Healthy Weight Loss Tips

cmriverside wrote: »

How do I know...

I started out all gung-ho. I'm female, I was 220 pounds. Instead of choosing the recommended "Lose 1 pound per week" I saw a choice to "Lose 2 pounds per week." Well, that's better, isn't it? DONE!

I got 1200 calories.

I did that for a while, probably about two months. Then I just crashed. Hard. My nails were flaking, the skin on my feet and hands was dry and cracking, my hair was falling out. I had bone-deep fatigue. I couldn't keep my eyes open. I was irritable, depressed, and couldn't concentrate on my work. Heck, I was having trouble concentrating on a TV show. That's just what I could see - there were internal things happening that I could not see.

Malnutrition has consequences.

You can Google those consequences. It's a real thing.

I've been on these forums since 2007. I've read similar stories hundreds of times. Sometimes they're worse, and sometimes they end in really bad ways.

It's not a race.

davidgutschon wrote: »

Hey, great job so far! To echo everyone else here, definitely more food is needed to support your body. I would eat a minimum of 2500 - 3000 calories. This will give you room the calories needed to grow muscle while still supporting your fat loss goals. If you have high output from workouts you may need more depending on the frequency of workouts. Keep up the good work!

springlering62 wrote: »

PAV8888 wrote: »

>>intense short workouts from 45 minutes to an hour and I know they’re best for losing weight and body fat<<
No they aren't.

As to the rest. Data point: at age 48+ not 23+ and at 172.25cm and not 182.88cm I went from 280+ to 160+ over about 1.75 years (and another 10lb over the next year). That all started a bit over 10 years ago

a) it was more than fast enough
b) it was more than fast enough especially if you consider the amount of work you have to do to figure out how and why you overshot normal weight by that much and how you are going to manage your life in order not to repeat this once you stop losing weight
c) during the 1.75 years I didn't find MFP till half way through
d) during my first year on MFP while losing ~72.5lbs in that time frame I logged 2540 Cal in on average
e) yes I was more than very active and that did not involve short bursts of intense activity followed by inactivity
d) yes the calories in and out at the time tracked to less than negligible variance from Fitbit calories out vs MFP calories in. This variance has increased over time to about 5%. But at the time was less than 0.25%

Forget the tv shows. Start thinking stuff you see yourself doing long term

Being morbidly obese but also never ending cycles of losing and regaining impacts both your physical and mental health.

Your goal is not to lose weight fast. Fast is meaningless because your health gains are measured by total time at a reduced weight, not speed of loss.

Your goal should be to figure out how to revamp your food and beverage intake and everyday life so that your weight level wants to trend (and keep trending) towards "normal" as opposed to always trending towards obese.

Try to figure out what's going on with you now instead of waiting for 25 more years. Because it is nice to be normal 😉 at least when it comes to weight🤣😎

Log your food. Avoid heroics. Look for health promoting normalcy! Take your wins and fight delaying actions and try to slow things down when things are go wrong. It's never too late in the day to put a stop to something that's gone wrong and you don't wait for tomorrow to start again.

You and your health matter!
Best of 🤞 luck!

This is an amazing post!!!!!! 1,000% agree!

Take it slow. Learn new habits you can keep the weight off with and not fall back into bad habits causing regain. Quick weight loss typically regains quickly.

invest in a fitness tracker. It will completely up-end how you look at food and exercise.

I lost too much weight (something that was never on my radar!) , and lost muscle. Rebuilding muscle was hard for me, and took much longer the second time around.

Food is fuel. I only eat what I enjoy, but I’m also more concious of fueling my activity- which increased exponentially with weight loss.

Undereating severely- as you are doing- creates so many issues, as stated above, including muscle loss. Always bear in mind, your heart is the most important - yet unseen- muscle in your body. If you’re losing muscle elsewhere, remember you may be losing it in your heart as well.

I’d strongly suggest seeing if you can get a visit with a dietician. Your insurance, gym, employer may provide free or discount in-person visits. My insurance provides free phone visits with a dietician.

AnnPT77 wrote: »

BigCris__ wrote: »

Hello! I’m a 23 year old 6’0 male and at my heaviest when I first started working out again was 356 lbs about 2 and a half weeks ago and I’m currently down to 340. I know while working out and looking to lose weight and body fat is to be in a calorie deficit. I’ve heard from around my weight and height I should be consuming 2000-2500 calories but I’ve been eating 800-1400 calories and burning about 700-1000 calories in a work out. I only do HIIT exercises so I focus on intense short workouts from 45 minutes to an hour and I know they’re best for losing weight and body fat. Just curious if there’s any tips that can help me out more. I eat a lot more clean as well like chicken and potatoes usually 4-8 oz of chicken and 1 full potato. Sometimes a ham sandwich with some veggie straws, salads, ground turkey and rice, that kind of vibe. I use to not care what I eat but I really want to lose weight so I’m more aware of what I eat and watch my macros. Would love any tips that can help me on this journey, thank you!

Others have given you excellent advice to get more calories so that you don't tank your health.

I'm going to comment on the exercise, but I'm torn about which direction to go.

