Alrighty. I fear i may be at a weight loss plateau. I’ve already lost a good deal of weight, about 10" on my waist so far, and i want to lose about 6" more. I don’t really go by pounds as my weight itself isn’t a good guage of how much fat i’ve lost. I go by waist size and in my experience 1" is about 5 lbs of fat, right now im about 259 lbs.
I want to lose the weight painlessly and sanely though. No hunger or starvation whatsoever if i can help it. I am a big person and i normally lose weight fine on 3000 calories a day. That is with 1100 calories of aerobics 5x a week though. Well, most of what i lost was with 600 calories in exercise a day 5-6x a week, but since im smaller now and i assume my body is fighting back harder against weight loss it takes closer to 1100 now to accomplish the same thing.
I have noticed that when i cut my calories down to 2500-2600 i start starving. I dream about food all day, count the minutes until i can eat again, etc. I don’t want to live like that so if i can’t lose weight on 3000 calories anymore and i don’t want to cut calories my only other option is to increase energy expenditure. I have noticed it doesn’t matter if i do no exercise or do over 2000 calories worth of exercise in a day, i am comfortable eating only 2800-3200 calories a day so i will do that instead of cutting calories.
Normally i do ellipticals for cardio 5x a week and i lift weights 2x a week. At my size and the resistance level i do ellipticals on i burn about 1200 calories an hour. I do about 45-55 minutes on the elliptical when i do this. I figure if this isn’t enough, maybe i can add an hour of an activity like walking later on in the day to add another 550 calories or so. Maybe i can go to the gym 2x a day and do something else like walk uphill on the treadmill or do stair-steppers for 25 minutes. I don’t know if i want to do both workouts back to back and spend 2 hours straight in the gym doing both at once because if i did that i’d probably have to eat halfway through it and i can’t really eat in the gym. And i’d rather not drive home covered in sweat Maybe i’ll have to work on that or eat outside. Either way, burning 1700 calories by exercising over the course of 2 hours doesn’t really seem like something i’d be comfortable with. I don’t know enough about fat oxidation to know if i will actually burn a good deal of fat and my daily food intake or if i will just burn alot of muscle doing that much at once.
However if i were to do 2 aerobic workouts a day i’d burn roughly 1700+ calories a day in energy. I sometimes do do 2 workouts a day like i will do ellipticals in the morning, then walk for an hour at night. I notice i can still eat around 3000 calories and not starve doing this. However is this too much, is it even possible to burn that much in exercise? I thought the body could only burn 2.5x the resting metabolic rate per day. If so then i guess 1700 calories in exercise is feasable, but still seems sort of unrealistic considering that some people live on less than that.