70 Days / 20 Pounds Challenge

Sorry to hear that. Yeah, North Africa is NOT the place to be right now! I really wanted my kids to see the pyramids, but I'm not sure now if it will ever happen.

Day 12!

My scale hovered, HOVERED on 139.8...then jumped to 140.

LOL.

Day 2 and 3 - had a few days add together and lots of walking for Canada day.

Day 15!

I'm still counting only 1000-calorie deficits because I can't be bothered to add up other days. My appetite is in the toilet from all the cardio. I need to eat another 300-400 cal tonight because what I've eaten so far is Not Okay. Once I sit for a while, I'll get hungry again.

I've lost 9.8lbs in 3.5 weeks, but some of that is "beginner loss" because I just started with the site.

As expected, no weight loss today, but the uptick was less than I'd expected. Also, upped the intensity of my Shred workout yesterday, and my muscles suddenly jumped in size from water retention, so it looks like I'm still loosing. I'm trying to do it with as much weight as I can handle to preserve fat-free mass, but it takes time for me to build strength.

Morbidity increases with weight loss according to some studies if you're less than obese. This is assumed to be from loss of too much FFM. Both FFM percentages AND absolute values of your FFM are important to health. Currently, my body fat percentage is expected to be around 29% for my weight, if I were a typical, non-weight-losing woman. It's actually right at about 27%. So my lean mass is still very good!

Day 16! My deficit is actually too high. Gotta decide what to spend it on, YAY!!!!

palwithme wrote: »

Well, so far this challenge seems to be working. According to the math, I should have lost 4.8 pounds. According to the scale I am down 4 pounds from where I started. On those days I don't hit the 1,000 calorie deficit I either maintain or have under a 1,000 calorie deficit.

That's awesome! I'm down way more because I was eating an maintenance before, so I had beginner water loss. Also, I haven't been recording any days in which I get less than 1,000 except the one where it was 900 plus 2 days of 500 before.

462 calories of Hershey's kisses, Cheezits, and homemade granola. Mmmmmmmmmmmm. I was actually more in the hole that I thought--even accounting for some of the exercise being off, I needed closer to 500 cal to not have a deficit too high.

Got it straightened out today!!!! Ate to a 500 deficit, so with the accidental 1500 deficit yesterday, it's Day 20!

reachingforarainbow wrote: »

MamaBirdBoss wrote: »

I'm not as heavy as I am out of shape. LOL. I couldn't run a mile, even without my exercise allergy (yes, that's a real thing). It took me nearly 3 months to work up to WALKING 10k steps a day. The first day I did 5k total, all I could do the next day was sleep.

http://www.healthline.com/health-slideshow/exercise-induced-anaphylaxis#9

Read slide 9. Figure out what is causing the allergic reaction. Do not use it as an excuse to not exercise. Exercise is important to maintain muscles/strength/cardio vascular health

Since I'm walking/jogging 4.5 miles a day now, on top of walking another 4-6 miles, so I'm not using it as an excuse not to exercise, trust me. I got out of shape because I spent most of my last pregnancy in bed, and then I started up a company (mucho sitting).

Exercise-induced anaphylaxis means I can't push AT ALL during cardio exercise, at least not my respiratory system, especially early on. That's why I'm doing intervals now. If I'm not breathing too hard but my legs are tired, I can totally push. But I can't do anything that makes me breathe too fast for too long a time. (The longer I've been exercising, the safer it generally is.) For example, sometimes I have to pause early in the 30-day shred if I did jumping jacks too vigorously to wait for my lungs to clear.

Working on the intervals lets me raise my fitness instead of slamming repeatedly into a wall of EIA and my metabolic disorder. It's been a near-miracle. I tried C25k before, but those running intervals are way, way too long--they're above my triggering threshold. I'm still only running :25 at a stretch. But it's allowing for actual improvement, which I never saw before. With minute-long intervals, I was stuck in a cycle where my EIA and metabolic disorder would kick my butt long before I got in any regular cardio work, so it never got better. Now I can work on the cardio side of things by having those shorter intervals that can turn into longer intervals.

Who knows? Maybe one day, I will actually run a mile again! Okay, not likely. But I can run/walk a LOT of miles!

There are things that make it worse--makes the attacks more severe and unmanagable. But there is NOTHING I can do to make it just not happen. If I exercise on a 12-hour fast doped up on so many antihistimines I'm swimming in them, I will still get EIA if I do the kind of exercise most runners do, for instance.

This means that it takes a really long time for me, compared to other people, to improve my cardiovascular fitness.

Weirdly, raking leaves is a HUGE trigger, and I have to be extra careful with that, or I'll spend the rest of the day coughing and struggling to breathe. I simply don't shovel snow. I haven't figured out a way to do that without trigger an attack within 10 minutes. Digging a single hole is fine, but shoveling snow takes too long, and I will ALWAYS have an attack.

Anyway, a better source of info:
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/886641-overview
http://www.ers-education.org/lrmedia/2012/pdf/196778.pdf

Mine is worsened by diary and NSAIDs, I discovered years ago, but even in their absence, I still get it. Anything with exertion + high adrenaline does it--like when a car flipped in front of me and ended up about 150 feet off the road, upside down. I VERY CAREFULLY did not sprint to the car to deliver first aid but did a controlled jog, but I was still coughing up half a lung for the next 4 hours. In regular exercise situations, I know the warning signs of an impending attack and can head them off really fast, though, now. In cold (mine's made worse by cold), I either don't exercise outside or I make sure most of my skin is well covered. I got super-expensive Under Armor running gear for it years ago, and that heads off the cold uticaria->fullblown exercise induced anaphylaxis progression. Very high humidity also makes it worse for me. Dry heat doesn't bother it at all. Don't know why.

And no, I don't run with an epi-pen because it's heavy and I've never had THAT bad of a reaction. Stopping exercise reverses the worst of it pretty fast, and if I decided to push on, I'd be vomiting so violently beside the road I wouldn't be able to keep exercising to close of my airways even if I wanted to! (Note how it says "cessation of exercise results in an immediate improvement of symptoms"--seriously, it takes about 30 seconds to get noticably better.) I do carry one in my purse, though. If I even need it, I'd be more likely to need it in an unplanned emergency.

Medicine does jack for me. I had an albuterol emergency inhaler, a stack of other oral steroids, and oral antihistimines. They make NO difference.

Also, I discovered on my own and then found in the literature later that if I edge up to the beginning of an attack, just the VERY beginning, and then back off and let the feeling subside, I can usually push up to that same level again and be fine for considerably longer.

I can actually reliably trigger an attack if I wanted to most of the time--mine's a lot more predictable than average. LOL.

My full list of frequent triggers is:
-running/jogging
-raking leaves
-shoveling snow
-aerobics (manageable)
-dancing (manageable)
-swimming
-racquetball--actually, I HATEHATEHATE this unless I've had 30 min to wash the worst out of my system before I start because I simply can't do it--5 min in, and I'm wheezing, coughing, and BRIGHT red, and my legs are itching

I still can't run A MILE, though. I don't know whether I ever will. I have a metabolic disorder going on, and I've figured out how to "hack" it now to run intervals, but that's not the same as a solid mile. I could do intervals for 10 mile pretty easily now (as long as it wasn't hot outside!), but I can't run a single mile straight. Not even at the slowest possible jog.

Day 5, 6, and 7 last week with adding a few days together. Day 8 - actual 1000 deficit today