64, Fit, Fabulous, and Fat!!!

shapcomp wrote: »

So if I am tracking and measuring and exercising and not still not losing weight, what can I do?

Hi!

I lost about 50 pounds with MFP at age 59-60, and am now in year 3 of maintaining a healthy weight (BMI 22) at 63, just to give you an idea where this advice is coming from.

First, take steps to tighten your food logging accuracy. It's possible to lose weight while tracking loosely, or not tracking at all . . . but if you aren't losing when you think you should be, super-careful tracking for a month or six weeks will give you the information you need to zero in on where the issue might be.

* If you didn't check the food database entries you use regularly when you first started tracking, go through them now (as a project or when you use one) to make sure they're accurate per package or USDA database. (https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/)

* Don't assume package servings are the right size; weight those, too. They can be amazingly far off.

* Don't assume the bar code scanner gives you automatically correct results; it doesn't, they're still user-entered entries and could be incorrect.

* Do you have a food scale? If not, get one.

* Weigh everything possible on your food scale (when at home). Learn the tips that make it quick/easy. **

* Avoid cups/spoons as much as possible for measurements. Scale is more accurate, and quicker. At most, use them for liquids only.

* Don't use database entries for homemade foods that you didn't make (except in the rare case to estimate a meal at someone else's home or something like that)

* Check in with yourself to make sure that you're logging all calorie-containing beverages, sauces, condiments, dressings, seasonings, especially oils for cooking, grocery-shopping samples, snacks, tasting while cooking, etc.

* Be aware that zero calorie oil sprays aren't actually zero calorie: They can say that because they're less than 5 calories per label-sized spray, which is often 1/3 second. Heh. They have the same number of calories per gram as the same oil in non-spray form. Weigh them.

* If you have "cheat meals" or "cheat days" (under any name ), log them, even if you have to estimate. (Estimate on the high side when unsure.)

* If this is all totally on point, consider making your food diary public on MFP and asking if anyone has suggestions about logging accuracy issues. This might be a little painful (people can be very blunt!), but is usually helpful (if you can be a bit thick-skinned about how people put things.)

** This is a thread about food scale tips to help with the things above (don't worry about the click-bait title ):

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10498882/weighing-food-takes-too-long-and-is-obsessive

While it's common to under-estimate food (and research has demonstrated this), it's also common to over-estimate exercise calories (yes, you should be eating exercise calories, but sound estimates are key; or, if you're not confident of estimates, start by eating 50-75% of them).

Heart rate monitors may be likely to overestimate certain types of exercise (especial strength-oriented exercise, and intervals); the MFP database overestimates some exercises; exercise machines are often howlingly inaccurate, especially if they don't know your age or bodyweight (and possibly even when they do).

Be aware that many exercise "calculators" include your basal metabolic rate (BMR) or resting metabolic rate (RMR) in the estimated total, so may be accurate for that gross calorie burn, but when what you really need to eat back (in MFP-world) is the incremental (net) calories (on top of BMR/RMR calories), that can be an issue at large amounts of exercise, especially for people (like smaller 60-something women ) who have relatively low calorie allowances to start with. (At smaller amounts of exercise, the difference is lost in the noise of other estimating factors, but you mentioned exercising 1.5 hours daily, which is a fair amount. I wouldn't be surprised if your BMR is at least 50 calories an hour, so just including BMR in exercise estimate when you don't want it included would be 75 calories.)

I'm not trying to tell you it's so hard to estimate exercise that you shouldn't eat any of those calories: Zero is a guaranteed inaccurate estimate. Not fueling exercise is a recipe for fatigue, which is counter-productive. (More about that later.)

Note that one major difference in our calorie needs when older vs. younger is mostly about loss of muscle tissue through decades of sub-optimal activities, and lifestyles that involve less movement.

Strength exercise (like weight training) is useful in diverse ways for us 60-something women. Though muscle gains are slow at best, strength gains are fast (from better recruiting/using muscle fibers we already have). More muscle tends to encourage stronger bones, which help protect us from things like the broken hip that can debilitate older women and even hasten mortality. More muscle keeps us stronger longer, so more able to be independent: It delays that permanent move to assisted living.

Some women our age believe the myths that weight training ("lifting heavy") means lifting giant weights, so is a big injury risk. It doesn't mean that at all: It means lifting things that are manageably challenging for us personally, then gradually increasing the challenge as we get stronger.

Some women of any age believe the myth that weight training will make us "bulky", to some kind of bodybuilder level that we personally don't want. It won't. Female bodybuilders work very hard for many years to get the look we see in photos, and they don't look like that in everyday life (they're all flexed up and weight-depleted to the max and dehydrated and fake-tanned and posed in the photos to look that way). Also, some of them have taken illegal performance enhancing drugs to look that way (in order to win competitions). Normal people like us, when we strength train, get stronger and develop more muscle tissue very slowly and gradually. It takes a very long time, even longer when we're older and female and trying to lose weight. If we reach a look we like, and don't want more muscle, we simply go into "maintain muscle" mode at that point. No big deal.

So, strength training (weight training or bodyweight exercises) can help - although slowly - with one of the reasons for lower calorie requirements as we age. There's a great thread here about strength training programs (despite the name, in includes bodyweight exercise programs, not just weight lifting):

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10332083/which-lifting-program-is-the-best-for-you

The other factor in aging and reduced calorie needs is reduced activity: Not so much exercise, but daily life. Think about it: At 20, we tend to have more physically-active jobs, and are more likely to go out dancing, join recreational sports leagues, walk & bike more due to lack of gas money, etc. Later, we're chasing toddlers, and redecorating/remodeling our homes, landscaping the yard, working to make a comfortable life in beautiful surroundings. At some point in middle age, we tend to settle in and enjoy what we've created over the years. If we have kids, they're grown and may even be helping us with stuff. Often, our incomes are better so we have more conveniences (the Roomba, the riding mower, maybe hired cleaning/yard workers, etc.) and we can indulge in richer foods and drinks. Social life becomes very food-focused, for many of us.

So, intentional exercise is part of countering that, but daily life movement has a surprisingly large role. (Research suggests that even people who are simply fidgety burn up to a couple of hundred more calories daily than non-fidgety ones.) Now, I'm not suggesting you get a twitchy! Though it's hard to estimate the calories, consciously increasing daily life movement can add surprising numbers of calorie burn to your day. (One of the things that can happen if we cut calories for a long time is that we subtly slow down, sit more, rest more, do less - very counter-productive to weight loss. Consciously increasing movement can help.) There's a thread about this here:


http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10610953/neat-improvement-strategies-to-improve-weight-loss

The "weight gain over the years" thing is tricky. People tend to attribute to amorphous "aging". But to gain 10 pounds per decade, all we need to do is persistently eat 100 calories more than we burn, year in and year out. Our gradually shrinking activity levels, and gradually increasing intake, can get us there very, very easily.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to write a manifesto. But I do like to see women my own age succeed at weight and fitness goals, and there are lots of misunderstandings and misrepresentations about it. Any number of times, I've been in groups of (mostly overweight to obese) friends, where someone says " . . . but of course it's impossible to lose weight at our age." It isn't impossible. It isn't even all that complicated. Really. (It's not easy every last second, but it's pretty simple.)

Best wishes! :flowerforyou: