Body Fat Reduction (to up calorie intake or not)

Gender: female
Age: 23
Height: 5'1''
Body fat percentage: 25%
Weight: 110lbs
Target: 21-22% body fat percentage

I was at 30% body fat and 120-125lbs. After working out and going on a low-fat dietary lifestyle, I am down to 25% body fat at 110lbs. So I lost about 10lbs of solid fat in 6 months or so.

How low was your fat intake?
Barbell training is a great idea regardless, so that part, yes.

100g protein should be beyond sufficient protein consumption. You can go higher than this if you would like of course.

How active are you outside of the gym?

I did not calculate my caloric intake when I was doing that. My regular daily diet would consist of:

1 cup of oatmeal
2 whole eggs + 1 egg white
2 pieces of chicken breast
2 pieces of Costco multigrain bread
1/4 cup of brown rice (uncooked)
1 large banana
1 cup of blueberry
1 cup of grapes
1/4 cup of pecan
some PAM spray

As for how active I am outside gym ... well ... I work as a banker so I just sit in front of a computer for hours ... lame. My housemate drives me to work and back home. I just workout in the morning. Night time, I'm too tired for anything so I sleep.

Are you still eating the above as listed, or do you now have variety in your food sources?
EDIT: Also, can you please clarify this:

BUT somehow, the body measurements have not changed for months (3 months or so) and the scale barely bulge

What has the scale done in this time frame?

You mentioned this:

BUT somehow, the body measurements have not changed for months (3 months or so) and the scale barely bulge

Can you clarify what "barely budge" means, in terms of how many lbs over these 3 months?

If you have a graph chart like you do for intake, please link.

I have opinions about this after having asked you all these questions. Before getting into this, these are just my opinions and I'm just some random guy on the internet, so you should keep that in mind as you proceed:

1) Your intake is actually close to sufficient due to your size (small). Your TDEE should sit somewhere in the neighborhood of 1800-1900 which would put a good intake value for you at about 1450 average (when I say average, this includes rest and exercise days together). When I just look at your diary, you are a bit under this but it doesn't look too bad. Since you eat back some exercise calories, you're not too far off from this.

2) You should introduce more variety into your diet for the sake of micronutrients but this likely won't effect body composition unless you develop a deficiency through lack of variety. In other words, if you compose a list of foods and eat them over and over again, and your list doesn't contain a certain vitamin/etc, you're screwing yourself long-term.

3) Protein intake is beyond sufficient and if you like low-carbing it, go for it, but it's probably not a great plan in your situation given all the exercise you're doing. That being said, your protein and dietary fat needs will cause CHO intake to reduce by itself. Continually hitting 170g pro will cause carbs to get quite low and I would suspect energy issues. Again, personal preference here, you can go low CHO if you want to.

Now as it pertains to your weight issue, I think it could be a few possibilities:

1) You COULD have hormone issues from low intake. For YOU, eating around maintenance (1800-1900) with moderate carb intake for about a week, followed by resuming your deficit, may help to resolve this. You would expect some bloat/water weight gain.

2) I'm actually going to go here: It could be that you are already very small and don't have much left to lose. Your bodyfat percentage is stuck because you need to start adding lean mass and your P90X isn't applying progressive resistance or heavy enough loads to accomplish this. I could be very wrong on this point but it's worth bringing up. Heavy barbell training would be a good thing to introduce.

3) You could be eating much more than you think you are due to estimation errors or counting errors.

Gender: female
Age: 23
Height: 5'1''
Body fat percentage: 25%
Weight: 110lbs
Target: 21-22% body fat percentage

I was at 30% body fat and 120-125lbs. After working out and going on a low-fat dietary lifestyle, I am down to 25% body fat at 110lbs. So I lost about 10lbs of solid fat in 6 months or so.

But then everything stops.

I finished INSANITY twice, I keep my caloric intake to a NET 1200 - 12500 on a quite consistent basis (sometimes overshot because of luncheons, banquets).

