90 minute Q&A - All fitness and weight loss related please

I may be late but I started reading through everyone's posts and I have to admit, I started over two ago and I have yo-yo'd a bit and I know it's my eating habits. I started at 150-something over two years ago and I am now at 135. I am 4'11'' and I, unfortunately, have 33% body fat. I began going to the gym four times a week since the beginning of April and/or doing P90x workouts at home when I am unable to get to the gym. I have tried counting my calories but when you look at my overall graph (weekly, monthly, whatever) I tend to be erratic.

My question is this, I would like to get to a healthy BMI, but considering I'm a latin girl who would like to put on muscle I don't think that would be the best way to set my goal. I was thinking it would be better through body fat percentage, right? Also, is there ANYWHERE i can find example menus of simple things to make to stay under 1200 a day so I can follow a better diet? I hate the idea of "dieting" but I really need to tweak my caloric intake. Simply staying under 1200 before helped me lose the weight I needed to get to 135 but I wasn't following a diet - just keeping my mouth shut when I didn't want to go over. Now I have a harder time saying no when I get hungry. (Hence the reason I turned to focusing on the gym). I just need some guidance. I really want to focus on lifelong health rather than just "getting skinny."

It sounds to me as if you have an issue of excluding the middle. Put differently, you tend to focus on the extremes of the spectrum rather than the middle. The problem is, the middle tends to be where people find their sweet spots. By that I mean, they find methods of eating and exercising that jive with their lives. They find sustainability and if they're persistent enough, they learn to love a lifestyle that garners health and a good body.

Extremes work in the sense that they'll get the ball rolling initially. They'll lead to weight loss and such. Often times though, after some time has passed, they either leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere feeling desperate and directionless or they leave you rebounding back to where you were before... or worse.

I'm not knocking the approach you've taken to get here... not at all. I commend you actually. You've lost some weight and you're working towards figuring stuff out. Just realize that you're in the midst of a process of experimentation. It's really the only way to go about it if you're truly going to custom tailor an approach to YOU.

Why do I say you exclude the middle.

1. You yo-yo diet, which is a telltale sign.

2. It's either eating really low calories or it's exercising by the sound of it... not more subtle combinations of both.

The latter one is where you need to focus. If your goal is more fat loss, which sounds like is the right focus, stick with something like 1300 calories. Don't deprive yourself. Don't think of it as a diet. In fact, if you want to be as loose as possible while still doing likely enough to generate positive physique changes... eat 130 grams of protein, 3-4 servings of fibrous veggies, and a piece or two of fruit per day. Maybe throw in some healthy fats like fish oils, nuts, avocados or whatever. Let that stand as your baseline target each day. Beyond that, do you. Eat whatever the heck you want. Is that a perfect approach? Nope. Perfectionism is the root of failure though.

Forget about BMR and don't sweat your body fat percentage. Dial in your diet as I suggested and focus on being consistent. If, after a few weeks things aren't heading in the right direction, you adjust. Maybe knock your calories down by 10% or so. Maybe you add in some conditioning work.

I'd keep resistance training in the mix for sure, as that's one of the only arrows we have in our quivers for helping preserve muscle while losing weight. Do you need 4 days per week? Absolutely not. A handful of full body sessions per week would cut it... maybe just two.

Welcome to the middle.

Quite possibly the best thing I have ever read on this site. Thank you!

That's because, as far as I can tell, the conversations on this forum (speaking very generally obviously) have deteriorated to levels where it's all about being right opposed to actually feeling out the people asking for help and offering contextually relevant advice. Everyone seems to think they have The Answers, as if there were such a thing. And those knowers-of-all feel the need to preach because they've lost 10 lbs and they happened upon a pubmed abstract that confirms their bias... never minding the remainder of the available body of research on the topic they're clamoring about or the real life application of it all... all while never actually coaching someone in their life.

I don't point that at anyone in particular and I don't mean to be a blowhard. It's just frustrating that it's nearly impossible to have intelligent conversations anymore because everyone lets their ego get in the way.

And I hate using words like everyone, this entire forum, and such... there are some amazingly bright and awesome people around here. But the forums have been painful as of late, which is why I generally choose to start my own threads.

/rant

Bumping...but also, thank you SO much for the last part!! Fairly new here, and for the most part I find the forums to be very negative, rude, and critical. It's like a certain group have their own little snarky sarcasm club and they like to belittle others to feel better about themselves. I appreciate you taking the time to answer all these questions! It means a lot, to a lot of people!

Just skimmed this and so appreciate the knowledge! This is on my to read late at night while unable to sleep list. Above Terry Gross.

I have a feeling that the row machine is going to hurt. It's essentially repetitive quarter/half squats during the first stage of the motion.

This caught my eye because I like using the rower for warm up - just around 5-6 minutes before I begin the strength training workout, and I do 10-15 minutes rowing as part of my cardio routine which includes a bit of elliptical and some cycling, on the non lifting days.

What's your take on rowing as a warmup before squats? Is it good or does it, perhaps, end up fatiguing the legs too much? My strength training routine is the AllPro routine - progressive loading-deloading routine that keeps the weights static for 5 weeks while reps go from 8-12, and then the weights are increased by 10% only if form with 12 reps is good. I started lifting a few months back and while I have progressed, my weights are fairly light so far (as a % of my body weight)

3. This form of training is glycogen depleting, which helps with partitioning (where calories are going and coming from)

Can you explain a bit about this?

Doesn't glycogen depletion mean "bonking". I thought that was a bad thing?

I primarily use swimming and run-walk intervals for my cardio. I have a tendency to blood pressure regulation issues when exercising (vasovagal sycope). In swimming, I can keep up a high level of exertion because it is a horizontal activity. I do laps as hard as I can without stopping and after about 45 minutes to an hour, my muscles are screaming and I am spent. With running, I can't go as hard because the upright position combined with the bouncing sometimes brings out the sudden blood pressure drop (making me faint). So, with running, I've been doing short run-walk intervals. Run-walking is SO much easier than swimming and I rarely feel any muscle soreness. I run of energy before my muscles feel taxed at all. That usually happens sometime around 90 minutes or so.

Should this be a signal to stop? On the weekends, I would have time to go out for longer periods like 3-hours or so. Should I be purposefully avoiding the bonk (by eating energy chews etc) or trying to train my body to get along longer with less glycogen by trying to push past the bonk? Eating the chews feels counter productive. Why bother running longer to just eat more calories? Should I split my run into morning and night to go for more total minutes?

To clarify, I have no interest in training for a race. I don't care about getting better at running or "improving performance". I just want to configure the running to burn as much fat as humanly possible.

(I've lost about 60 pounds so far but am still 15 pounds away from normal BMI for my height. I also strength train at the gym with weights. I net around 1500 cals per day.)

Thanks so much!