Advice Wanted: Speeding Up Slow Weight Loss

In My Humble Opinion
21

Doctors always say this, because they care more about limiting their liability than improving their patient’s outcome.

If she can sit down and stand up, she can do it with a couple pounds in her hand. If she can reach her arms over her head, she can do that with a couple of pounds in her hand. If she can pick a penny up off the ground, she can bend over and lift a few pounds. She can then increase those “couple of pounds” at whatever rate she feels comfortable with, but most likely she can increase it a small amount each workout for a very long time.

This “incrementally loading normal human movement” will do more for her health, strength, body composition, balance, and quality of life than even a million steps a day.

22

with increased exercise and better diet - also remember that you will be creating muscle and losing fat - so there will be some ‘gains’ to offset the ‘loss’.

Keep in mind also that water wieght will vary over the course of the day - I;ve always heard to weigh your self at the same time - and it assumes that you’re ‘bodily functions’ are relatively evened out.

Whats this mean?

a) look at long term goals - don’t focus as much on day/day gains/losses

b) without knowing her actual body mass (fat to muscle, etc) - she may be doing MUCH better than a scale will show.

c) it took time to put it on - it will take time to take it off.

23

I tend to have very slow weight loss unless I restrict carbs a lot. And the reality is, I feel better when I keep my carbs low, and those I do get come mainly from vegetables.

I still don’t lose super fast, but I went from maybe 1-2 lbs per month to the more typical 1-2 lbs per week, so this is the suggestion I’d make for your friend to try.

24

If she’s still losing 2 lbs a month and is sustaining that I wouldn’t change a thing. She’s doing better than 98% of people trying to lose weight. What she’s doing is working, and is sustainable.

She didn’t gain the weight quickly, she shouldn’t expect to lose it quickly.

25

Very true, but if she can make some sustainable tweaks that would further increase fitness and improve diet, leading to slightly faster weight loss, that’s not a bad thing.

26

(Ignoring all other replies in this thread.)

Here’s what I learned:

Walking is crap exercise. Sure, it beats couch-potatoing, but it’s still not a very efficient way to burn calories. Even at a pretty quick pace (4mph), walkers still don’t burn that much. I walked for about a year before I just gave up on it as exercise. I found other forms of exercise and one thing included a lot of resistance/weight training. And once I had a regular regimen of training that required me to build muscle (and not just work the heart, lungs and feets with walking), then 40 pounds melted off me like magic.

A little research helped me make sense of that: At rest, while you are sleeping, your muscles go into repair activity, which requires protein. (So, #1, healthy eating). As damaged, sore, tired muscles go about the business of repairing, they build up new tissue from all that healthy lean protein you’ve been eating, so you build up muscle. Fat does not burn fat. Muscle burns fat – it uses that fat for fuel when it runs out of bioavailable protein. Fat is just calories stored, but muscle is what uses up all the calories taken in.

The more muscle you have, the more fat you burn. At night. While you’re sleeping. (#2, sleep regularly and well) (and #3, you need resistance training as much as you need cardio.) This is why men tend to lose weight faster than women do – because they generally start out with more dense and more muscle tissue, which uses up more fat stores faster – and women carry more fat on our bodies in general because babymaking.

I think a big mistake many people make in weight loss efforts is thinking of it as only a two-pronged approach: 1) eat well and 2) do cardio. I say a four-pronged approach is more effective, and I learned that from my own personal experience, YMMV and so forth, but that is 1) eat well/less, 2) do cardio, 3) resistance/weight/strength training, 4) sleep well and regularly. (and 5. drink more water than other stuff)

I’ve seen studies (google yourself) that directly link good sleep habits to weight loss. Your metabolism and your circadian rhythms are a single system that works together. Screw up one and you’ll also have problems with the other.

27

Maybe not.

If she has chronic pain and lung issues (I have them as well), she may be taking medications that will slow weight loss.

Antidepressants are often used to help with chronic pain; they should come with a warning that they will make you fat. LOTS of people have trouble losing weight while taking these.

Ditto pain meds.

Medications for asthma can also cause trouble losing weight. I’ve battled my own intermittent use of oral steroids and ongoing use of inhaled steroids. Neither help. Steroids also can make you crave carbs. I’ve found that I gain less weight on them if I increase my protein and decrease my simple carbs.

Also – and this is something no one will mention – we don’t know what effects most multiple meds combos have on the body.

I’ve had luck with riding a stationary bike. I increase my speed to be faster than I would with just walking, but it doesn’t affect any of my pain issues; I can slow down if my asthma acts up. YMMV, of course.

Also, if she is over 35 or 40, weight loss gets tougher.

