Down 10%, stalled, need to retool?

[Oklibrarian]

Hey all,

I'm not normally one for fitness/weight loss forums, but it's time to shift gears and I think I could use some extra community. Here's the scoop: I've got a corrected congenital heart defect *waves at grendelsfork* but no restrictions other than naturally being slow as hell and kind of klutzy. I've needed to lose about 60 pounds for the last ten years or so, but haven't had much luck getting it off till about 5 months ago. After a come to jeebus chat with the doctor (your numbers are in good shape but you want to keep it that way, don't you?), I started eating slow carb /4 hour body-ish (dropped starches, kept dairy), added 1 aerobic and two strength (Pilates) workouts, and dumped 25 pounds and a couple pants sizes without much fuss. My body fat has plummeted(now kicking around in the low 30s with a 33ish inch waist) and I've gained a ton of muscle as well. Volume-wise I'm about halfway to my goal, I'm currently a 16 in most brands and I suspect I could get down as far as a 10 or 12 while being healthy (i tend to put on muscle easily and have BIG hipbones, very much a pear). I was a 10 in college (late 90s), looked like I weighed about 20 pounds less than I did, and was pretty hot by Geek Girl standards.

But now after losing 10 percent of myself, I've been stuck for the last month, and I think it's time to kick it up. I'm toying with a few ideas, which I wanted to run past you all.

Option 1: more cardio

Option 2: more strength

Option 3: dump the beans and/or dairy and go more hardcore paleo

Option 4: some/all of the above

Option 5: something I'm not considering?

Thanks for listening to me ramble, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

[aj_rock]

Well what do you WANT to do? Do you just want to weigh less, or do you want to get stronger?

Once you reach a plateau, it helps a lot to focus on one aspect at a time.

Welcome to NF btw

[bigm141414]

Hey! Welcome to the site Oklibrarian! Are you really a librarian? Because that's just plain awesome.

Anyways as to your post, my first question is always: What do you enjoy doing? Also, what are you currently doing for your workouts? What are your eating habits like?

Option 4 is a good way to go for now since I don't have more specifics. Also as for strength training what are your thoughts on barbell type stuff? Or are you more of a body weight routine type person?

[Oklibrarian]

Thanks for the reply!

AJ,

I want/need to weigh less WHILE getting stronger. Perhaps it's time to focus on the latter while letting the former take its course? The precise number matters less to me than being firm or firm-ish.

Bigm,

I am (at a university), and it is

I do 2 workouts a week, a pilates personal training and a spin/Pilates combo class. Both are pretty grueling. Id like to bump up to more like 4-5 workouts a week, but not sure if strength or cardio is my best option.

I'm also starting to wonder if I need to eat more., or at last more protein. I'm in the 1400-ish calorie range sun-fri (I would guess cheat day is double that). Breakfast is almost always a myoplex shake (42 grams), lunch is typically a grilled chicken salad and soup, dinner is a chicken breast or pork chop with 1/2 a bag of veg med , salsa or other topping to taste. I often get a bit hungry on the way home, and scarf either a small soy joy fruit bar or a 100-calorie pack of beef jerky. I also get in about 64 oz of water. Not sure on the macronutrients, but I could easily track it for a week.

[Oklibrarian]

Forgot to mention, I'm open to both barbells and body weight exercises. I have a treadmill at home, and have free access to the city fitness center through my work, in addition to the aforementioned Pilates studio.

[weirdquark]

Hey all,

I'm not normally one for fitness/weight loss forums, but it's time to shift gears and I think I could use some extra community. Here's the scoop: I've got a corrected congenital heart defect *waves at grendelsfork* but no restrictions other than naturally being slow as hell and kind of klutzy. I've needed to lose about 60 pounds for the last ten years or so, but haven't had much luck getting it off till about 5 months ago. After a come to jeebus chat with the doctor (your numbers are in good shape but you want to keep it that way, don't you?), I started eating slow carb /4 hour body-ish (dropped starches, kept dairy), added 1 aerobic and two strength (Pilates) workouts, and dumped 25 pounds and a couple pants sizes without much fuss. My body fat has plummeted(now kicking around in the low 30s with a 33ish inch waist) and I've gained a ton of muscle as well. Volume-wise I'm about halfway to my goal, I'm currently a 16 in most brands and I suspect I could get down as far as a 10 or 12 while being healthy (i tend to put on muscle easily and have BIG hipbones, very much a pear). I was a 10 in college (late 90s), looked like I weighed about 20 pounds less than I did, and was pretty hot by Geek Girl standards.

