Getting fit at 50 and beyond...200+ pound club

cpnknight wrote: »

Chaps.
My sincerest apologies.
I have had a rough few months. I didn't so much as "fall off the wagon" as get off, untether the horses and burn the blooming thing!
To cap things off nicely, I cannot risk sailing solo and will have to sell my beloved sail boat...

I have put on a lot of the weight I had lost but will not know the full extent of the damage until Sunday morning.
The only good and positive thing that I have to report is that I have made another wagon and am back onboard.

there is no wagon, only life. Perhaps something demanding more of your time and attention was going on in another part of your life. No shame, no regrets, no guilt. There is only forward after learning from the past. Happy to have you back, some of your previous posts resonated so much with me and provided me motivation to continue my course when it seemed it wasn't working. Hopefully we can help you now. So sorry you have to give up your sailboat, something you love so much.

Well the day came and went. Was meant to weigh and measure on Sunday but I got drawn into helping a friend and didn't have time in the morning to sort out the measurements etc (i got up late).

Monday 26th April 2021

New start, new goal.

• Target Weight = 200 lbs
• Rate of Loss = 1-2 lbs a week
• Time frame = When I get there

Current stats as of 08:00 Monday 26th April 2021
Weight...............314.4 lbs
Waist (cm).........135
Chest (cm)........130.5
BMI...................39

Now to start. As Sam Gamgees old gaffer says "It's the job as never started that takes the longest"

Well, most of May has been a write-off. Started at 213 and will likely miss my goal of 206 as today was 209. Birthday black forest cake was too much. Finding its easier to walk my distance in less time so upping distance but FP is reducing the calories being burned!! Still, progress being made. Upping my protein intake as well as calories, less muscle cramping. Waiting for new knitting needles so almost sitting on my hands while watching pm baseball so no snacking. Delighted to discover I'm 1/3 of the way to goal!!

jm216 wrote: »

It's Friday!
Would it be weird to sneak in some exercise and walk some stairs while I'm at work?
I think I'll do it!

I don't think that's weird at all. If your work is like mine, we have fire stairs that require doors to access, so you may be surprised to find you aren't the only one!! good luck to you!

Hello! I can't believe how much my weight changes day to day. It's totally common for me to be up or down 3-4lbs. It makes it hard to stay motivated because the trajectory feels all over the place. One thing that has helped is using an app that tracks the trend instead of the day to day. But I still get discouraged because it feels like I never see a steady downward progression.

And something I've often wondered...how long does it take for an over-indulgent day to show up on the scale? Is it immediate? Or a few days later? Just curious what everyone's experience is.

Anyway...I started June at my highest weight ever: 226.6lbs

I'm tracking everything, and paying special attention to added sugars and getting enough fiber.

wanderinglight wrote: »

Hello! I can't believe how much my weight changes day to day. It's totally common for me to be up or down 3-4lbs. It makes it hard to stay motivated because the trajectory feels all over the place. One thing that has helped is using an app that tracks the trend instead of the day to day. But I still get discouraged because it feels like I never see a steady downward progression.

And something I've often wondered...how long does it take for an over-indulgent day to show up on the scale? Is it immediate? Or a few days later? Just curious what everyone's experience is.

Anyway...I started June at my highest weight ever: 226.6lbs

I'm tracking everything, and paying special attention to added sugars and getting enough fiber.

The weight of the food shows up on the scale immediately: How could it not? An apple in my stomach weighs as much as it did in my hand, or sitting on the counter. A pint of water is about a pound more on the scale as soon as I drink it, same weight it had in the glass.

Temporary water weight related to digestion/metabolization (of sodium/carbs mostly) usually shows up for me within 24 hours, so I'll typically see it on the scale next morning (I'm a daily weigh-er, have been for well over a decade). It can be slower to dissipate, rate depends on circumstances, anything from 2-3 days up to two weeks (but usually more like the 2-3 days). This is just how a healthy body behaves. IMO, trying to game or defeat healthy water weight fluctuation is a poor health decision.

