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

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.