ETA – ugh, fitness trackers. These are designed by young, healthy, mostly male people. As DSeid mentions, they’re created for some mythic average person – I’d add that person is young, male, and healthy.

28

True, but I don’t think there are any easy, sustainable tweaks to what she’s doing. Yes, you can play games with low/no carb diets, and doing some food swaps, but she’s got a pretty good diet going on right now. If she could do more intense exercise it sounds like she would, so the workouts she’s doing now are about at her limits.

It’s frustrating and may continue to be so. It may get worse as she loses weight it will get harder to keep the gains going at the same rate. But until she plateaus I’d say that what she’s doing now is best in the long run. Or long walk. :slight_smile:

29

The formulas say she “ought to be losing weight faster than this,” but she’s not a machine or a computer. She’s a human being.

She should take her fitness band and her apps and her scales and put them in a box and ignore them for a month and see what happens. She needs to mix it up - her diet, her methods, and especially that ridiculous 20 hour-per-week walking habit. Her life sounds absolutely dreadful! No wonder she’s frustrated at her piss-poor results.

Diet - She’s learned something about portion control by now, and she should have learned that counting calories is not an exact science. Different diets work for different people. She should switch up what she’s eating, chill out and eat reasonable portions of some good food. Trying a lower-carb diet might be just the ticket.

Methods - She’s doing all this meticulous tracking and recording of what machines are telling her she’s walking and consuming and burning, but why on earth would she assume the machines are accurate? They’re working from averages and algorithms, and probably pretty good ones, but like I said above, humans are not machines or computers. She needs to trust her body, not an app.

Walking - 3 HOURS A DAY? EVERY DAY? That’s fucking insane. Why on earth is she doing this? It makes no sense. There is SO much more she could do with 3 hours a day! Is she interested in overall fitness or just the number on the scale? Is she doing anything other than walking? Is she doing any strength work? Core work? Is she even getting her heart rate into the right range by walking? Doesn’t she want to train other muscles? Why EXACTLY did the doctor say she couldn’t lift weights? There are almost no health conditions that would completely proscribe any kind of weight workout. After all, she lifts her own damn self, doesn’t she? Is there any reason that she can’t do a body-weight workout? This page describes a good basic one that she can modify if necessary.

Most of all, she should look into getting a personal trainer. He or she can show her how to get much better results in a lot less time. The trainer should be able to work with and around her physical restrictions, though it seems like she needs to get a better understanding from her doctor as to what she really can and can’t do. Yes, a trainer is expensive, but walking for 3 hours a day with poor results is expensive too. She can do as few or as many sessions as she wants or needs. If she’s motivated enough to walk for 3 hours a day for 6 months, she’s more than motivated enough to do the routines that the trainer gives her on her own.

30

Depends on where you live. When I lived on the coastal plain, yeah, walking didn’t do much for me over the long term. Now that I live in the mountains, even a walk around my neighborhood is constant uphill/downhill. It’s great exercise here. I don’t need a stair-stepper or an elliptical, I just go outside.

I agree with Green Bean, your friend needs to vary her exercise and cut back on it, too. She needs to take a day off to let her muscles recover. Exercising 3-5 times a week is what I usually see recommended. 7 days is pushing it.

31

Walking is crap exercise if you don’t do it for more than 45 minutes. I personally wouldn’t recommend more than 90 minutes though.

I would also recommend walking no sooner than at least 4 - 6 hours after your last meal, that way your muscle glycogen should be sufficiently depleted and once you get past the 45 minute mark you should be burning pure fat. That’s my theory anyway.

32

I concede your point. I live on mostly flat land so walking burns so few calories for the time it takes. I would also say that walking uphill is a form of resistance training, which is what I was advocating in that post. So we agree. In general.

33

The magic of walking is that you can do it in small increments and seamlessly integrate it in to your life. I walk about three miles a day as a part of my commute. But I don’t really notice the time spent on it, because it’s just a part of getting from here to there. It’s also easy for me to walk a short ways on a break or while I am on the phone or whatever. It doesn’t affect my schedule, but it sneaks a little activity in.

So, in short, I find your friends approach to walking to be pretty unusual, and not really taking advantage of what’s good about walking.

I would guess your friend is taking in more calories than she thinks. There is a difference between a small apple and one of those giant mutant apples, and in reality a half an apple is probably a more appropriate serving.

34

most people are rarely 4-6 hours from thier last meal - so, in your scenario, they would never get to take the walk.

Got a reference that all the muscle glycogen would be depleted BY SITTING ON YOUR ASS? Did you read the earlier posts related to what burns first?

35

That’s a good way to look at things, and you reminded me that I need to give more attention to sleeping. Thanks.

