Ogor

I genuinely can't remember, but I've seen a consultant neurophysiologist, who did a bunch of tests with needles and electric shocks. Considering I was presenting with muscle wastage, I think he'd have tested for that, wouldn't he? Or at least for anything pointing towards that? He couldn't find anything unusual or abnormal, anyway.

1. 5' 7" 2.This morning: 10 stone 7 (150 pounds). Four weeks ago: about 11 stone (154 pounds). Hard to say exactly because it fluctuates all the time now. But the recent trend has been down from a high of 11 stone 5 (160 pounds), which is where I was last November. (For the two year period from Jan 2015 to Jan 2017 I was 10 stone 2 (143 pounds) without any fluctuation at all.) 3. I genuinely don't have a tape measure so I can't say. I take a 30 waist in trousers, and that hasn't changed (they just felt uncomfortably tight when I had more weight on, whereas when I was slimmer for two years they needed to be held up with a belt). I'm not sure my arms have changed size, really - they've just gone from being firm to being soft and squashy where the muscle should be. I'll look through cupboards etc and see if I can find a tape measure. 4. OK, this sounds dumb but I only know the numbers on the machines and I'm not sure what actual weight they are. My routine is: Chest Press (machine at 45): 4 sets of 12 reps Shoulder Press (machine at 25): 4 sets of 10 reps Vertical Traction (machine at 55): 4 sets of 10 reps on each set of handles, so total of 8 sets Lat Machine (set to 45): 2 sets of 10 reps on each of the three parts of the handle (lats, triceps, biceps), so total of 6 sets Hip Abduction (machine at 55): 4 sets of 12 reps Hip Adduction (machine at 35): 4 sets of 12 reps Hand bike: 10 minutes at level 15 Step Machine: 10 minutes at level 14 ...followed by 30 minutes of cardio, either bike or crosstrainer or both. This is the same routine I've been doing for the last year - I used to do fewer sets, but upped the numbers when I was piling on weight. I've thought about going up on the resistance, but as my muscle decreases I'm finding it harder to handle the kind of weights I used to do with ease. I haven't actually had to drop down, but it's a lot more gruelling than it used to be. Like I say, I know this is not the kind of workout that's going to turn me into a beast, but I'm not really looking for that. I just want to be toned and healthy. 5. Roughly 2500 calories, same as I always eat. Yesterday pre-workout I ate 250g of lentils with cheese and sun-dried tomatoes on low-carb toast (600 calories) Post-workout meal: 250g minced beef, onion and mushroom with tomato and chili sauce on low-carb toast, with broccoli and spinach (1250 calories) Late-evening snack: 200g natural yogurt with raspberries and blueberries and 12 almonds (400 calories) All-day grazing: couple of squares of 80% cocoa dark chocolate and some nuts (200 calories). Didn't have a protein shake, but sometimes I will have one after working out. Some workout days it'll be a little more than this - on non-workout days maybe a little less. 6. Not sure how many grams of protein would be in there, but I suspect quite a lot? Other foods I commonly eat: meat (especially chicken), fish, a lot of eggs, peanut butter, other vegetables. Not very much processed food. Generally, it's a high-protein, medium-fat, low-carb diet with not much variation. I'm keeping tabs on my calories and protein, but not counting them closely. I know that I'm eating somewhere between 2000 and 3000 calories pretty much every day, and eating an above average amount of protein. The trouble with carbs is my blood sugar, which I'm keeping out of the danger zone with a low-carb diet. It's currently hovering just below the prediabetic range, and if I start adding carbs (which I tried before) it tends to go back up into that range quite quickly...

Yes, I don't think more calories would be the answer, seeing as I gained 15 pounds of fat in six months - after maintaining a steady weight for the previous two years - while continuing to work out for two hours every other day, and eating exactly the same low-carb diet! (In fact it was probably more than 15 pounds of fat, since I gained 15 pounds in weight, but actually lost muscle in that period.) I've lost about half of that again now, since I upped the amount of exercise I'm doing, but I can't just write it off as "getting harder to stay fit as I get older", because it was so sudden and extreme, and my weight had stayed absolutely stable for the previous two years. The loss of basic muscle mass at the same time is just baffling. I've seen several doctors and specialists, none of whom can find anything wrong with me. And yet the muscle keeps vanishing and the slackness of the skin increasing. Various tests have now shown that I don't have any major autoimmune disease, I don't have cancer, I don't seem to have anything really serious like that. Unfortunately they've given me no clue as to what it actually is. I was just hoping that maybe this was a known issue, a nutrition thing or something to do with the wrong kind of workout, which maybe somebody here would recognise. Is there a problem with eating too few carbs while working out? I know that I have less energy now, but could it also be affecting the muscle? To the point where I'm actually losing the basic muscle I had before I ever lifted a weight or got on a crosstrainer? That's the only thing I can think of that's different, compared to the old days when I could work out (far less than I do now) and build muscle with ease.

