Hello ...

nedoss

I've been using myfitnesspal for a couple of weeks now and thought I'd introduce myself: hi!

I'm 49 and currently weigh ~250 lbs. I've been working on losing weight (off and on) since January and have lost around 15 pounds with diet alone -- no exercise. After reading the National Weight Control Registry findings about the correlation between weight loss and exercise (http://www.nwcr.ws/Research/default.htm -- 90% of long term losers exercise, on average, about 1 hour per day), I decided exercise had to be a part of my lifestyle.

So ... for the last little bit I've been exercising (walking w/ intermittent jogging, elliptical) and logging my meals (w/ a few gaps here and there). Much to my surprise, my weight started going up rather than down :sad:. I'd gained 1 or 2 pounds during the time I'd been exercising -- in the same amount of time prior to starting my exercise regime, I'd lost 10 pounds. Exercising seemed to be hurting rather than helping. This didn't help my motivation at all -- was I eating too little, too much, eating the wrong thing, was I exercising too little, too much? I was able to move down a notch on my belt so I thought I was improving, but why wasn't showing up on my scale?

I decided to plot my weight (orange line) vs body fat % (collected w/ my withings scale). The shaded area on the right of the graph is the time during which I've been exercising and gained a couple of pounds.

Based on the graph, I've lost about 4% body fat since I started exercising! During the rest of the year, I dropped some pounds, but my body fat % only went down a couple of %.

Summary:

* Prior to exercise (Jan through mid-Sept): Starting @ 262 pounds with 2% fat loss = 5.24 pounds of lost fat
* With exercise (mid-Sept through Now): Starting @ 247 pounds with 4% fat loss = 9.88 pounds of lost fat

In about 5 weeks w/ exercise, I've lost ~10 pounds of fat. In the prior 8 months with no exercise, I lost ~5 pounds of fat. <-- Much more motivating than looking strictly at my weight.

--Nathan

(For some reason, the graph is chopped off on the right ... for reference, the scale on the right is body fat, with each horizontal line representing 2% -- you can see the scale if you right click in your browser and view the image by itself).