Old lady in training! LOL

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jperkins3958
jperkins3958 Posts: 2 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
Hi, I have been going to a gym that is only personal training, for almost a year. I go 4 and 5 times a week, religiously. I also country line dance 3 times a week, two of those times is for a couple hours at a time. And...to top it all off, I hike at least once a week. Now... you would think I would be very thin. But, I am not, in fact, I have not lost any weight at all. I have gained muscle, but no weight loss. Finally figuring out that it is 99.99 % nutrition for me....lol. I will continue to workout and dance and hike, I am loving all of it. Hoping that tracking calories will open my eyes on this aspect of this journey. Any advice is welcome.

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  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,410 Member
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    Yes, working out doesn't mean you will lose weight. Actually, the calorie burn from workouts is probably a lot lower than you think. At the same time it might make you more hungry and you eat more. If I wanted to lose weight by working out I'd need to run not more than 4km, which is about 200 calories. Anything more and I need to eat more. But with a deficit of only 200 calories it would take about 17 days to lose a pound. Provided I could run every single day.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,200 Member
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    Yupper. I went from completely sedentary, sort of more than sedentary (just out of the better part of a year of cancer treatment, including surgery, chemo, radiation . . . .), in my mid 40s, to training and competing as an athlete in a short endurance sport by sometime short of age 50. I still stayed fat, in fact usually just over the line into class 1 obese, for another decade, though I did lose a pants size or two from getting tighter/more muscular.

    I didn't lose weight until age 59-60, when I finally stopped deluding myself that high activity and relative fitness were enough to keep me healthy. (Blood lipids and blood pressure said otherwise.) I didn't much change my exercise activity during weight loss - it was already pretty high, and adding much would've whacked good overall life balance, for me personally.

    For me, weight loss was all about managing my calorie intake, and MFP's food logging/calorie counting was extremely helpful. I'm now 65, still at a healthy weight (around 125 at 5'5", now), still logging most of the time in year 5+ of maintenance: It's about the most productive use of 10 minutes-ish daily I've ever found. I wish I'd done it decades earlier.

    Best wishes as you progress!
  • Jthanmyfitnesspal
    Jthanmyfitnesspal Posts: 3,521 Member
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    If you get in shape when you are heavier, then you will be even better off when you lose a bit. Yep, losing the weight means restricting the calories. It's a bummer.

    But, keep on dancing!
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 7,483 Member
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    ^^^^what @AnnPT77 said. I’m older also. I spent half an hour stretching daily, did yoga several times a week for most my 50’s, and began walking several miles daily when we moved house to a very walkable community five years ago.

    I couldn’t figure out why I never lost weight. It seemed so unfair. I guessed I was condemned the being big. After all, my mom had predicted it, right?

    When I started weighing and counting on MFP, cause and effect became glaringly obvious. A couple mile walk was not going to offset that family size bag of M&Ms. A yoga class was not a bag of Geneva cookies.

    I honestly had no concept of in versus out, eat versus burn. It was a hard, cruel learning curve but I’m glad I rode it to better health.

    My sincerest advice is to weigh accurately and log honestly.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,200 Member
    edited May 2021
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    springlering62 wrote: »

    (snip)

    When I started weighing and counting on MFP, cause and effect became glaringly obvious. A couple mile walk was not going to offset that family size bag of M&Ms. A yoga class was not a bag of Geneva cookies.

    (snip)

    Oh, man, yes! I had an inkling about calories before I started counting, but didn't really face the hard facts until logging, when facts reached out and b-slapped me.

    If I machine row *hard* for half an hour - an exercise that I've been doing for nearly 20 years and am objectively not pathetic at for our demographic - it doesn't even earn a Snickers bar.

    And I'm talking regular-size bar, not the biggie one.

    I thought I must have a "slow metabolism", being old, post-menopausal, hypothyroid, y'know.

    No. After counting long enough to be clear about it, turns out I burn *more* calories than MFP estimates. It's just super easy to eat that much more, takes mere minutes.

    My sincerest advice is to weigh accurately and log honestly.

    And hang in long enough to get a crystal clear picture (4-6 weeks). Such a learning experience! 😬🙄😆🤣
  • metaphysicalstudio
    metaphysicalstudio Posts: 293 Member
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    Learning this point is a hard lesson for many, myself included. I worked out hours a day, most days of the week for decades before it finally set in that nutrition is actually the most important piece in terms of weight loss. Fitness is glorious for so many reasons....but it isn't the gateway to weight loss for most people.
  • Onedaywriter
    Onedaywriter Posts: 324 Member
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    Sounds more like you are a training to become a young lady again with all that you’re doing!!!

    Keep at it! The nutrition piece to the puzzle was harder for me to get right. I tried to think in terms of “that bag of chips negates the calorie burn of three days in the gym” and that helped me avoid it-most of the time LOL! Remember- you work so hard for those gym gains but can blow the calories burned in an hour workout in three minutes in the kitchen.

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