In September, I finally made strength training part of the plan instead of treating it as an occasional add-on. The new routine was a three-day split, while cardio still revolved around swimming and running. One lap around the main road on campus is about 4.2 km—almost exactly one tenth of a full marathon. In my head, each lap became a tiny marathon of its own.
By this point in the second half of the year, the weight loss had reached what could be considered a relatively small base. My BMI was down to 21.4. But after buying a body fat scale, I ran into a discouraging number: if my weight had dropped so much, why was my body fat percentage still so high?
The reading was 62 kg, with a body fat percentage of 27%.
That made me wonder what I had actually been losing all this time. It felt less like I had stopped being fat, and more like I had gone from being a larger fat person to a smaller one.
After looking into how body fat percentage is calculated, the issue became clearer:
$$ Body fat percentage=\frac{fat}{water+muscle+bone/connective tissue+fat}\times100% $$
During weight loss, fat does go down, but muscle can fall along with it. When both the numerator and denominator shrink—and the denominator shrinks more—the body fat percentage may stay the same, or even rise.
A friend, Z, gave me the nudge I needed: it was time to stop thinking only about losing weight and start focusing on losing fat while building muscle. So systematic strength training went into the schedule.
So in September, I picked up the dumbbells again and planned a three-part split: chest + triceps, back + biceps, and legs + shoulders.
The beginning was not exactly smooth. After the first leg day, I quietly hoped I would not be sore the next morning. Instead, the soreness lasted three days. During biceps training, I also strained a muscle and had to stop for more than half a week to recover.
Fortunately, after a while I began to get a better sense of the right training intensity, and the routine slowly got onto a more stable track. Strength work was paired with cardio, and during a week-long trip I also walked around 20,000 steps a day. Looking back, I was fairly satisfied with the amount of movement I managed in September.
Cardio remained a mix of swimming and running, though swimming became less frequent. Running gradually took over. Exercise brought the familiar lift of endorphins, and with that came a lighter, more relaxed state both physically and mentally.
The campus loop made running feel especially concrete. One lap along the main road is roughly 4.2 km. Since a marathon is 42 km, every time I completed that loop, I had finished one tenth of a marathon—a mini marathon, just enough to feel complete.