyweight of clean protein daily. Recomp lives and dies on protein and on being patient with a small deficit.

Sleep and stress - underrated. When I fixed my sleep, everything else accelerated.

What I didn’t expect was how much it bled into the rest of my life. Walking into rooms differently. Holding eye contact. The discipline of showing up to the gym when I didn’t feel like it rewired how I handle everything else - work, difficult conversations, all of it. The body was almost a side effect of becoming someone who keeps promises to himself.

If you’re skinny-fat and stuck: pick a program, hit your protein, stay consistent, and give it a full year before you judge it. One year is not a long time. You’ll blink and it’ll be gone whether you train or not.

Happy to answer any fitness questions if it helps anyone.

Sometimes they cry their eyes out cause they didn't expect you to fight back.