Over 50 years old, how to beat the plateau? Any ideas?

At 1,250 a day and regular exercise, you should have seen some weight loss in the past eight months. If you open your diary, we may be able to provide some more specific help.

Some basic troubleshooting: Are you using a food scale for solid food? Are you creating your own recipes and avoiding generic database entries? Are you having any "cheat" days or meals that you aren't logging? Are there any condiments or liquids you may not be logging?

My solution is probably not for everyone of course but you did say “any ideas are welcome” Back when I was losing weight and more recently to lose 6 pounds that I accumulated after lockdown, what ALWAYS worked to get me out of a plateau was an 8 mile hike. Told ya it wasn’t for everyone! but every time the scale wasn’t budging after a few weeks I’d go for an 8 mile hike and a few days later after the retained water weight went down I’d begin to lose weight right on schedule again. I have also ALWAYS eaten back ALL my calories earned through exercise (I use the iRunner app to calculate exercise calories earned on the hike) I’m 45 years old, I’ve lost a total of 43 pounds and maintained that loss within a reasonable range for 6+ years. Not sure if this will help but I wish you luck on your health journey!

hollythecook wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

Whatever it is, I don't think age has much of anything to do with it. (Said from the perspective of someone whose weight loss started at age 59.)

If you're perimenopausal or recently entered menopause, you could have some temporary water weight weirdness, but that shouldn't be a factor long term. If you're losing fat, even slowly, the fat loss should eventually outpace any water weight and show up on the scale.

Answers to the questions above might be helpful, also:

Did you start the HIIT and weights at approximately your current intensity/volume 8 months ago, too, along with calorie restriction?

Do you feel at all fatigued, dispirited, cold? How is your workout performance - able to add volume to your strength training at a satisfactory level, keeping up the intensity during the HIIT without increased struggle, etc.?

Are you eating back exercise calories, and if so, how do you estimate them?

Have you literally seen no change (other than random daily fluctuations) in weight in 8 months, or is it more like frustratingly super-slow loss?

I went through a premature menopause at age 21 so have been on replacement hormones for 30 years, which makes weight loss and maintenance a challenge, but I was able to do it until I hit about 49.

I started the HIIT and weight training in February 2019, when I started this weight loss journey, so it is what helped me shed the 40 pounds initially. My teacher "mixes it up" a bit, but I feel like I'm in a slump. I have been very fatigued, and I have now moved down from 3 days per week to 2 days per week to see if maybe I'm not recovering well enough between workouts. Sometimes we go for close to 2 hours on weight lifting days, and I feel like that is way too much. On HIIT days, she also likes to do "active rest" in between 3 minute rounds (like pushups, situps, squats, what-have-you), but I have heard that a "tabata" style with true rest for like 15-30 seconds is better than active rest, and I'd actually like to suggest to her that we try that.

I usually have a protein shake after my work out. I do tend to eat back some of my calories on work out days.

If you have a trainer, and have confidence in her, it makes sense to follow her direction.

I'm much older than you (64), though fairly fit (quite active for well over a decade, even when obese). Your routine, if I'm understanding it accurately, wouldn't work for me. I would under-recover. I do steady state cardio as the cardiovascular main dish, and use intensity as a condiment or side dish, in the overall exercise menu. Two hours sounds like a lot, for strength training. (Of course, my training objectives may be different from yours. I'm not training in a really structured way any more, but my biases toward that approach come from a time when I followed a structured training plan aimed at rowing performance improvement.) True HIIT is fatiguing, Tabata intervals (at least in the form I do them on the rowing machine) are exhausting. I would not personally do either one more than once a week, embedded in a daily routine that includes more steady state work. But that reflects my objectives, not yours.

I'd take your fatigue as a negative sign. Fatigue can mean a reduction in our daily life calorie expenditure (simplistically, we do less when tired, put off energy-draining chores, do more sedentary things for entertainment rather than active ones, maybe rest/sleep more). There can be subconscious slow-downs, too, things like slower hair growth, being colder, etc.