I workout 6 times a week, 40-60minutes a day (used to do INSANITY, now doing INSANITY:Asylum). My flexibility greatly improved. My strength also increases. My core is stronger. I can jump higher. My fit tests show better results. BUT somehow, the body measurements have not changed for months (3 months or so) and the scale barely bulge.

Why?

I'm thinking of upping my caloric intake to NET 1400, reduce INSANITY to 3 times a week and alternate it with resistance band / barbell training. In the past, I was hovering between 60-100g of protein a day but I think going forward, I want to increase it to at least 120lbs daily.

Should I adopt those new changes? I'm a bit unsure to be honest. I mean, seriously, INSANITY is really hard workout and to go through it TWICE without seeing changes in body measurement, that's tough on me mentally.

Advice/suggestions will be welcomed. Thanks a lot.

For your reference, here's my net calories report.
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/839/netcalories.jpg/

Because INSANITY isn't strength training per se. If you don't use actual weight resistance, you take the chance of losing a good amount of lean muscle tissue when just doing cardio based exercise. Less lean muscle will mean less weight, but it's not the weight you WANT to lose. It's called being skinny fat.
Lift some heavy weights for sets. It does wonders.

A.C.E. Certified Personal Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 28+ years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

+1 on the heavy resistance training and maintenance for a week (or more......) Sidesteal consistently gives SOLID advice. I enjoyed reading this. Good luck leenites!

I couldn't agree more!

Because INSANITY isn't strength training per se. If you don't use actual weight resistance, you take the chance of losing a good amount of lean muscle tissue when just doing cardio based exercise. Less lean muscle will mean less weight, but it's not the weight you WANT to lose. It's called being skinny fat.
Lift some heavy weights for sets. It does wonders.

A.C.E. Certified Personal Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 28+ years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

^ This is a better way of saying what I said in part of my reply above regarding P90. In addition to what niner is saying above, the smaller/leaner you are, the more difficult it is to retain lean mass during deficit eating and consequently, progressive loading should become a necessity at some point. I would suspect that at 110lbs, you don't have a lot of room for error.

Someone with a lot of fat will have a higher chance of hanging onto lean mass so they would require less loading and have a lower protein-per-pound requirement just due to having more fat. This type of person could do fine on P90 for a while. You, not so much, in my opinion.

Okay, I took the liberty to use the info you provided to do the math as if I were designing a program for you. Based on my calculations, which use your lean body mass (which you've lost 5 pounds of BTW), your BMR is only 900 Calories per day. Add in the activity factor for being sedentary at work and you get a BMR + Activity of 1080 Calories per day. You are one of the few people I've seen in my 15 year career in the fitness industry that has an BMR that low. That's because your lean body mass is so low at only 82.5 pounds. You absolutely need to add resistance training ASAP to stop the loss of lean body mass. If you add 500 Calories per day (just an estimate, but will change as you change your workouts so definitely log them), you get a TDEE of 1580 Calories. For my clients I recommend eating no less then 80% of their TDEE, so if you burn 500 calories then your total daily Calorie intake should be 1264 Calories (80% of 1580 Calories). My best recommendation as to how to work with these numbers and MFP, would be to put the 1080 as your goal and let MFP add your exercise Calories, then multiply the total goal by 80% (or 0.8) to get the minimum number of Calories you should eat that day. Yes, I know that is below the "magic" number of 1200, but that is not counting exercise and there's no such thing as a magic number that works for everyone. Your's is lower because of being so low in lean body mass. So, definitely focus on adding that lean body mass through resistance training. Since you need to focus on adding lean body mass through weight training, you need to get 1.5 to 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. At 110 pounds, you are 50 kilograms, so you need 75-100 grams of protein per day. If you take the 100 grams and multiply it by 4 you get 400 calories from protein. Divide that by the 1080 you are putting in as your goal calories and you get 37%. MFP uses 5% increments, so I'd enter 35% protein on MFP to get in that zone of 75-100 grams before exercise. MFP will add more for exercise so be sure to add those in when you are eating. If you subtract out the 35% from carbs from the total of 100%, you get 65% left. The minimum recommendation for carbs is 45% and fat is 20%, and conveniently, they add up to the 65% you have left, so I would put those in MFP to get your amounts.

