60 yrs and up

One of the decisions I made for myself when I started my weight loss journey was to seek every opportunity to be active. I consider walking to be exercise. It may not be spin class or HIT or whatever others are doing, but I am out of the house every morning, no matter what the weather, walking my dogs. I go to bed early so I can get up early to have time to walk them before I have to be at a class or an appointment. On the rare occasions when they don't like the weather, I take them home and continue the walk by myself. Since I have an audio book or podcast to listen to, I never feel alone.

I teach a beginning line dance class on Friday mornings. We joke that it is a social time, interrupted by dancing. It's great exercise not only for the body, but also for the brain.

Barbie from NW WA

Well, I just got a big illustration re: the article AnnPT77 posted about scale fluctuations. I just weighed myself this morning, and there's a six pound difference between today and what I weighed two days ago. Fortunately for my ego it's in the "correct" direction - but I now understand on a personal level just how widely weight can vary depending upon day to day factors.

gunderw59 wrote: »

Hello guys, 60 yr old newbie to site. Been doing crossfit at local gym for 8 months went from 285 lbs to 250 then hit the wall. Trying to track diet much closer to break through. I have completed my 1st week logging meals and exercise. I continue to be way low on protein and way above on sodium. I have not reached my calories any of the days but i'm eating a bunch it feels like. I have lost 3 lbs in the first week did 5 days crossfit during that time. I have 2 Questions and hope you can shed some light. I changed weight from 250 to 247 but my allotted calories and macros stayed the same I thought it would be a little less. I also log my exercise each day but it adds more calories and stuff when I do. I cant figure out how to just keep my calories the same and not add. I put original goals as weight loss at rate of 1 lb. per week because I believe in slow and steady. I would welcome all comments and advice. If you want me as a friend that will be great to. Thanks for reading

Hi! There's kind of a lot to unpack in your post. Apolofies in advance if this turns into an essay.

Fundamentally, I think some of your goals may be somewhat at cross purposes to each other. "Slow and steady" healthy, sustainable weight loss tends to be at odds with "can't eat all one's goal calories" and not wanting to add exercise calories to one's goal.

First, as a bit of background: The calorie goal MFP gives you for weight loss does not include intentional exercise (this makes it different from many/most other calorie calculators on the web**). Therefore, it expects you to log exercise when you do it - teaching us the useful lesson that we need more fuel when we do more work, but don't have to fill up the tank as much when we do less. Therefore, it adds your exercise calories to the amount you're supposed to eat.

Think of your body as a fee-based checking account, one that requires you to maintain a minimum balance. At the start of the month, you deposit your paycheck, and pay for things across the month as needed. If your account balance drops too low, there are expensive penalties you want to avoid. So, if you have some unusual expense (say, car repair) during the month, you may need to transfer money from another account so you don't go too low, and experience those bad consequences.

Your body, of course, needs a certain number of calories just to sustain itself. When you set up MFP, and want to lose slow and steady (a good plan), it gives you a daily calorie balance that has your weight loss plan figured into it. So, you want to be trying to eat close to that number of calories, to keep on the slow and steady course. On a day when you do some exercise, that's a calorie expenditure just like that car repair was a money expenditure. You don't want to drop way below your sensible calorie balance. That means you need to eat more calories, so you stay at the same minimum balance that it takes to remain healthy, while losing slowly and steadily.

Undereating, like overspending, has penalties. They start with fatigue and weakness (which can come on suddenly - ask me how I know this ). They can go on to unnecessarily large amounts of muscle-tissue loss alongside fat loss (something we can ill afford at our age), gallbladder problems, hair thinning, and worse. Hunger is not necessarily one of the warning signs. People can feel full enough, but suddenly begin to have other bad outcomes (after a few weeks or so when undereating catches up to them).

Another analogy: If you drive your car to work every day, but not much of anywhere else, maybe you can put in 5 gallons once a week and do fine. If you suddenly take a big trip of a few hundred miles, you'd better put in more fuel, or you're going to run out of gas. Bodies aren't different. They run on food as fuel, and calories are the measure of fuel.

Now, some people worry that exercise calories might be overestimated, so they start out eating back a fair fraction (maybe 50%) for the first 4-6 weeks, and watch their weight loss rate. After that, if losing too fast on average, they eat a little more to adjust. Likewise, they'd adjust to eat less if losing too slowly (but could safely/healthfully lose faster).

If you're having difficulty eating all your allotted calories, or close, the answer is to eat more foods that are a little more calorie dense, but not (to you personally) unpleasantly over-filling. Common examples are nuts, nut butter, fattier cuts of meat or fish, more oil or butter in cooking or on foods, avocados, full-fat dairy products rather than low/no-fat, etc. If you're getting good well rounded nutrition already, and still have some calories left, it's also OK to eat some reasonable portion of treat foods that are not as nutrient dense, like ice cream, baked goods, chocolate, or alcohol. Within calorie goals, those won't impair your weight loss.

SInce you're coming in low on protein, I'd suggest working on that first. We really want adequate protein as we age (some research suggests we metabolize it less efficiently, and muscle loss is a big problem for aging health). Also, adequate protein is useful for muscle retention while losing fat, and is absolutely key to making muscular/strength progress in the gym. Use some of your calories to get more protein!

Sodium being high may or may not be a big deal. I'm over sodium often, but as I have normal blood pressure now that I'm at a healthy weight, and don't have any other health issues that would require limiting sodium, I don't worry about it. If you have reason to limit it, just start looking at your diary, see what foods are contributing a lot of it, and consider whether you can happily eat less of those, and more of some other food you enjoy that better supports your nutrition goals.

Now, about your putting in your lower weight, and not seeing goal change: If you just recorded an updated weight (and did nothing else), MFP may not update your calorie goal. Some people report MFP automatically adjusting every 10 pounds, and some don't (I think the difference might be the app version they use, not sure). If you want MFP to re-evaluate calories at any point, you can make it do so by going back through the guided set-up like you did when you started out. Three pounds loss is great, but realistically, it isn't going to make a lot of difference in your calorie goal.

Best wishes for continued success!

** In the profile settings, MFP asks your exercise in terms of what you do in your job and daily life, not including intentional exercise. It does this by estimating your NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis), the calories it thinks you burn just going through regular life, but doing no exercise. Then it subtracts calories based on your weight management goal (1 pound a week = subtract 500 daily calories), to give you a pre-exercise calorie goal to eat. Most other calculators are TDEE calculators (TDEE = total daily energy expenditure); they're estimating your daily calories including intentional exercise, then average those over the week. Either way, you want to be fueling your exercise, either as you do it, or averaged over the week. Otherwise, you're underfueling and risking too-fast loss.

If you prefer to eat the same number of calories every day, regardless of exercise level, you would want to use a TDEE calculator to create your own calorie goal, and put that in MFP manually. Then, you can either skip entering exercise, record exercise time but zero calories, or pay for Premium MFP to have more options.