~30 days:
I've been focused on getting in shape. I like doing IF and not having to follow some strict bs diet for 3 months. I am however aiming for a set amount of protein and overall calories, but not too strictly (mostly just 1-1.5g of protein per lean mass and eating until I feel good and satisfied). I also do a 40h fast once a week (currently on a Saturday) which I might cut out later. On most of the days I do between 18:6 and 20:4 ratio of fasting:eating windows and it feels pretty good so far.
Felt a little deprived from the 40h fast that ended today at 12:00 so threw in some heavy food like a massive burger.
I am positively surprised that I haven't lost any lean body mass (or at least it's minimal)
The definition of abs is starting to show (it's very very subtle but I can see the separation). Currently my stats are 6'2 77.1kg (66.1kg lean) 14.1% BF. The side effects of the fast body fat drop are noticeable, but nothing that I can't handle. It's mostly bad moods like anger and depression, nothing I'm not used to really. Meditation helps a lot with that.
In regards to ASC, I haven't noticed anything much. Probably since I haven't been in any situations that would give me live feedback. I've been thinking of starting my own twitch channel in cs:go, but unsure about that since just the thought of it brings up massive anxiety. I do have more than 12 years of fps experience under my belt with more than 10.000h of game-play so experience isn't the problem, it's rather the mindset.
People seem to have great results with the new OF and OGSF subs. Great to hear!
On around day 33 I had this incredibly surge of confidence, I think it was the first one so far on this run. With my past run I experienced this within a few days of starting, not sure why it took so much longer this time.
Any way I felt like I could do anything and couldn't sleep because of the excitement of the experience.
Thinking backwards I have come to realize that I have somehow managed to hide away my true self again and I'm incredibly disappointed. It's like I have been suppressed by my own fears so strongly that every action is a reflection of the fears, not me. I can't express how sad that makes me. I want to destroy every fear and insecurity so that I don't have to feel this hopelessness again. This will take some time.
My weight is still at 77.1kg which is very good because that means my lean weight has increased. My bodyfat is at 12.9%, 1.2% bf loss this week. Sadly like for most men most of my bf is stored around the belly range, so if I want to have proper ab definition I'm going to have to go under 8%.
Been a rather shitty week on ASC. The general feeling has been depressed and angry, but I guess there's also those days.
There has been an interesting side to this week though. It's like something has pushed me towards using my intuition over the analysing thinking (meditation seems to play a huge part in this). And each of these decisions that I make without including the thinking part of my mind has been rewarded quite fast (can't mention how, but there's no way these things would have happened randomly). Now I don't know (in the broken "words" kind of explaining way) how this all fits together, but I can say for sure that this is more than a mere coincidence. It is more than simply staying in the present, although that comes pretty close to describing it.
Had 7 lucid dreams yesterday. Yeap, 7! Was trying to meet my "perfect sexual parter" and she was spot on!
I've run into a wall with the cutting, my BF is still at 12.9% but weight has dropped to 76kg. It was a stressful week and that interfered with my eating. Going to get back on track with the next week.
EDIT: Something that has been bothering me is that I feel like a doormat a lot of the time. That probably comes from my father since he is literally the biggest doormat and shady manipulator that I know. It makes me angry that I can't seem to assert myself when it would be the right thing to do. I'm not sure how ASC will deal with this, but I hope to make progress in this area.
Aggression has grown a lot, to a point where I can't keep it down all the time like in the past. This is an unusual experience since I have always been the "kind" "nice" and "passive" doormat kind of guy. It doesn't feel as uncomfortable being aggressive as it did on my first run of AM6. Already this tells me that the growth has been tremendous. I want to be comfortable around my aggression and not feeling like I have to stuff it down. This seems to be happening now on ASC.
Had a meeting with 2 people about a French language course last week. I felt incredibly anxious and weak. I told them I feel anxious a lot of the time with people and they brushed it off, take medication and bs like that. That moment I saw through the crap and the superficial shit that was supposed to show me how much in control of their lives they are when it is actually the opposite. At some point they recommended that I do something and for a response I told them I won't be put in wheel to slave away for the rest of my life on a meaningless job, that just won't happen. They both seemed a little shocked.
I am a little disappointed though, I still felt pretty weak and submissive at times during the conversation when technically there was no reason that I should.
Not going to lie, I've been gaming quite a lot recently and damn am I good at it. Sadly it's just another escaping mechanism so even that becomes an autopilot zombie habit.
After my 6 months on ASC I will either go with EHPRA 2.0 or AM6. I am starting to feel ready to give AM another shot.
My BF has dropped to 12.1% with 75kg and the abs are showing quite nicely.
Day 64:
Purchased the new EHPRA 2.0 which will be my next sub. I will be running ASC for 5 months instead of 6 because of the refund policy. However I highly doubt I will be needing to use it since already the free EHPRA worked very well on me.
Won't be updating this week other than to note here my stats. 74kg, 11.5% bf, 65.5 lean, Abs are showing even on days when I haven't worked out.
I have no idea what's happening on ASC. I am not motivated to do anything really, everything seems so meaningless. ASC seems like a very unstable program to me so far. By that I mean every day is different, like everything is absolutely in a chaos. To other's I seem somewhat confident but inside it's only insecurity, this is very unpleasant and anxiety causing. At times I feel strong, but at the same time I know it's not true and if something were to challenge it the house of cards would crumble.
