New to community: Laurie

webpoet1

I have been with MyFitnessPal for a little while but am new to the community.

I am 67 and back in 2020 I was bordering on an obese weight due to eating daily and sometimes more than daily fast food commuting to work. .

Then my work went remote and stayed that way. And retired in late 2023.

In 2023 I was down to the overweight category but was told my A1C was prediabetes range. 6.2. So I went into a an online diabetes prevention program. I got my weight down to the high range of healthy BMI. And a new thing for me: discovered i did not hate exercise at all. Just needed to find the right exercise routine for me. Thanks in part to my Medicare supplement plan covering free YMCA membership. I also find that logging food, exercise and weight daily in my phone keeps me on track

From 2023 to present I have been consistently walking on treadmill for an hour: i started once a week. Then increased to twice a week.

This fall i increased it to every other day.

And here's the issue. Since this fall my weight has gone from maintenance to creeping up a few pounds. I am not sure if this is related to my more frequent exercise. Or.

Also I recently have started adding in a small amount of slow paced gentle jogging to each of my hours.

Should I stop adding the extra exercise calories in the app? But if I am active every other day the normal calories do not seem like enough. I want to eat enough.

Also at my age is it normal to want to nap for a half hour or so after exercising. Should I resist the temptation? Is napping good or bad?

I am going to discuss the above with my doctor at annual visit in March but does anyone have any suggestions?

I am mainly just frustrated that I seem to have fallen out of maintenance after 2 years at around same weight. But really I would rather be more active and enjoy it and weigh a little more than be inactive as I was previously and weigh less.

AnnPT77

Hello and welcome to the Community!

I joined MFP in mid-2015, and have been in maintenance since sometime in early 2016. Admittedly, I've crept up and down a few pounds over the nearly 10 years of maintenance, but entirely in the normal BMI range and same jeans size. (It helps that I hate to clothes shop: That's motivating for me. 😆) I'm also retired, and active with exercise.

I think there are potentially several things that could be in play in your case. It can be nuanced, so I apologize in advance if this gets a little long, in the pursuit of being complete-ish.

Exercise can add some water retention, but that wouldn't normally keep creeping up and up forever. It might show up as a small scale jump of a pound or two when starting new exercise, but wouldn't keep increasing without increasing the exercise challenge. Even with gradual steady exercise increase it would tend to level off eventually not just keep rising.

What is possible is for exercise calories to be over-estimated, so that adding/eating all of them might not be ideal. That varies somewhat individually. Exercise estimating methods can vary in accuracy, and that's a complicated subject in itself. I feel like MFP's way of estimating regular walking runs a bit toward over-estimates, especially for less-intense paces. For outdoor walking, I use this calculator, with the energy box set on "net": https://exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs

(If you like, I can explain why I think that may be more accurate than MFP, but I won't belabor it unless you're interested.)

In general, some people eat back part of exercise calories rather than all of them. Another option, if you use a source outside MFP to get a calorie estimate, is to over-type the MFP calorie estimate when adding exercise, or create a custom exercise of your own to do a similar thing. Personally, I estimate all my exercise calories carefully and conservatively, using different methods for different exercises, then log/eat them all. I'm more likely to adjust my base calorie estimate if my weight trends change, if my exercise level/type hasn't changed. I'll say more about that later.

Since I'm not myself a treadmill user, I don't have a experience-based feel for MFP's treadmill estimates, if it even has separate ones. The above calculator could be used for treadmill walking, but someone using an incline would need to turn incline into a grade value, or accept the lower estimate from omitting incline.

If you're planning to keep gradually increasing exercise - which is good from a fitness perspective, of course - I wouldn't suggest completely ignoring the calories burned in exercise. If you're quite consistent in your exercise over a period of time, one reasonable option would be to average some amount of exercise in to your MFP activity level setting, then use your multi-many-week scale weight trend to slightly increase or decrease calorie goal if your weight trend heads in a direction out of sync with your goals. In brief, I'd use 4-6 week average weight change per week, and the assumption that 500 calories a day is about a pound a week difference in scale weight (using arithmetic for partial pounds) to adjust calorie goal as needed over time.