Probably most important: If you're relatively new to regular exercise, start moderately and build gradually. You don't mention how often you're exercising, but I'm guessing from context that it might be daily, or nearly. Even if you've been moderately active previously, daily HIIT is NOT best for losing weight and body fat, no matter what nonsense in the blogosphere may claim.

Highly intense exercise is more fatiguing. Over-exercise can bleed calorie burn out of daily life activity (via fatigue, doing less - maybe in subtle ways - and resting more). Also, the exercises usually described as HIIT these days, often fast-paced exercise with weights, bodyweight, or similar equipment . . . they have higher injury risk. Injury can sink an entire exercise program until healing can happen.

What's best for weight loss is a sustainable, manageable challenge to current fitness level. If a person hasn't worked out much previously, I'd recommend they start with some moderate thing, even walking, striving for a pace that's just a bit of a challenge for the time they have to devote to it. The sweet spot, IMO, is maybe just a few minutes of a "whew" feeling right after the exercise, then feeling energized - not exhausted - for the rest of the day.

If new to the exercise, I'd go with every other day (or less) for the first week or two, and see how that settles in to the body. The exercise isn't where the magic happens, isn't the part where our bodies rebuild better. That happens in the recovery time between exercise sessions. Recovery is very important. This applies to our hearts, as well as our other muscles.

As a person gets fitter, the starting exercise load will get easier. That's when to increase pace, duration, intensity or type of exercise to keep that manageable challenge always in the picture.

The challenge is what triggers fitness improvement. The "manageable" part allows for an energetic daily life routine, solid recovery to rebuild the body better, reduced risk of injury, and probably more enjoyment of exercise as well. (There are research studies suggesting that test groups assigned intense exercise don't continue as well as those assigned a more moderate routine.)

It is good to include some strength exercise while losing weight, but I'd recommend a slower-paced traditional routine rather than high rep, fast-paced work. That can be weight lifting, bodyweight exercises, or really anything that challenges current muscular strength. Although it burns fewer calories than cardio, strength training helps us preserve as much muscle as possible alongside losing fat.

Did you know that obese people usually have more muscle mass than similar always-slim people who have the same exercise history? It comes from moving our larger mass through daily life. Muscle is slow to build, and building it takes a lot of work as well as time. Strength training during loss helps preserve what we already have.

A pound of muscle burns very slightly more calories at rest than a pound of fat, which results in "higher metabolism". That effect is small, just a few calories a day. But people with relatively more muscle are likely to find it easier and more fun to move in daily life, so are simply likely to move more. That more-frequent movement can burn meaningful numbers of calories daily. (Example: I used to budget trips up and down stairs in my house when I was obese, staging items at the top/bottom to carry on infrequent trips. Now it seems like I scamper up/down stairs many times a day without a thought.)

We don't need to start strength training and cardio all at once. It's total exercise load that IMO is best increased gradually. A person could start with a bit of each, or start with one type and add the other later. What matters is total load being appropriate for current fitness level. The goal is to establish a productive, enjoyable routine that we want to keep doing long term. (Any exercise we do is 100% more beneficial than some theoretically better punitively intense thing that we eventually procrastinate or skip with the slightest excuse.)

Back at HIIT specifically: Elite cardiovascular (CV) sport athletes don't do all high-intensity work every single day in every workout, and they have the best fitness and health advice money can buy. Yes, the daily work they do would be intense for me, but in terms of their personal capability, CV elites do a large volume of moderate intensity work (their "main meal" in exercise terms) and add a small amount of high-intensity work a couple of times a week (like a "side dish"). Why would us regular duffers do otherwise?

Starting out, it's a good idea to keep CV exercise moderate for the first few weeks, to build a base of endurance. Higher intensity exercise can be added later on that foundation, in smaller doses. That's a normal way to look at training plans.

This last I feel like I have to say, and it may seem critical but I think it's more of a blessing in context: There are physiological limits on true high intensity exercise, at any fitness level. If a person can do something for an hour, it isn't truly high intensity. That's OK: Like I said, doing all high intensity work isn't ideal for fitness OR weight loss. The fast-paced nature of most modern activities called "HIIT" is still an injury and fatigue risk, too.

Since you (quite legitimately) asked Riverside the follow up on "how would she know", I'll answer that straight off. The point isn't to be braggy, it's to offer bona fides for the advice, which you can evaluate as you will.

I was a late-bloomer athlete who started being routinely active after cancer treatment. I was obese (and stayed obese for a dozen years while training hard and even competing, BTW). Along the way, I got coaching certifications from the official body for my short-endurance CV sport, to the highest level I could without being a professional coach. I've personally used training plans developed by a high-level coach (Division I NCAA) for people like me, and have seen the similar plans used with that coach's collegiate athletes. I've known multiple elite (national team, Olympic) athletes in my sport, and been coached by those folks.

I won't pretend to detailed knowledge about strength training; I just know basics. I know more about cardiovascular fitness development. Personally, I'm not competing anymore (probably), but I'm still athletically active, still working with good coaches when I can, and (for reasons on the eating side of things, not exercise), I haven't been overweight (let alone obese) since around late 2015.

Best wishes!