I am between stopping at 90 days (followed by EHPRA 2.0) and going for the full 6 months. Thinking logically and comparing the pros/cons of either choice.
A big one is that the confidence on ASC is not the core confidence but rather the situational confidence, so it's hard to say whether doing 6 months would benefit me that greatly in the long run.
On the contrary I have a fear of appearing weak while running EHPRA, the vibe of the sub seems like it's very passive and a rather feminine one. I have come to hate that weak vibe and weakness in general.
Doing the pros and cons I don't seem to prefer either choice. I do still have a month to decide so there's time.
I'm glad you updated your journal , thanks for that. This is one of those subs I wanted to rock it out , but have been sort of intimidated by it. I'm on my second run of AM , and it's going great. What I can tell you is , there is a part of me that knows I should have done EPHRA; but have been delaying it. It may be in your best interest to run EPHRA and heal , EPRHA and ASC is still on my to do list.
Have you considered that maybe the insecurity you feel is coming up in response to the subliminal statements? I'm experiencing a lot of insecurity and other fears right now on stress relief and that's how I'm interpreting my experience. I think these fears are causing me a lot of stress so stress relief is flushing them out and hence I experience them consciously.
(03-09-2016, 03:14 PM)Womanizer Wrote: [ -> ]there is a part of me that knows I should have done EPHRA; but have been delaying it.
I can relate to that, EHPRA is always on my "to do" list.
@
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I am certain that it is partly resistance to ASC. The thing I wonder about is whether the same fears will keep appearing again and again, if yes then I got 2 options. Whether I face them on my own which has been difficult for me in the past or swap to something that addresses fears like EHPRA 2.
Thanks for the posts, hopefully I'll have some more positive stuff to write on my next update.
I am having really difficult mornings, by that I mean it's incredibly hard to get out of bed due to depression and anxiety. Like this Friday, my anxiety kicked in so hard that it produced quite horrible physical effects, I don't think I have had that since I last went to school. I managed to get a workout in after all and that got my anxiety down to a level where I could just push through it. ASC effects seemed to kick in a few hours after that and the evening it was full on confidence. While walking I felt like I was 3m tall and relatively at ease.
I love when ASC comes through and I just let go, feeling so confident and relaxed, it's sort of like a feeling of absolute power. However the resistance is severe in my case, I could even go as far as to say it's worse than on OF4g. There's one thing that is very different from when I ran OF4g though, it's that I haven't drank any booze or smoked a single cigarette, in short there's nothing to really cover that fear up with other than maybe escaping to video games.
Noting down my cutting progress. 73.1kg (65.8kg lean) 9.9% BF. FUCK yeah! under 10!
I was comparing the pictures from December to the ones I took today and the difference is insane. I haven't gained any noticeable muscle so I was a bit disappointed about that however my main goal was cutting down to a low bf% before I'll be focusing on gaining some muscle and I am on point with that. I have about 3 more weeks until I am supposed to have hit 8%bf which was my initial goal from ~21%.
Started thinking about it and I doubt ASC can help me with escapism and fear/anxiety. These seem like the 2 most debilitating things that are holding me in place right now. The roots for these are rather deep so I am changing to EPRHA 2.0 after I have completed my 3rd month which to me is still a very good amount of time. Also I want to give AM6 another go after I am done with EPRHA. I don't know how much confidence building is in EPRHA, hopefully my confidence will keep growing!
Another thing I discovered going through my older posts is that I have a huge difficulty trusting people, that has to be related to the anxiety.
Posture is very upright and upheld not slouched, there's a few exceptions though like when I sit, it's hard to stay put so I move a lot. A few days back I was walking in the city and and this group of big guys walk toward me (I am a relatively slim guy) and all of them move out the way, making more space for me than the do for themselves.
My facial structure is hard to pin on the subs since I have been cutting down on bodyfat and that improves the aesthetics by itself.
Was writing this essay today, everything was going great and I was feeling very confident, until a moment that I started reliving my past in my head (subject was something in the lines of "Your best memory from childhood"), SO MUCH negativity surfaced all at once and in 5 minutes all of my confidence was gone, I felt like shit and have been in a sort of a daze ever since. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? This has happened quite a lot in the past, I'm not quite sure what triggers this, but every time this happens it saps all of my energy within minutes if not even seconds leaving me in this feeling of absolute emotional overwhelmed feeling after which it's hard to understand anything that's going on. Literally, like I can't even understand what people are saying after this wave of absolute emotional mindfuck overcomes me. Not only am I incredibly tired, but it's like my intelligence drops from 100% down to 2%.
Has anyone got any insight about what this might be? Or can just relate to this?
Last few days have been odd... Being too social and getting too emotionally invested in a group seems to push me out of groundedness and I don't like that. Brings out too much of the feminine side. I'm not too sure how to explain it, it's like getting carried away and too excited.
Shit like this makes me want to run AM instead of EPRHA2.0 next. I have never really been that much of a strong masculine guy in my life, however after the long OF run and the current ASC, this has started to slowly change and I like that, being grounded feels incredibly powerful when compared to being the so called "social butterfly".
Running ASC to me seems like a horse trying to pull 10 carriages, horse being ASC and carriages being the deep stuff that doesn't align with the goal of ASC. So now I got a few options, keep whipping that horse (stay on ASC), start removing the carriages (EPRHA 2.0), or do both at the same time (AM6) and currently I think it would be best to remove a few carriages before I get that horse moving again.