I’ve decided it’s time to drop the poundage. So yesterday and today I started exercising. Not very much, since I don’t want to over-do it and be in pain the next day. Just some push-ups, sit-ups (I don’t like crunches), jogging, and some reps with the dumbbells. I’ll increase the number as the days progress. Breakfast is tea. I know that I should eat breakfast, but I never get round to it. I’m taking note of my intake, but I’m still working on Christmas dinner. I had the Brussels sprouts yesterday, and the ribs from the prime rib. There’s still a slab of prime rib left that should be good for two meals. So I’m not exactly in the low-Calorie mode yet.
I assume that ‘working out’ will build muscle. How long until the built muscle starts burning fat? When should I ‘tip over the edge’ and begin to lose weight?
IANAPT (personal trainer), but I am a fatass. IME, if you’re doing cardio, you should begin to lose at least a little weight before your increased muscle mass and fitness starts to have an impact. Then what will happen is your pace of weight loss will slow because part of the fat you’re losing will be replaced with heavier muscle. But even then you’re becoming more fit and more healthy, so it’s good for you even if you don’t get as much gratification from the scale.
A someone who’s in the same boat and who has had some success (from BMI 39 to BMI 29 in the last 15 months), first of all let me congratulate you on your project. You’ll see it is worth the effort. Do tell us about your progress .
Some thoughts from my personal experience:
exercise is a necessary component but not sufficient. You do need to change your eating habits.
It is a long term project. Anything heroic, you will soon tire of and stop doing.
So: don’t try anything heroic. You must change your habits to habits that you can sustain indefinitely.
you should make yourself familiar with the caloric content of typical foods as well as the energy expenditure of your kinds of exercise.
rule of thumb: 7000 calories = 1 kg of fat (3200 calories = 1 pound of fat). (e.g.: 3.6 2-litre-bottles of Coke = 1 pound of fat gained; water drunk instead: 1 pound of fat lost.)
something that has worked well for me: instead of converting an optional tidbit into calories which is kind of abstract (and you can always deceive yourself you’ll make it up later) I convert food into the exercise needed to burn the calories. Is this 5-gram piece of chocolade the café serves with my coffee (10 seconds’ worth of bliss) worth 5 sweat-drenched minutes on the exercise bike at 130 watts? - sometimes the answer for me is yes, but it pays to be conscious about one’s food. Like all changes of habits, this is only onerous for a few months.
on previous attempts to take up running I soon got into joint pain (the speed at which you gain the fitness to run seems to be faster than the speed at which your joints, ligaments and muscles adapt to the strain of running). I had a full sports medical checkup first, and on advice there got into a programme of a local association (a club for preventive sports) that builds up strenght through gymnastics, and endurance through walking/Nordic walking/jogging at the same time. In my experience it’s much more enjoyable to exercise in a group (my gymnastics group is made up mostly of other fatties and of people in their 40s to late 70s)
strength training is all very well (I have taken it up at two times a week) but you also need a good amount of aerobic exercise to reach the calorie consumption you need.
when you weigh yourself regularly on an accurate scale you’ll see day-to-day fluctuations of as much as several pounds. This is mainly due to different hydration. Don’t let yourself be discouraged by this - it’s the long term trend that counts. My way to deal with that was to enter my weight in an Excel sheet every morning first time at work, have Excel calculate weekly averages and only take those seriously.
tschild: I lost almost 30 kg/65 pounds back in the late-'80s. This is how I did it: Every weekday morning I would do the same things I’ve just started doing except for the 10 kg hand weights. Then as now, I started slowly. By the end I was doing 25 push-ups, 120 sit-ups, and jogging for 45 minutes. I would have a Slim Fast shake (I like them) for breakfast and lunch and eating whatever I felt like for dinner. I found that over time a fast-food child’s meal would fill me up. It took ten years to gain the weigh back. I blame my computer, which is much more interesting than exercising!
