Hello

Hello. March 24th I logged 10 years with MFP and never missed a day. When I started I needed to lose 70 lbs which I did and have not gained it back. Logging meals works.

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1161603/so-you-want-a-nice-stomach/p1

sweetdaisy13 wrote: »

Thank you both for the welcome and your weightloss is amazing!

I tend to fast 16:8 and have been doing this for a couple of years. I don't have breakfast, have a small lunch at 1pm and main meal around 8pm.

I'm quite active and exercise daily: run around 20-25 miles a week, do rebounding sessions 3-4 times a week, walking and strength and conditioning workouts in between to prevent running injuries.

Since logging my food intake again I've noticed that it's snacking is possibly where I'm going wrong. Sometimes my snacking contains more calories than my lunch/main meal. So I need to make better food choices.

I'm 5' 4" and weigh 124 lbs, but 121-122 lbs is where I'm most comfortable. My daily calorie goal on MFP is 1,200 and when I have a heavy exercise day I do increase my calorie intake and try not to exceed 1,500. On a low exercise day I eat 1,200 or just a little under.

I have a GPS fitness watch and even though I can "burn" around 1,100 calories during a half marathon, I take this figure with a pinch of salt and know it's only an estimate.

I'm happy with a go-slow approach. I only have a few pounds to lose on the scale, but it's the appearance of my stomach that bothers me the most. I really want to get rid of the fat around my stomach, but know that you can't spot reduce - advice around this area would be most welcome.

Great insight on the snacking: I can see how that could happen. Calorie counting, even temporarily is super-helpful for identifying things like that.

And yes, spot reduction is not doable, from anything I've seen. For many of us, abdomen is the last bit to recede, too. This is usually regarded as the best summary around here when it comes to appearance and abdomen:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1161603/so-you-want-a-nice-stomach/p1

With apologies for not having a cite at hand for you, I've read some research hinting that aging women may get a disproportionately positive outcome from strength training, with respect to mobilizing abdominal fat, but I'm not 100% convinced (I also don't think of someone your age as "aging" 😉). For sure, building muscle is the foundation of recomposition.

I think you don't need this next, but I'll throw it in for other possible readers with different backgrounds. Sometimes we see women here (usually young ones still grappling with body changes in adolescence, but occasionally older ones chasing their 16 year-old body) who have ideas about abdominal configuration that are overly affected by photoshopped Instagrammers or the like. (That doesn't sound like you, to me.) This thread is about what real women look like under real conditions, including some women who are quite fit, muscular, etc.

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10689837/does-this-uterus-make-my-stomach-look-fat/p1

Perhaps you'd even consider contributing to that thread, when you have some before/afters, for the community benefit.

In terms of exercise calorie estimates, this is usually regarded as a good, conservative source for double-checking walk/run calories. (For MFP logging purposes, you'd use the "net" option.)

https://exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs

With some guesses about your pace, 1100 might not be crazy far out of the ballpark for a half marathon, at your size. Running burns quite a lot of calories!

I do have a question about your calorie goal, wondering how you arrived at it? Was it from MFP? If so, what weight loss rate did you select?

With so very little to lose, you might be one of the few who can afford to go faster, because the time will be so short, maybe less than a month. That's especially viable for someone young, who doesn't have a lot of other current sources of life stress. (Fast weight loss is a stress, challenging exercise is a stress. Stress is cumulative, across physical and psychological sources. So, if there are stressors in job, home life, etc., those add in with the calorie deficit to create potentially high cumulative stress. "Too much" stress, an admittedly squishy concept, plus one that's individual-specific, can have negative effects for health, immune system, etc.). It can also trigger creeping water retention, hiding fat-loss progress on the scale, which sometimes makes people drop calories even lower - eek!

Very often, MFP assigns a 1200 goal when someone picks a too-aggressive weight loss rate for their current size: It's the minimum it will give a woman. Now, like I said, you'd presumably only need to be aggressive for a very short time, which is less likely to cause problems, but when only letting your calories go up to 1500 on heavy exercise days, I'm concerned that you may be limiting your fitness progress/performance and muscle repair, not to mention any potential for muscle gain (which could happen with a very small deficit/slow loss rate).

I'm about your size (5'5", 123-point-something pounds this morning) but of course much older (65). I've been losing slowly (irrationally slowly perhaps 😆) at 1850 net calories, usually 2000-2400 calories gross intake. I'm admittedly a mysteriously good li'l ol' calorie burner, but a TDEE calculator (https://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/) suggests that your BMR (the amount you'd burn in a coma!) is around 1200, and your all day calorie burn with exercise (TDEE, total daily energy expenditure) could easily be over 2000. Underfueling a strong exercise program can be counter-productive.