Primarily, we care about losing fat, don't we? I know I do. Water retention and the portion of food weight that will become waste is not fat, so why worry about it? I vote for trying to understand and accept it, and recognize that fat loss will show up in longer-term scale weight trends, playing peek-a-boo on the scales within the week or two that it takes to clearly outpace the irrelevant water/waste fluctuations that can be several pounds from one day to the next. Being frustrated or stressed about it burns no extra calories, feels icky, so good to avoid, IMO.

Full digestive transit, according to research, may take up to 50+ hours. That has implications for how long food weight that will be waste may hang around and affect the scale, and also IMO implications for how long it *might* take for fat weight to show up.

Remember that in order to gain a pound of body fat, we need to eat roughly 3500 calories above our current *weight-maintenance calorie level* not just that much above our current MFP calorie allowance. In theory, that could be done as 100 calories above maintenance every day for about 35 days, or all in one chunk of 3500 calories above maintenance in one big meal or day.

There's some decent science that the "all at once" excess in particular may have a slightly lower than theoretically expected impact on fat gain. (Body temp may increase a tiny bit, resting heart ditto, stuff like that, so calorie expenditure is bumped up a little bit by the excess; perhaps, also, it might exceed the body's ability to absorb calories or nutrients during the digestive transit time).

The "increased burn" piece of this is because the relationship between calorie intake and expenditure is not static. It's dynamic: Eating more tends to rev up the body a tiny bit. It can happen with smaller increases, but smaller effect, probably. Bodies are better at storing in cases of continuing small surplus, I believe: I think of it as getting better at what we consistently train them to do. (In this case, we're training them to store calories as fat, by repetition - this is more a metaphor than literal, AFAIK, though).

Stephanie Buttermore has some videos on YouTube about days of massive calorie intake, with the science, if you're interested: A couple of cases where she eats 8-10,000 calories in a day, several times her maintenance calories, then monitors the impact for several days, in one case including many lab tests.

However, I wouldn't count on this effect as a free pass for so-called "cheat days". Most of the excess calories are likely to be stored as fat.

Like I said, I've weighed daily for many years. Over those years, there have been days when I ate 3500 calories or more above my maintenance calories, either all in one day, or in a couple of days over a weekend. I've even done it multiple times since starting calorie counting almost 6 years ago.

My experience is that I don't gain as much fat as I might estimate, but I will gain. It's hard to tell how long it takes the fat to be stored, because it's absolutely obscured on the scale by water weight weirdness during the most probable times that it would take to complete. (Note that our bodies are normally storing and burning fat in teensy amounts all through a typical day, too. A high fraction of our calorie burn during sleep comes from stored fat, for example.)

From experience, bolstered by the "up to 50 hours for digestive transit" idea, my tentative conclusion would be that it takes a couple of days for fat gain from a big calorie overage to show up on the scale. It's literally impossible to know, IMO, though, with limited-precision home-based instruments like a bodyweight scale.

If you haven't read it, this is a good article that may put the water/waste fluctuations in better perspective:

https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations

Apologies for the essay.

TL;DR:

Short term multi-pound gain/loss over a few days is mostly not fat, but rather water/waste. Water/waste changes may obscure fat loss on the scale for day to up to a couple of weeks (how fast one is losing fat affects that timespan, among other factors). Fat storage/burn is usually small increments from consistent daily averages, and hard to see on the scale amongst water/waste changes, but it will show up in the trend over weeks to months. I don't personally enjoy arguing with normal reality, so I strive not to stress about this. The majority of our days determine the majority of our progress, and accurate effort pays off eventually.

@AnnPT77 That was incredibly kind of you to write so much in response to my kinda throwaway question. Thank you! That was both fascinating and eye-opening.

It's interesting to try and understand more about it, because sometimes I'll have a day when I overeat and because it doesn't show up on the scale the next day it's easy for me to say that it didn't matter. Might as well have another day like that because it didn't affect the scale. But actually knowing that it may show up on the scale two or three days later makes it easier to keep it as a one-day thing and not let it become a habit.