I rarely drink anything but water, tea (often with 0% fat milk and Splenda), or strong black coffee. The water where I live is said to be some of the best in the state.
I understand about joint pain! I destroyed my knees skiing and in a car crash (a year apart) in high school. Before, there were severl times when I had to cut my jogging short. But I kept at it. That’s why I’m starting slowly; to allow my body to get used to what I’m making it do.
I’ve never been one to join a gym. It’s 20 miles to the nearest one, so I’d never go. Same with the sit-ups vs. crunches. As I said, I don’t like crunches so I won’t do them. But I’ll do sit-ups. Better to do things I’ll do than to not do things I won’t. Maybe not as effective, but more effective than not doing anything.
The most effective exercise you can do is pushing yourself away from the table.
Plan a daily food intake that is sustainable. Not sure what time of day it is where you are, but if you’ve only consumed 400 calories and it’s after lunch, you are not on a sustainable diet.
Cardio, combined with some lifting is great. I find it gets puts me in a great mood, it helps me sleep better, and reduces my appetite. But creating a knowledge of good eating habits and setting up a meal plan that doesn’t starve or over-feed you is more important.
I agree on the 1-2 lbs a week idea, that is sustainable. You’re in this for the long term, not to hit a set weight.
It’s 1445 here. I tend not to eat in the morning. Starting to think about those boiled red potatoes. No idea of their Caloric intake, nor even how much they weigh.
If you can’t weigh the potatoes exactly, you can measure their volume and calculate an approximate weight using the data from the above site (which refers to baked potatoes rather than boiled, but should still help in obtaining a ballpark figure).
I agree with others that the diet is very important, maybe even more so (for losing weight) than exercising. About 3 years ago I started exercising only (and quite strenuously) and lost about 10lbs., but stalled for a long time. I started losing again after I was ready to watch my intake.
I like Fitday.com. It’s free and has pretty much all you could need. The only complaint I have is that it doesn’t have a whole lot of packed food calorie counts, but you can add your own items. I’ve lost a little over 10 lbs. in about 2 months. At first I think I cut too many calories because I got too hungry, but I found a good balance with experimentation.
If you can do it, I would also recommend getting your body fat tested (forget about bioelectroimpedance scales, I think calipers or underwater weighing are much better) so you have a good idea of what you should actually weigh based on fat percentage.
Lastly, I’ll echo the other sentiments that you should do exercise activites that you enjoy and don’t be too drastic on cutting calories. You need to have a diet you can live with, I mean really live with. I’m sure you know…you go off the diet, the pounds come back on.
What helped me drop 20 odd pounds this year was to stop eating when I wasn’t hungry.
I know that sounds way too simple but I didn’t eat until I was full-just not hungry anymore.
FWIW muscle won’t cause you to get skinny. Your appetite just goes up to match the higher metabolism due to more muscle. I knew a really muscular guy who ate 6000 calories a day. But he needed that many, he said anytime he went below 4000 a day he suffered from things like headaches and light headedness. I need about 4000-4500 a day and if I go below 2500 I have the same problem, I become light headed.
You really should eat breakfast though. It will stabalize your blood sugar. At least one study has shown eating regular breakfast leads to less of a risk of obesity and type II diabetes, at least if it is a high fiber, whole grain breakfast. I’d recommend a breakfast high in protein and fiber. Another issue is insulin sensitivity. People who are insulin sensitive seem to lose more weight on a high carb/low fat diets. People who are insulin resistant seem to lose more on a low carb/higher fat diet.
In the long run trying to control your biochemistry or appetite isn’t going to work. Look up the phrase ‘intuitive eating’.
First, I suggest you look into FitDay.com, or get the personal version of FitDay (.com is a freebie; personal is $20 to download), and use it to track your food intake and daily activity. So long as you expend more calories than you eat, you’ll lose weight.
Your muscles will burn fat right away. The problem is that when you build muscle, there is not an apparent weight loss befause muscle is denser than fat. How do you know when you’re building muscle, you ask? Whenever you go do a workout and come away sore, you’re building muscle. In reality, you’re still losing the fat, so don’t give up.