You mention your fitness watch. If you wear it 24/7 as I do mine, do you have it synched to MFP? That will reconcile its all-day calorie burn estimate with MFP's estimate, and leave your MFP calorie deficit for weight loss in the picture. You'd want to enable negative adjustments in food settings, too, to let it adjust downward in case of the rare less-active day. (If you have an Apple watch, it may not handle the interface correctly. Common advice here for Apple watch is to synch the watch to the Pacer app, and Pacer to MFP.)

I hope that at least some of that long ramble (apologies!) was responsive to your questions.

Best wishes!

sweetdaisy13 wrote: »

Thank you for all the information and advice @AnnPT77 .

I'm definitely going to work more on strength and conditioning workouts, plus core exercises as it helps with my running. Having done some reading on body recomposition, I see lots about doing squats, pull-ups, press-ups etc but nothing about sit-ups? I would have thought that this is a must (not that I do any, as I don't like them or find them comfortable for my back)?

The majority of my runs are trail/mountain running (pace is usually anywhere between 8-9 minute per mile, 10 minute per mile when really steep and tricky terrain), so whilst I know that GPS/Tracker watches are not 100% accurate in terms of calorie burn, I do believe that I am burning more calories than if I was running 'pancake flat' routes. I have a Garmin Forerunner 245 watch and I wear it 24/7 and have it linked to MFP and Strava (as I love going through the data).

My calorie goal has come from MFP. I have my goal weight as 122 lbs with a loss of 1 lb per week and my activity level as Lightly Active, but maybe I have done this wrong and it should be Active? But I'm not sure as Active states that you spend a good part of the day doing some physical activity. I do exercise a minimum of 30 minutes a day and if I go for a long run I can be running for 2-2:30 hours, but my job does not involve physical activity therefore I am unsure which activity level I am.

Your goal weight has zero effect on your MFP calorie goal. It's just used for some "atta girl" motivational messages. Your personal characteristics (age, weight, activity level . . . ) plus your weight loss rate target are what go into estimating your calorie goal.

MFP is designed to use an activity level setting based on daily life *before* exercise, i.e., your job, home chores, non-exercise hobbies, and that sort of thing. Then it intends for you to log exercise (or synch a tracker) and eat those calories on top of the base calorie goal it estimates, keeping the same weight loss rate. That teaches the useful lesson that when we're active, we get to eat more (in fact, need to eat more, for best health odds), and when we're less active, we should eat less.

If you prefer to estimate your exercise in, and eat the same number of calories each day, it would be theoretically better to use an outside TDEE calculator (like the one I mentioned above, one of the better web ones IMO) to get a daily calorie goal that includes exercise, and take a deficit off that, then set MFP goal manually. Under the covers, the activity multipliers MFP uses are different from the ones most TDEE calculators use for the same-label activity level, because of the different assumptions.

Either way, you follow the goal for 4-6 weeks, compare body weights to look at average weekly weight loss, and adjust intake if necessary. (A premenopausal woman should compare bodyweights at the same relative point in at least two different menstrual cycles, because hormonal water weight fluctuations can distort scale weight worse when comparing different points in the cycle.)

With MFP activity settings, the boundary between sedentary/not very active and lightly active would be somewhere 4000-5000 steps or equivalent other movement, done outside of intentional exercise. I'm not sure where the lightly active/active boundary is. Someone else may speak up, on that. (I'm unquestionably sedentary, in real life, before exercise.)

For all I know, Garmin may take elevation into account when calculating outdoor run/walk/hike/etc. calorie estimates, I don't know. I have a Garmin Vivoactive 3, and sort of suspect that it may consider elevation change, but I haven't bothered to research the question. I eat all the Garmin exercise calories from intentional walks (though the ExRx link would give more rational estimates, probably lower for me), the Garmin exercise calories for things I don't have a better alternative for (on-water rowing, biking (don't have a power meter), etc.), and that's worked out OK. (Some of my other exercise, like machine rowing, I use other calorie estimating methods as a cross-check. I use the MFP database for strength training and yoga.)

I don't synch my Garmin, though I think most people would be better off doing so. I got mine after I'd already been logging on MFP for several years, knew my calorie needs very well at that point . . . and the Garmin, like MFP, dramatically *underestimates* my calorie requirements. (I'm just weird, statistically. Most people aren't, so the trackers give reasonable all-day estimates for most people.)