There's a more detailed discussion about how to use experience to deterimine calorie goal in this thread, plus some good discussion of other methods and other MFP-ers practices/experiences:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10638211/how-to-find-your-maintenance-calorie-level

I don't know if naps are normal at 67, even though I just turned 70 myself. I think whether they're helpful or unhelpful is quite individual. Personally, I don't nap, but that's because I have other sleep issues, and napping tends to aggravate those in my case.

I guess I'd suggest giving some thought to whether the naps are a genuine good thing in your case, which is very possible, versus a symptom of something else that could be addressed in another way, such as sub-ideal overnight sleep quality/quantity, onset of hypothyroidism (a common thing as people age, especially among women - and a condition I have myself, easily treatable), or possibly even triggered by increasing exercise activity/intensity a bit too fast.

Certainly, resting more can somewhat decrease our overall calorie expenditure, and over-exercise can make that effect more likely. There's a bit of a balancing act in increasing exercise so that fatigue, leading to more resting, isn't a factor.

Your plan to discuss the issues with your docto in March sounds really good.

Another thing that matters, that some people don't really register, is the effect of changes in daily life patterns. I don't know whether that appiles in your case or not. I don't know, for example, whether your movement habits other than exercise changed when you retired, or may've changed recently for other reasons.

I'll probably remember the details fuzzily of a past thread here, but the gist was this, in a somewhat extreme case: Someone reported eating and exerciing the same, but seeing steady weight gain in recent months. When other MFP-ers asked questions, it turned out that the person had downsized their good-size multi-level house and suburban yard, and moved into a one-floor condo. Their daily life movement (walking, stairs) and house/yard chores amounted to a material difference in overall daily activity level, so difference in calorie needs, even with consistent exercise habits.

For most people, daily life activities burn more calories on average daily than intentional exercise, so a change can really matter.

I'm not suggesting anything as dramatic as that instance necessarily applies in your case, just using it as an extreme - therefore clear - example. You might think about whether your routine has changed in some what that could be relevant, even if to a smaller degree than that. Research has found that fidgety people can burn low hundreds of calories more daily than otherwise similar non-fidgety ones. I'm not suggesting fidgeting as a lifestyle strategy, just pointing to that as one example of how tiny things, repeated, add up. Theoretically, 100 calories difference per day is roughly 10 pounds of bodyweight change in a year.

I guess I'd also suggest some consideration of nutrition: Are you getting enough protein, healthy fats, veggies and fruits for fiber and micronutrients? Sub-ideal nutrition can lead to fatigue, and increased exercise can potentially be a tipping point in that kind of situation. You may be doing just great on that score, but theoretically it could be a factor.

Sub-par protein is common among seniors, and there's evidence that we should spread that protein across all of our meals vs. concentrating it mostly in one or two meals as may be OK for younger people (because we typically metabolize protein a little less efficiently as we age). Increased exercise can create more protein demand in the body, too.

Nutrition is an area where your doctor may be helpful: I consulted with mine, and she now schedules some nutrition-related blood tests periodically for nutrients that could be relevant in my particular circumstances (which include aging, of course).

I think your instincts are 100% right here: That being more active is more health-promoting (and fun!) than being less active, and that being more active (as a totality of daily life activity and intentional exercise) means it's important to eat enough calories (and get the right nutrition) to support the extra activity. Certainly, it should not be necessary for you to eat fewer calories simply because you increase exercise: The opposite would be true, if all other factors were equal.

Apologies for the length . . . unfortunately, I'm like that 😬. I hope you may find something helpful somewhere in that.

I'm sure you can sort through this, and find a good solution to balancing your goals, especially with your doctor's help come March. Best wishes!