Maintaining Muscle, Phentermine, and Calories...

So in essence I'd be removing the extra 500 calories from my diet by changing my workout to not really burn calories but instead build muscles? Seems counter productive... Are you saying I'll actually burn MORE calories by lifting heavier weight fewer times?

Well, it seems like you have a couple of goals:

- burn 500 calories

- preserve muscle mass

Preserving muscle mass is best done with a progressive lifting program. You will burn a fair number of calories doing this as well, though not as many as doing more intense cardio activity.

Only problem with all this 5x5 stuff that I can see is it's a lot of dead lifting and rowing, both of which would put a lot of pressure on my umbilical hernia, which the doc has told me to avoid surgery on till I lose the said weight, and my brother also does this with me and he's torn his ACL like 8 years ago and never got surgery so his knee is crap... I doubt either of us could actually do this...

If you don't feel like you can do some of the exercises, then don't do them. You can still follow the idea of progressive loading with the machines if you are comfortable with that right now. So rather than doing all those reps at the same weight, you would do fewer reps but increase the weight each week (I think this is how the Stronglifts model works, I don't have it in front of me).

You could also do a hypertrophy program, in which the goal is generally to get huge, but obviously that would not happen when you are eating at a deficit. In that case you would do three sets, increasing the weight and decreasing the reps with each set. For example:

Set 1: Lowest weight, 15 reps
Set 2: Add weight, 12 reps
Set 3: Add weight (heaviest weight), 8 reps, aim to fail by 8th rep

This would be easy to do with the machines because it would just be a matter of moving the pin, but you wouldn't rotate between machines after each set. You would complete all three sets, then move on to the next machine.

listckli71 wrote: »

The only I don't know from your post is are there any dangerous signals coming from your bloodwork. This pill was like 10$ for a month for me so not a huge cash cow for doctors. I have fatty liver and he thinks the gains outweigh the risk even though I was already making progress on my own. Up to you sounds like you are doing great! So no pressure. I just wanted to jump on here and say doctors arent evil and mine had a full on discussion with me, checks my emails and responds quickly.. and has monthly check-in set up to make sure im progressing. He cares about my health.

This thread is seven years old. I doubt the OP is still even around...