But now after losing 10 percent of myself, I've been stuck for the last month, and I think it's time to kick it up. I'm toying with a few ideas, which I wanted to run past you all.

Option 1: more cardio

Option 2: more strength

Option 3: dump the beans and/or dairy and go more hardcore paleo

Option 4: some/all of the above

Option 5: something I'm not considering?

Thanks for listening to me ramble, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Option 4 is probably the way to go, but it does depend on what your goals are. I personally find cardio kind of boring, though I've started to get some satisfaction from being able to run faster and further with less effort than I previously had to put into it, so I might do more of that. I started doing weight lifting and got really into it, so I'd throw in more of option 2 than option 1, but it depends on what you like to do. Doing a lot of steady state cardio is good for burning calories, but it'll tend to come out of your muscles if you're not careful since they take more energy to maintain than fat does. So eating enough protein and lifting weights helps maintain and build more muscle, which makes the weight loss come more out of the fat.

[Oklibrarian]

Thanks! I think I'm going to invest in the fitness guide, and see what/how I can implement the tips therein to augment what I'm doing. I'm leaning toward adding 1 more strength and 2(?) cardio workouts, and also seeing what I can realistically do to clean up my diet a tad. it's pretty darned good considering where I was 6 months ago (an ongoing and passionate love affair with bacon cheeseburgers), but there's probably room for improvement. I think I may log my intake for a week and post it for constructive criticism.

[aj_rock]

If you want better recommendations, it's easier if you tell us height, weight, and current strength levels. From there, we can assess whether you could potentially add more strength while dropping fat, or if you've built a big enough muscle base to concentrate more heavily on just fat loss.

[Oklibrarian]

If you want better recommendations, it's easier if you tell us height, weight, and current strength levels. From there, we can assess whether you could potentially add more strength while dropping fat, or if you've built a big enough muscle base to concentrate more heavily on just fat loss.

Fair point. I'm 5'5", 223ish (knocking around between 222 and 224 for the last month after dropping from 246 starting in late august). I could tell you which springs I use for particular exercises in pilates, but the weights for those seem to vary a bit by brand based on a quick 30 second websurf, and in any case most of the exercises seem to rely at least as much on body weight (squats, lunges, etc). My trainer seems very impressed with my lower body strength (I've worked up to two of their heaviest springs for leg presses), but that's not exactly quantifiable. I went ahead and bought the fitness guide, will probably go to the gym on thursday or friday morning to grab some barbells, try out level 1 and put some numbers to that. Also, I fell off the wagon a bit last week (as tends to happen when I plateau), but unlike usual I realized that way lies dragons, and that I need to retool rather than swing by Arby's over lunch. Hence my arrival here. I've been eating clean as a whistle since Sunday morning, and that may have an effect as well. (ya think? ;-) )

Long story short, fat loss is probably still a higher priority than building strength for at least another 30 pounds, but I want to make sure I don't LOSE strength if at all possible.

(if this dupe-posted, i apologize)

[bprime]

I didn't read anything besides the options, and if you're sitting below 15% then you should just get strong and eat to get strong.

Otherwise keep working on your bf% IMO. Just have to work at it more diligently. It always gets harder the longer you're at it.

