Six months and 75 pounds later - pictures

Tremendous work! I bet you FEEL so much lighter with so much more energy! Question...besides being able to burn more calories in the same amount of time, why do you enjoy the elliptical trainer so much more than the treadmill? Ive never been on one to compare.

I have so much more energy and I do feel lighter. A flight of stairs used to cause me to breathe heavy, now I routinely go up 7 flights of stairs and feel great doing it. I feel strong, and light on my feet, like I did in my early 20's (and I'm double that now). Exercise has become my time machine, I really feel like I've rolled the clock back 20 years.

What I enjoy about the Elliptical is that I can go faster than I can on the treadmill because there is no jarring impact on my joints so I have no worry of injuring myself. If it weren't for my bad knee I'd probably be running. So to get the calorie burn I want from a treadmill I need to spend a lot of time on it, and that gets boring after a while.

On the Elliptical I feel like I can push myself harder because the percieved effort is less than compared to a treadmill, and it really pays off with the much higher calorie burn in a shorter period of time. Doing the math, I currently burn about 9.75 calories per minute on a treadmill. With the Elliptical I've been able to do about 13.5 calories per minute, that's a 38% increase. So I can now get my workout done a lot quicker, or burn a lot more calories in the same amount of time.

Given that I'm at my goal weight now I really wish I'd tried the Elliptical sooner because even though cardio will continue to be important I'm starting to transition into strength training as I go into "maintenance mode", so I won't be doing cardio six days a week like I have been doing.

Just curious. I'm starting at the same weight, and doing the 2lbs./wk. How many calories did you burn on the average workout, and did you eat them? Keep up the great work! Good job.

When I first started I was burning about 300 calories per workout, and yes I ate every one of them I often tell people that I don't exercise to lose weight, I exercise so I can eat while I'm losing weight.

I still remember the first time I got that message telling me that I'd lost 10 pounds so I should recalculate my goals. I thought, ok, sounds reasonable, and after I did it suddenly my available calories went down. I was so frustrated! That made me not want to update my goals, but I found by not doing that, meaning not updating your effort and your intake to match your progress, you actually begin to see diminishing returns. So once I understood that I began to look forward to it.

As you lose weight, you will burn fewer calories from the same workout, and your BMR will go down too, meaning you have fewer calories in your daily budget to begin with. Fortunately, I began to discover that I was getting full on smaller portions as well, so it all balanced out.

Now I've progressed to about 900 calories burned in a typical workout, and I eat every one of those too. As I was getting close to my goal, around 70 pounds down, I found myself hitting a plateau, where I basically sat at the same weight for about 3 weeks. I couldn't figure out why, I was still maintaining roughly a 1000 calorie daily deficit. So I decided that maybe being so close to my goal was making me too aggressive, so I reset my goal to losing 1 pound per week, which gave me back about 500 calories per day. As odd as it sounds, once I started eating more suddenly my weight loss continued and I broke out of the plateau. I dropped that last 5 pounds in about two weeks after that.

The key thing to remember is that your body is very good at adapting to whatever stress you put it through, and if you keep doing the exact same thing your body becomes very efficient at doing that, so you begin to see diminishing returns. That's why you need to adjust your routine every couple of weeks, even indulge and go over your calorie budget once in a while, so that you are forcing your body to adjust to new input, rather than allowing it to become very efficient at the same old thing.