It’s funny that just this morning I was just thinking about how to conceptualize the elements of the exercise portion of a general fitness program, except I see it has having 3 facets, not 2: Cardio, strength, and “core.” There’s probably a better name for it than “core,” but it’s where I lump in a variety of things such as working your abs/core muscles, flexibility, balance, and so forth. A fitness routine should address all three areas.
I guess this is why the OP’s friend’s 3 hours a day of walking got me into such a lather. It might have been a good workout for her 6 months ago, but at this point, it barely addresses any of the three areas. She is making no gains in either cardio, strength, or core. And if her main goal is burning calories, the walking isn’t even really helping there. She’s maintaining her ability to walk long distances, but that’s about it. It’s better than sitting on the couch, but if she’s looking to lose weight and get in better shape, she’s wasting a huge amount of time and effort.

Then again, the OP didn’t say anything about her friend wanting to get more fit, just to lose weight.

Elihana - if your friend needs some encouragement, maybe point out that she’s gotten fit enough that even 3 hours of walking every day isn’t cutting it any more. That’s a big achievement for a former couch potato!

That’s so true. My mom went on a low-protein diet for 6 weeks and gained a pound. But she lost inches and was visibly slimmer. She was slightly bummed about the number on the scale, but the fact that she looked and felt so much better more than made up for it.

36

I recommend swimming. It burns a lot of calories in a shorter amount of time, doesn’t stress the joints, etc. if you can swim laps for 30 minutes, that’s quite a workout. As you get faster, of course, you’ll burn more calories.

Sadly, swimming laps is horribly boring. Still, she can get a much more efficient workout in. And some people find a zen-like zone.

37

Recover from what? Walking is not a stress that requires recovery, it’s the way humans travel from one place to another. This isn’t what “3-5 times a week” means in the context of exercise. Do you think humans were only meant to walk 3-5 days a week? How do you get from your bedroom to the bathroom on the other 2-4 days? Are fish supposed to take a break from swimming 3 days out of every 7 as well?

It’s important to keep in mind the stress-recovery-adaptation cycle, because it is the basic foundation for how living things adapt to a changing environment. There is a baseline: this is what your body is used to. An equilibrium you are uniquely adapted to. The amount of strength you have, the speed you can run, etc. In order to improve anything about your body you must apply a stress that is large enough to produce a response (unlike lifting a one ounce pink rubber weight) but small enough to recover from (unlike a gunshot wound to the head). Your body then has a whole slew of hormonal and chemical responses (called recovery) that translate into preparing you for a recurrence of that stress by making you stronger, faster, or able to endure more.

Walking the same amount you did yesterday is not a stress, and therefore requires no recovery. It is the baseline. It burns calories, sure, but it produces no systemic response. I see this time and time again. People get off the couch for the first time in their lives, restrict their diets, and see amazing results. A few months later, they’re frustrated by slowing weight loss, halting strength gains, or no speed improvements. The sad fact is that they’ve adapted to the stress of their new lifestyle. No more improvements can come from continuing the same routine. They need to apply another, larger stress to see further results.

Walking, beyond the initial shift from sedentary to active, is not a very large stress for organisms like us that have evolved to walk every day. I would suggest she cut back on the walking (but not stop) and apply a different stress instead during the hours she would have spent walking. Weight training, despite what her doctor told her, is the perfect replacement. She can start from zero, and go as high as she feels. If she incrementally increases the load every workout (or every week, or whatever) she is necessarily increasing the stress on her body in a controlled fashion. This is how you keep improving over the long term (repeated, small increases is also the type of stress that requires recovery – THAT is what recovery days and “3-5 days a week” thinking is for). Doing the same thing you did last week, and the week before, just doesn’t cut it.

38

That is technically not true. If you start eating not enough nutrients your body will start stock piling fat and water weight because it thinks you’re starving.

39

7 days a week isn’t pushing it for cardio but for toning your muscles need a break.

I would make sure as well that nothing is off with the thyroid because it will slow metabolism.

Check other hormone levels.

Check for body toxicity. If it’s high you can obtain ph balancing water drops to make sure you water is alkaline and able to cleanse the inside.

Every few weeks do a one to two day detox.

Alternate high an low carb days. It keeps your body on point.

Substitute a meal or two with a healthy weight loss shake like Shakeology, body by vi, or Vemma bod-e shakes with low cal soy almond or coconut milk.

Try limiting gluten.

Try to eat mostly raw.

Replenish nutrients and hydration correctly after a workout.

Try hcg drops

Try hgh

Try dhea

If over 35 men can try testosterone women can try progesterone.

Always consult a doctor when updating a diet/workout regimen.

40

There’s alot of woo in there -

ph balancing water drops?

hcg, hgh, dhea?

what the hell are you ‘detoxing’ from?