Weight loss

[SSLtech]

I remember many years ago a post by john Roberts about the body going into 'starvation' mode, and something about what it is, what the effect is, how to avoid it, etc.

I wish I'd paid a little more attention!  ;D

Anyhow, I'm determined to lose some weight that I've accumulated. 35lbs is the target. Planned approach is portion control and exercise.

I started 2 weeks ago, cycling every day, some days 20 miles, some days sixty miles, but generally in the order of 200 miles per week. Also consuming 1000-1500 calories per day, with NO beer through the weekdays, though at the weekends I allow myself a couple of craft brews (typically IPA's, porters or imperial stouts) on top of the 1k-1.5kcals. (You know... life without ANY treat isn't really a life!)

So far, two weeks in, down about 10lbs... -the easy 'first few'. -Anyone got any What are the 'watch-out' things like the effect of the body going into 'conservation' or 'starvation' conditions, and what are the effects.

At the moment, instead of building strength with the constant cycling, I'm a little concerned that I may be getting slightly LESS strong overall, though it's hard to judge.

 

[Ethan]

You should plan a "pig-out day".
Your body is an adaptation machine. Your body begins to adapt to the reduction in calorie intake by attempting to store more fat. You need a scheduled pig-out day where you eat whatever you want--reset and assure your body that it doesn't have to store excess energy for the impending famine.  It will also replenish your glycogen stores help you get a more intense workout in the next day. Once per week is a good way to go.

Any physical activity is good, but if you can try to focus on anaerobic exercises (i.e., weight lifting). High-intensity anaerobic exercises allow you to burn more calories both during and for several hours after your workout (prolonged thermogenesis). Aerobic exercise, while great for cardiovascular benefit, only burns calories while you're doing the exercise, you don't get the benefit of the many hours of elevated body temp that continues to burn calories like high-intensity weight lifting would .

Another benefit is that building muscle is like compound interest, the more muscle mass you have the more calories you burn while doing any given activity.
Also be careful of overtraining.  If you're losing strength, it could be a sign of overtraining--breaking down more muscle mass through catabolic stress hormones, and you not being able to fully recover from each workout.  High-intensity training EVERY day is too much.

Good luck with your goals!

 

[zayance]

At the beginning better only train 3 days a week, with one day in between to rest, so the body get used to exercising, and won't get no harm of muscles, joints or whatever.
Then slowly more days, i do 5 days a week, and only two days off, 2-3 days cardio and the rest somekind of muscle buidling using body weight, loads of exercices out there, don't need weight at the beginning. Losing weight is one thing, but like Ethan said loosing muscles is not good, you need to find a good balance in between, and better loose weight slowly then quickly, because quickly is the best way to regain that weight, the harder it is the better, so you'll think twice when eating or drinking "bad" things...
Your food should be taking care of the recovery, some kind of protein (i prefer vegetal) can help too, just enough for your muscles to have something to eat from.
I sometimes do a month of Magnesium intake during the year, sometimes even more than a month, helps fatigue, moods, stress etc.... (better go fo good quality here).
i lost a lot of weight keeping at it, and now my body is stabalised, still doing exercice 5 days a week (at least 45mn), no prob here.

Good luck

 

[okgb]

I liken it to a bank account , Calories in Vs Calories out and your balance,
easier to not take them in then have to burn them off
I bought one of the magic bullet blender thingys I like it

 

[SSLtech]

Here's some cycling data showing recent work:

Last week, by day:

And the last month, by week:

Ethan, that (pig-out-day) sounds like what I was wondering about... I may give it a go. -Perhaps my craft-beer weekend indulgence isn't enough! ;-)

Oh, and... Liverpool for the Premier League!

 

[SSLtech]

Oh, and Ethan, I forgot to address the aspect of anaerobic 'hard work' exercise: -unfortunately, that's not really an option for me, since I had my stroke... My blood pressure runs high -even medicated- and I'm strongly advised to keep all workouts aerobic and moderate.

