Just retired and feel lost, need a friend for motivation

janjk56
janjk56 Posts: 1 Member
in Introduce Yourself

Hi everyone, My name is Jan and l am 69 yrs. I have been lifting weights for well over a year now and l love it, the problem is l have put on 20 lbs and dont see any muscle. I feel a lot stronger but really disappointed in myself. I know it's my nutrition, and l need motivation. Thanks for reading this and l will take any suggestions to help.

Answers

  • debradke2
    debradke2 Posts: 6 Member

    Hi Jan-Nice to see you in here i just reupped in here after a long absence. So I am new again.

    I am 67-birthday in Jan! I have been on a long fitness journeyz Started mar 2020-now. I did well walking and low cal and lost 60 lbs in sbout 1.5 years! Now ive maintaintsind for awhile 145-150.
    Trying to lose another 20lbs or so. Trying to get into wt lifting because walking is not really helping. Well let me know how you are doing.

    I

  • claireychn074
    claireychn074 Posts: 1,977 Member

    The issue with lifting is that it can make you hungry, so if you eat to your appetite it’s not surprising that you’ve put weight on.

    The good news is that bigger muscles need more calories to fuel them, so lifting is a great long term strategy to grow your calorie needs. But, lifting itself burns surprisingly few calories - much less than cardio.

    You’ll need to plug in your stats in MFP, select a slow rate of loss, then try that for 4-6 weeks to see how much weight you lose. You will then need to adjust your intake up or down accordingly, MFP and all calorie recommendations are only estimates and everyone is different.

    Picking a slow rate of loss is important if you want to preserve that new muscle growth: too fast a rate of loss will lead to more muscle loss. It’s so much harder for women to build muscle, you want to keep what you’ve achieved!

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 38,465 Community Helper

    What @claireychn074 said up there!

    Also, if we still have some extra body fat, then we may actually have some nice muscles . . . but they don't show - hidden by that thin layer of fat smoothing over the visibility. That's extra likely for us as women, because we tend to have a small layer of all-over subcutaneous fat, whereas men are more likely to carry more of their fat in the torso. (Yeah, we can have some there, too. But also everywhere else. When I lost 50 pounds, my ring finger went from about size 13 - yes, really, because I have giant man hands even though I'm a now 69-year-old woman - to a size 9 or 10.)

    I'm not a big lifter, though I've been on and off with it over a couple of decades - not really long enough to add a lot of muscle that way. But I have been very active for nearly 25 years in a strength-y cardiovascular sport (on-water rowing), starting when I was still class 1 obese. Imagine my surprise when I lost weight, and it turned out that I wasn't as blobby as I'd looked, but rather actually had some kinda cute li'l ol' lady muscles. (Profile picture is me at age 60, post weight loss. I'm far from a bodybuilder, but I'm not muscle-less, either. Until I lost weight, the fat hid it quite completely.)

    If you are able to slowly lose that extra weight, using the approach Claireychn074 suggested, you may find that you've already created some nice muscle.

    Best wishes!

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