Now, as for your workouts, what are you planning to do for resistance training? Since you have Insanity, do you have other Beach Body products like Chalene Extreme or P90X? Either of those would be good to start with if you aren't sure how to put a weight training program together yet. If you are more comfortable doing weight workouts on your own, that's great too. Just be sure you add weight training! If you need help putting together a program due, PM me and I'll be glad to help you.

You may want to vary your workout. You stated that you have done Insanity 2 x's now, change it up. Challenge yourself with new and different exercise your body is not used to doing. I would also increase your protein slightly and you may want to increase your calorie intake and eat your exercise calories!!!!

I'm pretty sure I'm on that "no room for error" type. That's why I come here for some assistance so I can reach that final goal. The first 10lbs of fat came off so easily but these last 5lbs or so is incredibly hard.

I do not have the budget to get a full set of barbell/dumbbells/whatever so that's a bit hard. I can go gym for the barbell still but gym does not have dumb bells (it's a small gym in my condo and they are afraid people will steal dumb bells). I can just work on all barbell exercises first.

And to supplement that, I'll probably get a pair of 8lbs and 12lbs of dumb bells. They are expensive so again, I'm contemplating.

I have resistance bands (http://www.amazon.com/Lifeline-Special-Triple-Resistance-Cable/dp/B00069CP26/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325345178&sr=8-1) and they are quite nice. So if my budget does not allow for further investment, I'll stick to this for now.

I'll increase my carb intake a bit and overall calorie intake to GROSS 1700 for starters, alternate between barbell and INSANITY and hopefully, we'll see some difference.

Consider a TRX system if you can't afford to spend a lot on weights. It not that expensive for what you can do with it. I've trained many clients with it and there's lots of good strength training you can do with it.

A.C.E. Certified Personal Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 28+ years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

I had a co worker that did Insanity and reached her goal weight and was very happy. She enjoyed Insanity so much that she continued doing it even after I suggested she stop and give her body rest and do some strength training. She didn't. After gaining every pound back that she had lost I told her to wear her HR monitor for 24 hrs to see how many calories she's buring. Get this...5500 calories in a day with only 1 workout. She went to see her Dr. and every thing checked out normal. I don't know what else to tell her.
But I would suggest you wear a HR monitor for 24 hrs to get your daily burn and then move on from there.

HRM wouldn't give an accurate reading as heartrate can be raised by stress, fear, excitement etc. Emotions like this don't burn more calories because they raise heart rate.

A.C.E. Certified Personal Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 28+ years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

I got you loud and clear. 1700 without eating back calories. ^.^ I'll try to get about 100g of protein and 45g of fat and fill the rest with carbs. Is there a preferred way of taking carb?

I prefer orally.

For example, on the day I do lifting, I take more than 100g of protein (less carb) and on the day I do INSANITY, I take like 80g of protein (more carb) kind of thing or do they not matter so much in this sense?

I don't think it matters provided that you are able to provide ample energy to complete your workouts and day to day functions. If you FEEL fine eating roughly the same macro intake daily, then go for it.

Also for protein, does it matter so much if I eat dark meat as opposed to white meat? Should I be concerned about lean meat vs the fat that come along with thighs/legs. I'm asking because dark meat is CHEAPER! haha. Beef is more expensive so I only take chicken (and occasional treat of more expensive pork).

As long as you're logging the fat content I don't find anything wrong with fatty meats. For variety sake I would suggest getting all your macronutrients from varied sources.

I should definitely invest in some sort of dumb bell thing. Strength training is definitely something that I've been wanting to do.

I have a friend who uses powerblocks and likes them a lot, it's an adjustable set of DB's. Check into gym memberships too, just in case you can find a special somewhere.

Another question.
Is it worth it to get a HRM to estimate how much calories I burn? If yes, which model would people recommend for the kind of activities that I engage in?
Budget can go up to $100 if needed but if they are mostly bells and whistles, nah ...

IMO, unless you're just curious, you don't really need one if you're not eating back your exercise calories. Also, they're not accurate for weight training sessions....or so I've seen on here.