-I wear a HRM and watch the pulse: -In terms of geek-tech, everything is ANT+, so the phone logs my heart rate, as well as speed, cadence, and power output in Watts. -In addition to the ANT+ interface for the phone, I also have a node 2.1 on the handlebars, which also connects to all of the sensors, and gives me real time feedback, while the log is there for me to review when finished.

 

[[silent:arts]]

I would like (and need) to add weight ...
Any suggestions?

 

[JohnRoberts]

Luckily JR is still around...and caveat I am not a health professional, but I have paid close attention to this for decades. That said I have actually been gaining weight recently since I blew out my knee and reduced my physical activity level without adjusting my diet down to compensate...  (so this is a do what I say, not what I am doing at the moment) :-(

I would advise against any short term weight loss plan... Life is actually too long to expect short term fixes to stick. What do you think will happen after the brief quick weight loss? If you return to anything resembling your previous pattern that weight will come back on, maybe more because now you are burning less baseline calories to carry around the spare tire.

This is a huge subject so I will touch on the broad strokes.

Starvation (actually called caloric restriction or CR by the people who do this on purpose). There is a great deal of science surrounding the effects of continuous CR. There are true believers who restrict their caloric intake to slow down aging (hoping to live longer). There have been promising experiments on animals and even primates, taking decades, where the caloric restricted primates did age more gracefully. However there are consequences to CR. First you have to plan very carefully to get adequate nutrition when eating less food. A second phenomenon when severely restricted your body will "remodel" your body will literally consume or eat it self to keep the brain fed with fuel. We will not run out of fat for many months but the body will still remodel  and atrophy little used muscles. The body is not smart enough know how much fat it has in the gas tank (actually the fat mass does generate some hormones like a pre-evolutionary part of our endocrine system), but we do not use this information. Instead the body operates on a strict short term sugar economy, We have a small amount of circulating sugar in our blood and perhaps 2000-3000kCal of glycogen stored in muscles and organs, a little more than a typical day's total energy budget.  If we starve ourselves by fasting or restricting carbohydrates until our glycogen is depleted, the body will shift to Ketosis where fat is converted to ketones, a sugar replacement that the brain can run on. Muscles can burn fat, but the brain needs it's sugar (or ketones), or it will shut down (a bad thing). 

Nutrition... The body generally stores fat soluble vitamins (like E) but most water soluble vitamins (like C) need to be constantly replenished. Even Vit D commonly extracted from sunlight is stored in the skin fat. When severely restricting calories, you need to eat smarter to get full nutrition.

"Energy Balance"... yes, weight gain or loss is pretty much as simple as balancing a check book, but there can be some confounding factors. A major fraction of our energy consumed daily is the bodies overhead. Sugar to keep the brain happy, energy to keep us warm, energy to carry our body up and around. When we starve ourselves or go into restriction, the body goes into survival mode and reduces that baseline consumption. CR practitioner do this on purpose, but anyone trying to lose weight wants to avoid this slow down in baseline metabolism.

I don't know how much Keith weighs now but 1000-1500 kCal + cycling daily sounds too low for a healthy sustainable pattern. Another tidbit about weight don't be too focussed on every pound. Our water weight can fluctuate quite a bit and the weight is not the important part, it is how you feel. In fact muscle is heavier than fat so converting fat to muscle could actually gain weight or negate fat losses.

My advice would be to target some final destination weight, and activity level that you would like to maintain. Based in that weight, and activity level you can compute a nominal caloric intake to maintain that weight. Then adjust your regular diet for nutrition so you can meet nutrition goals with that caloric budget. If you are carrying 35# more than that destination target, eating maintenance levels for that target weight will result in a modest energy deficit and weight will come off slowly, as you consume that extra weight your diet is not supporting.

Instead of starving yourself and performing excessive workouts to lose weight, just start now on that final maintenance diet, and the excess weight will slowly and healthfully melt off.

====

Too sudden weight loss can release toxins that accumulate in our stored body fat. I am not aware of people actually getting sick from this, but it sounds scary enough to avoid. 
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Your perception of weakness may be low blood sugar. While physical exercise should improve the bodies ability to regulate blood sugar. Our muscles work with insulin to convert sugar to glycogen for storage so simple exercise can mitigate against adult onset diabetes. Also on a low protein diet if the leg muscles need more raw material to repair (muscles tear and rebuild when exercised). If there is inadequate protein in the diet, the body will consume little used muscles elsewhere to get the needed raw material.  Did you ever see a marathon runner with big biceps, no.. QED.