Fatigue can result from over-exercise, from being in too big a calorie deficit for too long, from cumulative stress (including the aforementioned things plus other life stresses, including the stress of the pandemic), from sub-ideal nutrition coming home to roost after a long period, from less than ideal sleep, and more. But regardless of source, it can drag your TDEE down a bit in various ways, and slow weight loss below what you might expect.

I'm not saying thats *the* reason you're seeing a plateau, but it could be in the mix. It would take more assessment to try to figure out the why, and there are probably other factors in what you're experiencing - things others have mentioned.

Some of the questions I asked were about figuring out whether water retention was a likely factor. There's always water weight weirdness, but the two big things that seem to trip people up - that look like plateaus but really aren't - are water weight from new exercise, or related to hormonal cycles, neither of which seem to apply to you.

hollythecook wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

Whatever it is, I don't think age has much of anything to do with it. (Said from the perspective of someone whose weight loss started at age 59.)

[snip]

Do you feel at all fatigued, dispirited, cold? How is your workout performance - able to add volume to your strength training at a satisfactory level, keeping up the intensity during the HIIT without increased struggle, etc.?

Are you eating back exercise calories, and if so, how do you estimate them?

Have you literally seen no change (other than random daily fluctuations) in weight in 8 months, or is it more like frustratingly super-slow loss?

I feel like some work out days are good and some are bad. There are days I feel really old and my body won't get down on the ground and back up very quickly. We don't continue to add weights. We use 8 pound hand weights and a 10 pound kettle bell.

I have seen no change in 8 months other than weight gain of the 8 pounds.

Not ever adding weight seems odd to me, in a strength program . . . unless you're adding volume in some other way (more reps/sets for example).

I wish I had more and better insights for you, but it's unclear to me. I'm sorry.

Best wishes!

Hope you don't mind me saying but your exercise routine sounds most peculiar.
2hrs of strength training but you don't seem to have any weight progression programmed in. How are you measuring any progress? Are you getting stronger?
Lots of HIIT (do you mean real HIIT or is it circuit training?).
When you opine that Tabata is "better" what does better mean to you? The Tabata pacing intervals are particularly taxing and again build fatigue*.

I can't work out what your fitness or sporting goals are from this routine so is there some other driver for choosing to train in this way?

To me seems like you are going to build a lot of fatigue and have poor recovery. That isn't sustainable for months on end - it's partly why people periodise their training. It's also far harder to tolerate high intensity and volume when in a deficit. It also will drag down your daily NEAT calorie burns as our bodies are very good at making us slow down when fatigued.

Also didn't see your answer to the question how you are estimating your calorie expenditure for those exercises both of which are very hard to estimate with any accuracy and if people use the wrong methods can be spectacularly exaggerated. With a private diary it's hard for people to see what's going on but from your comments inaccuracy on both CI and CO mean your calorie balance could well be very different to what you think.


* Re. Tabata - personal view, I'm not a fan. Seems designed to feel hard (to appeal to people think sweat and pain mean an effective workout) and more importantly the pacing and under-recovery compromises the high intensity parts of the interval training which IMHO is where the benefit of intense interval training comes from.

glassyo wrote: »

Mithridites wrote: »

Another vote for the food scale here! At the very least it will confirm that you are logging accurately, but I suspect you will find some sources of error, like I did. This is how I log a peanut butter and banana sandwich (open-faced):
1. Plate on scale. On/tare.
2. Bread on plate. Record grams. Tare.
3. Smear PB on bread, 15 grams. Tare.
4. Cut up banana on bread. Record grams.
It's actually a very quick and painless process now. Only dirty items are the plate and the knife, and its accuracy has been confirmed by my losing 30 pounds in just over 3 months. Try it out! Good luck with your weightloss journey

5. Lick knife.

Well, to do that (and still log accurately), the process would be slightly different :
- PB jar on scale. Tare.
- Scoop PB with knife and spread on bread.
- Record grams after putting jar back on scale.
- Lick knife.