Advice for me?

justagirl2013

Funky- Wow! Thank you for this post! Very educational.

I am definitely going to switch to lifting weights. I know when I am lifting now, I get extremely tired after one set. It's frustrating, but I keep at it.

So if I read your post right, I need to eat minimal of 1970/3 calories per day?

I was reading about heavy lifting earlier, and it sounds interesting, and fits what I have in mind for my body in the future. At this point, ideally I think it would be nice to lose some weight and then concentrate on that, but maybe I should just "jump" right in and start doing heavy lifting...

I feel I have to read over this a couple times, to fully grasp



dburdi02- I always thought I was doing squats correctly, butI just read your post and had to try one. Surprise, I'm not! My knees are coming in front of my toes. I made an effort to keep behind my toes, and wow. Definite improvement there!

I've decided to do lifting first, and then cardio, as I want to have that energy to build up my muscles. I want to burn fat too, but I want to build muscle. I don't want to be skinny with no definition. I don't want to be a body builder either (which I know is not easily obtained as a woman unless drugs/etc are involved)

I think I experienced muscle burn out today in my legs. I did a lot of hard cardio yesterday 103 minutes, and had complete failure today. I pushed for 10 minutes on the elliptical and then gave up. I was crying because I was just in so much pain. I understand there is pain and there is soreness, this was definite pain. I will see how tomorrow evening goes, hopefully better.

I have so much to learn, and I really thank both of you for being such a great help to me. I hope you truly understand my appreciation of your responses.

On another note, I'm peeved about my eating today... I think I did really good yesterday (need to consume more veggies for sure!), and I just need to mimic that for a while. I do need to make some changes regarding a few things (no more condensed milk for coffee, no more apricot preserves with my cottage cheese...) but today just sucked in general. I cooked some chicken thighs and they were utterly disgusting to me. So instead of eating a healthy dinner, I ended up eating a bowl of cereal <sigh>. I hate MFP sometimes though. I hate that today it told me I'd be 205lbs in 5 weeks, but yesterday I'd be 198. That's a huge difference, and I can really see my mistakes today (cereal, corn flake candy--only 1 piece but counted as 2 b/c I wasn't sure of the nutritional info--, mounds bar, ugh). It's so hard to not beat yourself up, and I want to succeed so bad.

On to tomorrow!!!!

funkycamper

Glad to help and sounds like you're on the right track.

Personally, what is working best for me is to establish my BMR (under the Tools section) and then eating most of my exercise calories. That might be a good place for you to start. If you lose too quickly, you will want to up your calories a bit. However, don't let slow losing make you think you need to drop your calorie level. At least not for awhile. Give it a good month before your reassess. Some people do lower after awhile to get the results they want but some of us find great results if we actually raise our calorie level a bit. Yeah, it sounds counter-intuitive, doesn't it? It can take some experimenting to find what works best for you so I hesitate to tell you an exact answer. I happen to think that learning more about how my body works by experimenting with it is one of the interesting things about this journey.

Just remember that the more you restrict and the quicker you lose, the more muscle you will lose and that's a bad thing for your metabolism, your fitness level, and can make you end up skinny-fat (thin but no muscle tone). It's far harder to build it back up later when you've actually lost muscle than to retain the muscle you already have.

There are many knowledgeable people on these forums (and elsewhere on the web) who would argue that you should never do heavy weight training sessions and cardio on the same day. Their reasoning makes sense to me and I'm starting to question whether I should end my weight training session with the short interval (HIIT) I'm now doing. What they're saying is if you've lifted heavy enough to near failure, you shouldn't have enough gas in the tank left to do any serious cardio of any kind, including intervals or steady-state. Just like you wouldn't have enough gas to do a good weight training session if you've spent some of your fuel by doing cardio before the weight training.

After I'm done weight-training, my arms are definitely jello but my legs have just a bit of gas left. So I'm thinking about adding in a couple more weight exercises for my legs and skipping the short HIIT afterwards. And then I'll just do my cardio on non-lifting days.

I would also recommend any of the following books to get you started on your weight training. New Rules of Weight Lifting (there are various ones, I got the one specifically for women) or Rachel Cosgrove's The Female Body Breakthrough (I got that one, too, and also love it) or Starting Strength (haven't got this one but have heard very good things about it). Those are ones I see highly recommended here the most often. There is also a forum here under "Groups" dedicated to the New Rules of Weight Lifting. That's a great place to get more of your weight training questions answered.

Oh, and I would start heavy lifting now. As you lose weight, even slowly, there is always going to be a bit of muscle loss. It's unavoidable. However, lifting heavy will retain more of that muscle. It also has a far greater after-burn than any other type of exercise. Studies show that your body continues to burn more calories for quite a few hours after you're done lifting heavy. A part of that calorie burn is due to the energy put into repairing the muscles. While eating in a deficit, you will not be building any new muscles but you will be activating and strengthening the muscles you already have which will seem like you're building muscles. And nothing will help your body become a calorie-burning machine better than lifting heavy, imho. At least that's what I seem to be experiencing.

As the muscles get stronger, they will get more dense and cause you to lose inches even if you don't see a loss on the scale. The tape measure and the fit of your clothes are the best gauge of this.

Oh, when lifting, especially when you're just starting out, part of the muscle repair process is water retention in the muscles. It's temporary but, especially at first, you might actually feel like you're gaining inches. And that water retention could show up on the scale making you think you've gained. Don't let either of these things get to you and derail you. It's temporary and then, after a couple of weeks, you should start seeing some real progress in tightening of muscles and some inches being lost.

Anyway, I'm not an expert. Most of what I've learned, I've learned on these forums by reading the advice of others. It can take awhile to separate the good advice from the bad and, unfortunately, there's a lot of people throwing out bad advice here, too. But you ask great questions and sound like someone who can figure out who to listen to and who to ignore.

Good luck!