[Oklibrarian]

Thanks for the thoughts! I think I'm going to use the next 6-week challenge to implement the following:

1. Eliminate cheese totally from my diet on non-cheat days *sighs, sheds tear*

2. 1 more HIIT-ish cardio workouts (with my spin class that makes 2)

3. 2 x level 1 strength workouts (with my pilates training session that makes 3)

4. Personal goal related to my college success website (probably prettifying my facebook page and/or writing my email list freebie, not sure yet though)

Thanks all for being a sounding board/swift kick in the butt! I can already tell this is gonna be a very good community for me. :-)

[aj_rock]

If you wanted to 'clean up' the diet more, i'd eliminate the legumes/grains before dairy. Besides the no-no it recieves from hardline paleos, dairy calcium has been tentatively linked to fat loss, the exact mechanism I am not sure of.

As for HIIT, it's only really a good idea if you've already built up a decent aerobic base so to speak. If you can run at least 5 k continuously, then by all means. Just make sure you don't hit the legs too hard between cardio, pilates, and strength training.

Really, at your weight to height ratio, continued fat loss shouldn't be a huge problem. Take a look at quantities of food consumption as well. Figure out your BMR, and then just adjust your intake down 10-20% from there.

[Gainsdalf the Whey]

I've done the slow-carb thing and paleo with dairy. Giving up the legumes isn't too bad, just eat more meat and nuts to keep full. As for getting past the plateau, see my sig. Remember, weight loss is 90% diet. The exercise only provides a slight extra calorie burn, the biggest effect is in how you feel and down the line overall body comp (skinny-fat vs. skinny-strong).

[Oklibrarian]

Wow, I just did my BMR and Harris benedict equation, and OMG! I'm WAY undereating. Allegedly I should be eating 2428 calories a day, so even less 20% I NEED to be eating 1950 calories a day. Unless i have a slip, I generally only get 1400-1600.

SO my issue is not lack of willpower, but a starvation diet. yikes. I think priority 1 needs to be eating more of the good stuff to stay satiated (because when I let myself get hungry, let's just say I don't want to reach for lean chicken breasts and broccoli)

But now I'm a bit stumped on macronutrient ratios thanks to all the contradictory numbers that are batted around online. Do I need .5 grams of protein per body weight to maintain my muscle mass? a whole gram? more? And if I'm supposed to limit myself to 50 grams of carbs to promote fat loss, then that leaves me needing to get well over half of my calories from fat. While I'm far from fat phobic, that's a lot of nuts and guacamole...

[Morrigainz]

It really depends...you have to find something that works for you. Personally, I am between .5-1 g of protein per lb of bodyweight. I still have my carbs over 100 but they are much lower than they were before. I think it's around 35/30/35 but I'm not positive. It's so easy to get overwhelmed by all the information but remember that everyone is different.

[Gainsdalf the Whey]

I aim for 1lb of protein per lb of lean body weight. I can usually get there and it accounts for about 30% of my calories. I just try to keep carbs below 30% of my calories and love days where I can keep it below 20%. That means fat tend to be anywhere from35% to 55% of my daily caloric intake, usually falling somewhere in the low 40's.

[Oklibrarian]

Good points, MirGSS. Time to go play in excel and the nutritional databases. in any case, it stands to reason that if i fill myself up with the good stuff, then I'll have fewer issues with the 5:00 munchies (my current bugaboo).

[Morrigainz]

It's true. And I don't know if this is condoned, but when I get the munchie feeling but don't want to really eat, I've been drinking water and chewing a piece of gum. Usually helps the craving go away.

[starmadepath]

Dairy is one of those topics that really gets argued to death about "good for you/bad for you" (and the general consensus changes every 10 years or so - someone on my college speech and debate team did an informative speech about it). I have found personally that if I eat dairy, I don't lose weight. I take calcium supplements and that negates my body craving dairy, and I think ultimately it's the way my body processes all the saturated fat in dairy that makes the weight loss stop. I think it's different for each body. So when it comes to cutting out foods from a diet, as long as you're getting the nutrients you need other places, my philosophy is "try it for a few weeks and see what happens." Getting to know my body has been a long trial and error process (still on-going) but leaves me feeling healthier and fitter and better with each new discovery.