I might not be the best person to advise you, from a philosophical standpoint. I'm very health motivated, don't really care about appearance goals, want to keep as much strength/muscle/performance as possible when losing fat, and that sort of thing. That biases me strongly toward slow loss, when my weight is healthy but not exactly where I want it to be.

Personally, I focus on the worst that can happen, before accumulating enough experience data to adjust rationally: With too slow loss, the big potential problem is frustration; with too fast loss, the big potential problem is health/performance risk. I'm strongly biased toward the "risk frustration" side, for that month or so . . . probably partly because I did lose too fast when I first got to MFP, because it suggested I eat 1200 to lose weight at a reasonable rate, and I turned out to lose *much* faster than that, and suffered some consequences though I fixed it as soon as I realized. (Fortunately, the consequences pretty much were only weakness and fatigue, might have been a little extra hair loss a few weeks delayed. It can theoretically be worse.)

Best wishes!

sweetdaisy13 wrote: »

Thank you for the above information. I have adjusted the rate of weight loss per week to 0.5 lbs and this has given me an increase of 250 calories a day. Daily calorie goal is now 1,450 which according to my Garmin watch is slightly under my RMR.

I think this is much more do-able than a calorie goal of 1,200. I'm not looking for fast weight loss, I'm happy to lose slowly and keep the last few pounds off, rather than lose the weight quickly and put it back on in a few weeks/months due to 1,200 calories being unsustainable for me.

That sounds like a good plan, to me. Even if just under your RMR, you should still have a pretty substantial calorie deficit given your exercise activity, unless you eat back your calorie adjustment as MFP intends.

I'd encourage you to think in terms of accumulating a few weeks of good logging data, then adjusting to a sensible rate like that. Half a pound a week can be tough to see short-term on the scale, amongst typically daily weight fluctuations of a pound or two from water weight and digestive contents variations, in anything less than multiple weeks. A weight trending app (Happy Scale for iOS, Libra for Android, others) may be a help, but ultra-slow loss can even elude them for a few weeks. (Mine thought I was gaining for the better part of a month, when I re-started strength training after a long-ish break 😆, even though I was actually losing fat . . . slowly, soooo slowly 😆 - slower than half a pound a week, though).

Nonetheless, actual normal slow loss (like half a pound a week) leaves room for good performance, perhaps even slow muscle gain to happen, if dedicated and genetically fortunate. I think it can be a better overall formula, if your goals are primarily appearance and performance, vs. just a number on the scale.

I'd be interested to hear how things go, for you! 🙂

sweetdaisy13 wrote: »

Weighed 122 lbs (8 stone 10 lbs) today which is my goal weight. Very happy with this.

It's really has been an eye opener since I've started logging my food intake from 11th March. Watching what I eat, along with daily exercise is allowing me to eat a minimum of 1,450 calories a day and lose weight.

Now that I have reached my goal weight I'm looking to maintain or possibly drop one more pound and keep it off. I will keep snacking to a minimum (as this is where I've been going wrong) and continue with my exercise routine.

Since 1st April, I'm now incorporating a few planks and isometric exercises daily to improve the appearance of my body and to build strength. It may only be 5-10 mins a day but starting off slow and steady.

Good show! Thanks for coming back and letting us know how things are going for you . . . I always wonder how these stories turn out! 🙂

sweetdaisy13 wrote: »

It's just over 6 months since I started my thread. I'm now 118 lbs (8 stone 6 lbs) which is 4 lbs under my original goal weight.

I went slightly off track around mid-June and put a few pounds on. Ran an ultra marathon at the beginning of June and just couldn't get back into the swing of things in terms of my diet. But, I'm now back on track.

I'm no longer counting calories, as I eat from all food groups and don't exclude anything as I need good nutrition to be able to continue my exercise routine and not get injured. For me it's about portion control and eating the foods I like in moderation. I don't want to get consumed by counting calories for the rest of my life, but it's definitely been a good insight.

I'm continuing to run regularly and prefer to run longer distances and ran an ultra marathon 3 weeks ago and have another in 5 weeks. I also do Rebounder workouts and Planks on my non-running days.

I try to burn a minimum of 700 calories a day through exercise and this works for me. On days where I do long runs I can easily burn 1,500+ calories.

Whilst it's easier to lose weight when you're young, I used to think that it was my age (early 40s) that was preventing me from shifting some excess weight. But in reality, I was lacking determination and will power to get to where I need to be.

Wow, nice accomplishments: Good show!

Thanks for coming back with the updates, it's nice to hear back about how people are doing.