Sometimes things turn out better than expected

and some things turn out worse. As Vin Diesel said in "Fast Five," let's start off with the dessert first. Next time, we'll take a look at the veggies :)

Body fat progress has been much better than expected.
On May 14, 2012, my baseline reading was:

148.4 lb / 15.8% body fat / 125 lb lean mass

At this point, I had just started cold showers a week beforehand, and started to clean up my diet (without calorie counting). The diet was essentially a less strict paleo, with a bit more flex on carbs (~110 g daily carbs), and almost none of the usual culprits (dessert, soda, highly processed foods, etc.).

Four weeks later, on June 11, 2012, my reading was:

145.8 lb / 14.6% body fat / 124.6 lb lean mass

The diet was working! During this time, I lost 2.2 lbs of fat, and only 0.4 lbs of lean mass.

Two weeks later, on June 25, 2012, the diet seemed to have plateaued in terms of its effect:

144.7 lb / 14.5% body fat / 123.8 lb lean mass

I was still losing a bit of weight, but a lot of it was lean mass. It was time to incorporate a few changes. On diet, I shifted to intermittent fasting and put the workout at the end of the fast period. In terms of exercise, I moved from 5X high intensity interval training (HIIT) a week to 3X heavy resistance training + 2X HIIT. Also started calorie counting, using ~1800 cal as my maintenance level, tracking food intake with the very easy to use MyFitnessPal app!

Four weeks later, on July 23, 2012, my reading was quite positive:

139.7 lb / 13.1% body fat / 121.5 lb lean mass

Dropped 5 lbs and 1.4% body fat in 4 weeks! Definitely moving in the right direction and quickly!

So in 10 weeks, I've dropped 8.7 lbs and 2.7% body fat. That means approximately 1% body fat per month. That'd put me right on track for 8% by year end!

The lesson here is that reaching a goal requires the constant application of the ability to monitor, adapt, and learn. When I've pursued goals in the past of this nature, I was able to make quick progress, but was disappointed whenever I ran into plateaus or unexpected movements in a negative direction. Now, I take it more in stride, understand that plateaus are part of the process, and give changes more time to play out (2-4 weeks). The strategy is simply to keep doing something until it stops working (i.e., 2 week plateau), and then make a change and monitor it for the next 2 weeks.

Winston Churchill summed up this approach eloquently: "Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."