Right now, I have a daily deficit of about 2000 calories, and that translates into about 15 lbs per month loss. Everone’s basal metabolic rate is different, so YM will definitely V.
I think 1-2 pounds per week is a lot. That’s a substantial caloric deficit.
I put on weight after my knee surgery, and not till I started biking seriously did I take it off. I ate and drank more reasonably, exercised a lot, and took off about .5 a week for a year. I’ve held steady at that weight, by maintaining a pretty strict exercise routine.
I was lighter in the middle of the summer (when I was biking 150 miles per week) than I am now, but not by much.
I had a Slim Fast for breakfast. (Protein and fiber.) New Year’s Day is going to be anything but low-cal. Ham hocks and black-eyed peas and ham hocks and collard greens, plus cornbread. But I can freeze the beans. Anyway I went to the market to get the collard greens. I had to get into the olive oil Shayna and Spiny Norman gave me, so I got a baguette. I broke off more than I intended to (about four inches) and ate it with the olive oil. Delicious! And I had three slices of a Jenny-O turkey breast. Tilapia is thawing, so I’ll use the olive oil to cook it with Roma tomatoes, onion, garlic and capers for dinner. Not low-cal, but relatively healthy I think.
I was feeling my arms this morning. I feel them now. The weights must be working.
In a word, probably never. The muscle ain’t gonna burn off your weight all on it’s own. The NIH has recommendations based on evidence of varying degrees of quality, but, allowing for the fact that weight loss isn’t an exact science yet, the upshot seems to be:
Exercise won’t be a big part of losing weight. The diet is much more important just for taking off poundage.
On the other hand, exercise seems to help with weight maintenance and may be more important to longevity and health than weight itself. Also when people lose weight they tend to lose muscle mass too, so exercise exercise exercise. Just don’t expect exercise alone to take off weight.
You should reduce your caloric intake by 500 to 1000 calories per day. After about 6 months to a year, or after having lost 10% of your weight, weight loss will most likely slow or stop. At this point just focus on maintaining your weight loss for a while, and then, if you want to lose more, you can try again to reduce your intake.
Weight maintenance is the tough part. The body has quite a few mechanisms to discourage you from losing large amounts of weight, and will put a lot of effort into trying to get you to regain whatever you’ve lost. The overwhelming majority of people gain back the weight they’ve lost within 3 to 5 years. So, unless your losing a relatively small amount of weight, expecting just a “healthy lifestyle” to suffice in keeping you at a low weight is probably wishful thinking for most people. Be prepared to be very focused and work very hard if you’re going to try to keep the weight off. It’s at this point that exercise will probably help you the most, though, since there’s some evidence that exercise is a help in weight maintenance.
My opinion is, that whether you manage to lose that weight permanently or not, keep up the exercise - you can control your exercise level much more easily than your weight, and it’s incredibly important to your health.
Question: Is it better to jog, or walk. I can’t jog very long now. I’m working up to longer times slowly. But I can easily walk a mile or two. Which is better for weight loss? Should I do both? (i.e., do the other things and jog, and then take a walk later.) Should I do one one day, and the other the next? Should I do one instead of the other?
As long as you get an extended period of exercise in, either is fine. To build up your ability to jog longer, walk for 5 minutes, jog for 5, walk for 5, etc. Don’t sweat the specific details of your cardio; it’s much more important to find something that you enjoy doing and will keep up with.
Does anybody have tips on maintaining the discipline necessary to eat less? Sometimes I’ll get into a gung-ho mood and am ready to take on the low-calorie world, but then the second some tasty carbs show up that’s all out the window. I know how to eat healthfully, but I have immense amounts of trouble actually doing it, and merely thinking of how much I want to lose the weight (that is, greatly) doesn’t seem to help. I’m constantly eating things I very much know I shouldn’t if I want to lose weight. I really grapple with willpower.
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