Macros

williamsons2

I’m a 64 female who doesn’t want to starve, lose hair or comprise my food choices. I’m a healthy eater but I have to lose weight. I’ve started to weight lift with a trainer and walk the treadmill at the gym. I’m starting my macros as 35 C; 30 F; 35 P…my question is this a good ratio to gain muscle and lose fat?

cmriverside

I assume you are also eating at a deficit from your maintenance calories? Did your weight-lifting "trainer" give you those macros?

It's not all that easy for a female to gain muscle, so I'm not sure what you mean by that…is it just for strength or are you going to be competing?

When losing weight, you'll always be losing some muscle too. Good job doing the weight training, just in general.

I am in your age bracket and also female. I'd struggle to eat that much protein, percentage wise, but if you can make it work it's fine. How many grams of protein does that 35% work out to be? Grams per body weight are the better multiplier, but I'd ask your trainer for an online calculator. Try Examine.com for their calculator.

AnnPT77

I'm a 69-year-old woman, athletically active. I agree with Riverside up there. Get a protein goal in grams, not percents.

Whether X% is OK depends on calorie level. If I ate 35% of my maintenance calories in protein, that would be overkill. If I did the dumb-for-me cut calories to the bone 1200 calorie diet, 35% would be . . . well, adequate, maybe.

Some common rules of thumb for protein intake are something in the range of 0.6-0.8g daily per pound of healthy goal bodyweight for typical people. Heavy exercisers might want more, with something in the range of 1-1.2g per pound of goal weight daily as the typical upper end. Unless a person has a pre-existing health condition that limits protein intake, more is usually OK within reason, but diminishing returns.

Here's the link for examine.com:

https://examine.com/guides/protein-intake/

They are generally regarded as science-based and neutral. (Among other things, they don't sell supplements). They link all the research they rely on.

Any calorie intake level lower than the number of calories we burn results in fat loss. Faster fat loss increases risk of losing relatively more muscle or other lean tissue alongside fat loss. Very fast fat loss can cause things like hair loss . . . or immune system suppression, fatigue, weakness, gallbladder problems, and more, some of it worse. On top of that, fast loss is much harder to stick with long enough to lose a meaningful total amount of weight, and can result in short-changing nutrition.

Don't try to lose too fast: That's a biggie for the goals you mention.

How fast is too fast may vary depending on how overweight a person is, and whether that weight is already creating significant health risk. That's a doctor question, more than a trainer question.

Rule of thumb for weight loss that's common around here: No more than 0.5% to 1% of current weight per week loss, with a bias toward the 0.5% unless severely obese and under medical supervision for nutritional deficiencies or health complications.

Whether you feel like you're starving is complicated. Food choices and food timing can matter. Avoiding over-exercise can help. Getting good sleep quality/quantity may help. Rate of weight loss for sure matters. Hydration can matter. You can figure out a lot of this stuff if you pay attention to how you feel, and correlate it with what you do when you feel that way . . . maybe even experiment with alternative strategies sometimes, for at least a few days at a time.

I feel like it's common to feel hungry at first, for maybe a couple of weeks, because the influence of habits is strong. For many of us, things then settle down as long as we're not doing anything to extreme. That's generality, so YMMV.

BTW, both Riverside above and I have successfully lost weight with MFP, and maintained loss. I won't speak for her, but I lost from class 1 obese to a healthy weight at age 59-60 back in 2015-16, and have stayed at a healthy weight since.

This is achievable in our demographic. We even have an advantage, IMO: We know ourselves pretty well, probably know how to game our strengths and weaknesses in ways that let us chip away gradually but persistently at big goals until we succeed. We've done that in education, careers, maybe home-making or raising a family, and more. It's the same skillset here, just applied in a different domain. You can do it.

Best wishes!

P.S. Please don't cross-post the same query in multiple topic areas here. Most of us read multiple topic areas. Things will get more confusing for you if you have multiple potentially disparate replies on different threads about the same question, because the reply-ers can't talk it out. On top of that, cross-posting is against the rules.

williamsons2

Thanks, for the input ladies. Most appreciated!