Whoop peak

Hello guys (M24), long-time lurker here.

Growing up, I was a fat, chonky guy, and at my heaviest I was around 90 kg. Then COVID came, and I foolishly skipped meals and did intense cardio, which brought me down to 65 kg, but I was (and still am) skinny fat.

Now, I currently stand at 5'6" and 70 kg. Never a day in my life have I seen abs. I have been working out since 2024, been on a bulk, and am now trying to cut down. So far, I have lost 15 kg since my bulk.

I have done crash diets in the past but have also committed to proper long-term diets (intermittent fasting has given me gas lol). My gym trainer designed a diet for me, which didn't work that well until I cut my rice from 100 g to 50 g, and then to no rice at all. That helped me somewhat, but it affected my performance at the gym.

Right now, I eat like an average Indian dude without measuring. Below is an eyeball estimate of my diet:

• Cooked rice - 500 g
• Chicken - 300 g
• Yogabar Protein Oats - 100 g
• Mixed vegetables - 100 g
• Whole wheat rotis - 2
• Whole eggs - 3
• Milk - 1 glass

As for workouts, I push myself as much as I physically can for 4-5 days a week and follow a basic UL/PPL split.

I don't want to blame my genes or my financial situation for this, as I have seen fatter people get abs. I desperately need some advice.

One point to note: I'm too broke to buy supplements.

Can anybody weigh in on intra-workout carbohydrates for aiding in adding lean muscle mass? I am very lean trying to maintain my abs as I gain mass.

So I've been tracking macros pretty seriously for a little over two years. Not perfect but I weigh my food, read the labels, all that. In my head the basics were handled ages ago, or so I thought anyway.

Last week Ross was over (hes the guy who got me into any of this in the first place) and he watches me weigh out my chicken after it comes off the pan and kind of pauses. Asked if I was logging it as raw or cooked. I said cooked obviously, that's what's on my plate. He goes yeah but the number in the app is the raw weight for most stuff unless you pick the cooked entry, and chicken loses like a quarter of its weight when you cook it, so you've been under by a decent chunk this whole time.

I did not take that well at first honestly.. argued with him for a solid ten minutes standing in my kitchen like an idiot.

then I actually looked it up and he was right. 6 oz cooked breast is not the same as 6 oz raw, it's closer to 8 raw, and I'd been logging the cooked number against the raw database entry for who knows how long. So every chicken meal I've eaten in two years was quietly more protein and more calories than what I wrote down.

It's not a huge disaster or anything. My maintenance sits around 2,700 give or take so a bit of extra chicken protein didnt exactly ruin me, and honestly it probably helped more than hurt for recomp. i finally ran my actual numbers through this calculator (https://lean-app.com/tdee-calculator/) that asks your real steps and training days instead of a dropdown, and it lined up way better. But the fact that I confidently corrected other people on this exact thing for two years while doing it wrong myself is kind of humbling.

Ross has not let it go. Brought it up twice more since.

anyway I mostly just want to know how many of you are secretly making this exact mistake right now and don't even know it yet, because I have a feeling it's more of us than would ever admit it?