As to your problem of plateauing (and CONGRATS on all your success so far!!), here's some things that might help (and you might already know some of this, so forgive me if I'm covering old ground):

Your body is designed with one main purpose: survival. It doesn't care if you want to lose weight, if you want to get stronger, if you want to lay in bed all day. As long as it has what it needs to keep you breathing, it just keeps chugging along. If you want to lose weight, get stronger, stretch your limits you have to progressively overload your system. You need to stress it so that it starts to understand it needs to change/needs to build muscle/needs to use that fat for energy to keep going because the demands placed on it are greater than they were yesterday or last week. Progressive overload is what makes exercise work. So, yes, shake things up! Keep pushing yourself (never too hard/to the point of injury, but hard enough that you're actually getting progress out of the effort you're putting in).

Your body also starts to read the signals from exercising differently after it starts getting used to them. For example, often a beginner will benefit from 3x week strength training full-body, but once you've been training for 6 months or so, it will often benefit the trainee to switch to upper body/lower body splits on a 3 or 4 day cycle (E.g. 3-day body split - Monday - upper, Wednesday - lower, Friday - upper, Monday - lower, Wednesday - upper, Friday - lower). But as with the dairy thing, it really comes down to what your body responds best to. So try some things out and give each enough time to do something before changing to something else.

I plateaued after losing a significant amount of body weight also, and tried a bunch of different things diet-wise, and so far the thing that seems to be working for me now is carb cycling (high low and no carb days through the week) while making very healthy food choices.

Anyhoo. My 2 cents with the stuff I've learned in my own trial and error process. Hopefully some of that helps.

[Oklibrarian]

Starmadepath,

thanks for the congrats! I need to do better about acknowledging what i have accomplished, rather than immediately rushing off to the next goal. I keep forgetting I've lost TEN PERCENT OF MYSELF, hitting a number I haven't seen since the dot com bubble popped.

Re: Dairy: It seems like when I started eating dairy (aside from my morning shake and the very occasional crumble of shredded cheddar on a salad) the progress stalled. Of course, I was also (I know now) really undereating at the time, so there might not be a relationship. In any case, I'm going to attempt to eat more while curtailing the dairy (or at least cheese) on non-cheat days.

Re: Carb Cycling: Hmm...I get some of this by virtue of the 4 Hour Body Saturday cheat day schtick (which is THE reason I've been able to stick to this for 5+ months), but there might be some benefit of a more carby (but healthy carbs) meal mid-week, say wednesday lunch or dinner. Basically, I agree that I need to do more trial and error at this point.

[aj_rock]

For your goals lib, you're better off looking at concepts like 'free meals' and 'refeed', where you allow yourself a larger number of calories for a day or week in order to a) reverse metabolic adaptations and keep yourself from going insane. Generally speaking, you should have just a free meal around once or twice a week, and refeed once every 6-8 weeks. Carb cycling only really makes a difference if you're already fairly lean and want to get even leaner.

[Oklibrarian]

hmmm... googled, found this link on refeeding. Looks like a promising concept, and would rein in my tendency to go insane about every three months and eat everything in site for a couple of days. (maybe I have leptin issues? it would explain why I have always lost weight so slowly even with huge calorie deficits...)

A word on the cheat day thing and how I practice it--I don't go in for the binge till I explode business, but rather eat enough of whatever calls to me that day until I feel full, then stop. mostly this comes in the form of rice, some hash browns at breakfast, maybe some bread if we get a burger for lunch. I'm going to track this saturday's to get an idea of what's happening there, it may actually even be a mite higher than baseline since Mom's coming up to spend the day female bonding, and we'll probably have both breakfast and lunch out.

[DaveSix]

I find it best to switch off between moderate carb/low-fat and moderate fat/low-carb. If you want to eat higher carbs for the day, make sure you keep fat intake low and vice versa. Combining moderate to high carbs with moderate to high fat results in gaining fat.

When I've plateaud it's because I'm not eating enough fat which will cause the body to conserve fat.