tdn, do yourself a favor and keep up the exercising. I seriously didn’t lose anything for a long time at one point when I first started trying to get back in shape. I dropped a couple of kilos initially (I was almost 90 kg at my fattest, which is about 20 kg heavier than I was as a senior in high school) and then nothing happened for a couple of months. I was feeling better, workouts were getting easier, but I wasn’t losing anything.
What worked for me: I cut my cardio time to less than 20 minutes, but increased the intensity. I switched from steady efforts to intervals, and tried to keep my heart rate at about 80% of my max on the peaks, about 65–70% on the valleys. I switched from doing light weight to mixing in heavier weights with low repetitions. I did a two week cycle of heavy/light workouts, 3 days a week, MWF.
About 4–6 weeks into this higher intensity workout, I started dropping fat like crazy for the next few weeks. You could actually see my stomach shrink between one weekly photo and the next (I only took pictures for a few months close to the beginning, to keep me motivated). I needed the light weightlifting and the easy cardio to get me in enough shape that I wouldn’t hurt myself when I started doing real workouts. Things leveled out again after that, but something I learned from that is that variation in your exercise, and pushing yourself to do more; heavier, faster, harder, whatever progression you want to use, will often get results.
If you’re at a plateau, you need to change something, but please don’t quit completely. Change the intensity of your exercise, add some weight lifting if you’re not doing it already. Paradoxically, increasing your calorie intake a bit, especially your protein consumption, can help you lose fat if you’ve been on a restricted calorie diet. There might be other recommendations a dietician or exercise specialist can give you if you consult them.
You will never regret staying with exercise, but you will almost certainly regret it if you stop doing it for too long. I know I did. I was an athlete in high school and college, and got fat for the first time in my life after I broke my wrists, got depressed from that and other stuff, and stopped doing anything active as a consequence. It took almost as long to get the weight off as it did to put it on, and I had a prior active lifestyle to use as an example for myself.
I’ve had a couple of setbacks, including one “break” that ate up the better part of a year. Because of that I strongly encourage you to learn from my mistakes: it’s much harder to get started than it is to continue, and it’s way too easy to let a hiatus stretch out too long. I gained back a good 5 kg of the 12–13 kg I initially lost because of that break, and it took more time than I want to think about to get back to the levels of exercise I’d reached before, though thankfully the fat wasn’t as stubborn the second time around.
Seriously, don’t worry as much about the food part as you do about keeping active. I only kept close track of my intake and eating patterns in the early part of my weight loss, as a way of re-educating myself on what a “portion” should look like, and as a way of getting back into healthier patterns of eating (5–6 smaller meals spread out throughout the day rather than 3 larger meals). In my experience, diet is not anywhere near as important as exercise.
I’m not saying to go out and start eating 5000 calorie meals, but try to stay as active as you can make yourself if you do decide you need a bit of time off from calorie counting. And try your damndest not to let your break last longer than a couple of weeks, or it will be much easier to find excuses not to start again.
A note for those with machine-induced de-motivation: fat-measuring scales are often close to worthless, especially if you start putting on more than average muscle mass. Feel free to use it as a mental boost if your numbers are going down, but pay more attention to the tape measure, actual weight, and the mirror if your Tanita or whatever scale shows little change or an upward trend.
Mine cost me ¥12,000 and can’t seem to figure out the difference between having a serious gut that prevents you from wearing half your clothes, and a stomach that’s flat even when you don’t suck it in. Seriously, I lost close to 30 lbs. and it showed my body fat going up from when I first started using it. It got less accurate as I got in better shape, sometimes showing fluctuations as large as 5% from day to day, even when I followed good practice by weighing in at the same time of day. Weight-wise, it shows about what other scales show, but the body fat measurement bears no resemblance to reality.
Muscle building exercise like calisthenics, weight lifting, or gymnastics-type stuff will help A LOT. Not only will it help you with losing fat, it’ll help you with keeping it off. I recently took a 6 week break due to the holidays and travel, which gave me no access to a gym and little time or motivation to do what exercise I could do outside the gym. Some calisthenics and stretching a few times in that 6 weeks was about all I did. During that time, I didn’t pay much attention to what I ate — aside from mostly-unconscious portion control. I feel a bit bloated and nauseous if I eat until I’m “full” instead of about 80% full now that I’m used to smaller and more frequent meals.
My scale weight only changed by about a kilo. I give most of the credit to my workout program prior to this hiatus that packed on around 4 kg of muscle I didn’t have last year. A side benefit of doing mixed strength and intensive cardio conditioning is that my first workout after the break, that I did the other day, was one that would have either killed me or made me want to die even as recently as 6 months ago. I actually thought I was taking it just a bit easy. The carry-over lasted longer than I thought it would, thank the gods. I still got a bit sore, though.
Negative motivation is actually what helped me get back on the horse after being a lazy bum for a couple of weeks after my life routine started again. The thought of procrastinating until one of my regular workouts was torture — instead of just pleasantly painful — was not a happy one. That was the stick.
The carrot was the goal of being able to do some of the workouts from Crossfit un-scaled by the end of this year. I’ve been using them as my workout planner since sometime early in 2007. I still have to scale the goal weights, though I’m usually doing full reps now. Since the workouts vary, and they are all quite challenging, it keeps my motivation up. It also provides inspiration since there are kids and old people who do their stuff, as well as some people who show what you might be able to achieve if you stick with it.
Even if you can’t do the workouts they show, the principles work very well. There’s a ton of info available free on their site. I’m just now getting to the point where I’m willing to pony up money for the things they don’t just give away. And I found a place that gives better scaling guidelines than my initial “guess and try it” method, especially for newbies: Brand X Martial Arts Forums.
