OK guys - there's a lot of discussion all over the place here. Just like we do on the women's board when someone new comes by w/ questions:
1) What are your stats?
-- these we don't know yet but he still considers himself overweight, though lost 50 lb.
2) current diet? Please put it into a food counts program (like
www.fitday.com -- free account, very easy to use) & give some numbers so we know what we are talkign about specifically:
Meal 1: time = morning I assume
1 banana
granola bar - I grabbed the nutritional info for a Kudos bar -- dunno if its correct but its a ballpark representative.
Meal 2: time = midday
grilled chicken breast - i'll assume 6 oz
salad - i'll assume 2 c = lettuce, 1/2 tomato, 1/2 cucumber (just guessing)
any salad dressing or somethign on there?
Meal 3: time = night
same as Meal 2
Estimating some of the foods because we dont' have detail, I get the following from fitday.com:
If I include a standard salad dressing, 2 tbsp per meal ( = 4 tbsp for the day), I get:
Total cals: 1285, macronutrient breakdown: protein: 111 g (35%) / fat: 66 g (47%) / carb: 67 g (18%)
Without salad dressing:
Total cals: 1014, macronutrient breakdown: protein: 110 g (45%) / fat: 39 g (35%) / carb: 59 g (20%)
So keeping in mind that "progress" is driven 80% by diet (just a number, but its primarily driven by diet because your body responds to how you feed it -- the training in the world is irrelevant if you don't diet to fuel that activity), Basically your body has been shedding "weight" but do you have any idea your bodyfat. On this current diet your body has assumed it is entering a "starvation phase", i.e. it thinks you are living in a drought situation and it has slowed down its metabolism to preserve as much energy source as it can (bodyfat). With all that cardio demand though, it is probably consuming both fat AND MUSCLE. To that end I really want to hit people when they say they don't care about losing muscle. You lose muscle, then at the end of it all you are now "skinnyfat". This diet is similar to the Atkins Diet in that the carbs are very low, but also the total cals are very low & your aerobic demands are fairly high. God you must be exhausted. Atkins Diet absolutely sucks as a long-term lifestyle, so I wouldn't in a million years recommend it for anything other than a short transition period.
Basically you are stalling out because 1) your body can't sustain this diet much longer as far as what you perceive to be "progress" and 2) your cardio demands are consuming more energy source than you are ingesting so it is turning to both your bodyfat AND your muscle.
NO, STEROIDS AND CLEN ARE NOT THE WAY TO GO. That just means you are introducing yet another thing that forces your body to respond a certain way, but you still aren't providing enough of the basic stuff - energy to support what you are trying to do.
Probably need to know where you are now re: weight, height, bodyfat, in order to make a best recommendation, but NO I would not be looking into steroids when you can easily make adjustments via diet. The fact that you are looking for steroids vs making adjustments to your diet is tellign me that you aren't aware of the importance of diet in all of this - even if you chose to cycle, you absolutely need your diet in place to support whatever your goals are, and further you would be wasting your time if you aren't training. And also don't go jacking up your cardio even more. Frankly I think "more" is not always better. Again - if your diet isn't in place, then everythign else you do just taxes your body that much and tries to force it to do things that it isn't being fueled for.
I agree wholeheartedly w/ the comment about a long term plan now. If you've made the great progress of 50 lb, I'd start putting in place a diet & training program that will get you where you want to go w/o absolutely destroying your muscle mass in the process and making the whole effort more smooth and maintainable in the long run. Its supposed to be a LIFESTYLE -- if you do this wild cut down to whatever is your goal and then go off the program you've been on for so long I can guarantee a nice big fat rebound. Slow & deliberate trending down towards where you want to go will get you there in much better shape when you arrive.