Hello - I don't know if anyone here can help me out, but it's worth a try... I'm in my mid 40s, and I've been working out - on and off - for many years. I used to go to the gym regularly for a year or two, then lapse, then restart a year or two later, and so on. I've finally managed to hold down a regular exercise regime for the last 3 and a half years, after being diagnosed with high blood sugar and told to do cardio. Since then, I've been going to the gym every other day and doing roughly a 90-minute workout, a combination of resistance stuff (on machines) and then 30-45 minutes' cardio at the end. This is combined with a low-carb, high-protein diet (to keep blood sugar low). Within a couple of months of starting this, I'd lost a lot of weight. I wasn't that big in the first place, but a bit of middle-aged spread was creeping in, and that went away pretty quick. My blood sugar also dropped, and then stayed out of the danger zone. Good news. I noticed, though, that I was looking quite gaunt and my arms and legs were very thin. Usually when I went to the gym I'd bulk up a little bit, even though I never did free weights, but this time I was looking kind of stringy. I just put that down to the cardio, though - it was a runner's physique, really. I didn't look unhealthy or anything, just a bit sinewy and hollow-faced. Then, about a year ago, something started to change. I noticed that I had loose skin hanging off me, especially on my back and thighs (the two parts of my body which have always been naturally solid, and were always muscular even when I wasn't working out and the rest of me was flabby and un-toned). I started to get quite fat round the middle, despite keeping very strictly to my calorie allowance and not going over 50g of carbs a day. I realised that not only was I not building muscle, I was actually losing the muscle I'd had before I'd started exercising. Before long, I could grab overflowing handfuls of loose flabby skin from my back, thighs, and upper arms (where my triceps should be). My build was still skinny, but my body became soft and squidgy to the touch. I had put on some weight, which was a mystery in itself considering my diet and workout routine, but not enough weight to explain this change of shape. Since then I've lost some of that weight again, but the muscle loss has continued. I asked a couple of friends for advice and did what they said, but none of it worked. I started eating carbs for breakfast on workout days, and cut down drastically on the amount of cardio I was doing, but I just kept losing muscle and gaining weight, and my blood sugar started to creep back up. I doubled the number of reps I was doing on the machines, but when I did that I actually started losing muscle even faster (and the more I did, the more tired and weak I felt over time). I went up from a 90 minute workout to a 2-hour workout. Kept getting worse. It's not just that these things didn't work, it's that they made the problem get worse more quickly. So I stopped going to the gym altogether for three weeks. And immediately put on a quarter of a stone, so I started back again. Now I feel like a skeleton with a loose bag of skin hanging off it. For some reason I have rock-hard quads and rock-hard biceps - although neither are bulky and they're both constantly sore - but the rest of me is just mush. When you poke it with a finger, your finger sinks in... but you can feel right down to the bone. It's not like flab, where you can feel a springy resistance. It's like the subcutaneous fat and the natural muscle have both vanished. I'm sitting upright in a chair as I type this now, and I'm uncomfortable because I can feel the mush on my upper back squidging against the chair back. I've never seen anything like it: you can literally grab great chunks of my back and fold them over. And yet, round the front, my ribs stick out almost painfully. I can slap myself on the thigh and watch the underside swing backwards and forwards like a plastic bag full of water. Then when I tense my leg, it turns into a thin blade of solid, painful muscle. Relax it, and it's soft and wobbly again. None of this makes any sense to me. I realise that at my age, I can't do an hour or two in the gym 3 or 4 times a week and expect to come out looking like Daniel Craig. But this? This is just weird. The doctor has sent me for various tests - blood tests, testosterone, x-rays, neurology, neurophysiology, rheumatology. Everything came back normal, and now he's run out of ideas. But it keeps getting worse. Now my face is beginning to lose definition and sag alarmingly, just like my back. It's all quite scary. Seeing as the medical stuff has shown nothing out of the ordinary, and I'm not taking any regular medication, I guess this must be one of two things: a problem with my diet, or a problem with my workout. I'm not sure what to do about either of these things, though. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? I'd be very grateful.