As i get older it is more painful to get on the weight machine to work out. I can tell that I have lost strength in recent years due to this. If you don't use it you lose it. Getting old sucks. I would suggest mixing in some upper body strength work to complement  the bike workouts. This can be as simple as push-ups and/or pull-ups.
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There are tons of resources on the WWW to help manage nutrition levels, The CR group has a website CRSOC and while they are IMO too extreme on the caloric restriction side, they have great advice about nutrition.

There are also tons of BS and snake oil on the WWW... The diet industry is a Bazillion dollar business and growing as it is basic human nature to pursue easy fixes for hard problems... Avoid anything that promises fast results as that is unhealthy by definition.

So to recap... instead of a high impact short term program, consider looking at this as a permanent long term lifestyle adjustment. Make small incremental changes that you can live with. Whenever possible turn these changes into good habits. The weight will come off at it's own pace.
   
JR

PS: During weight loss our blood chemistry (HDL, LDL, etc) improves dramatically. It seems like a good idea to prolong this period of unusually good blood chemistry by losing the excess weight as slowly as possible. 

PPS: OK I just saw you comments about avoiding anaerobic work. Perhaps you can think of some aerobic workout to support upper body strength. In bicycle sprints the upper body is involved somewhat, i have an exercise bike (Schwin air-dyne) with arm cranks (I need to use it more).

 

[JohnRoberts]

I would like (and need) to add weight ...
Any suggestions?

Pretty much the same math... Just eat more kCal of food than your body burns.

You have a good problem as slender people generally don't suffer from health issues associated with being over weight.

Eat more food, consider weight lifting (or push-ip/pull-ups etc).

I'm sure many would like to trade with you...

JR

 

[okgb]

And the idea that the pressure on internal organs from belly fat makes the size measurement
more important than the actual weight , you may have muscle weight from working out.
if you want to gain weight , drink beer it makes you invinceable and thus able to actually eat the whole pizza as well!

 

[Ethan]

Oh, and Ethan, I forgot to address the aspect of anaerobic 'hard work' exercise: -unfortunately, that's not really an option for me, since I had my stroke... My blood pressure runs high -even medicated- and I'm strongly advised to keep all workouts aerobic and moderate.

-I wear a HRM and watch the pulse: -In terms of geek-tech, everything is ANT+, so the phone logs my heart rate, as well as speed, cadence, and power output in Watts. -In addition to the ANT+ interface for the phone, I also have a node 2.1 on the handlebars, which also connects to all of the sensors, and gives me real time feedback, while the log is there for me to review when finished.

Keith,
I'm sorry to hear about your stroke. Glad to hear you've recovered well enough for moderate physical activity.
While my interest and knowledge in the area of nutrition and exercise runs deep, I'm reminded that I shouldn't give advice that could could have consequences for anyone's unique medical situation.

But back to your original suspicion. If you feel you're losing strength, it could possibly be a symptom of over-training. Any time you exercise you're inducing micro damage to your muscles, if one doesn't allow sufficient rest time and adequate nutrition to repair the damage, you force your body into a net catabolic state (losing more and more muscle). The *general* rule of thumb is to never exercise the same muscle group more than every other day. So for example: if you're cycling on monday, you could do some aerobic rowing on tuesday so that your lower body has a chance to heal, then rest on wednesday, and maybe some light speed walking on Thursday for variety, etc.

Rest days are just as important as your workout days (even more so when you're restricting calories), so it's important to prioritize them.

Try to come up with a dozen different kinds of exercises that your doctor approves of and rotate those in.
Dare I ask…what is your diet like?

Oh, I almost forgot… One of the best ways to burn fat is to do your cardio in the morning on an empty stomach, a larger percentage of the calories that you burn will be from stored fat (there are several clinical studies that have shown this, google if you'd like to do more research).
Just make sure to adequately nourish yourself after the workout.

 

[SSLtech]

Diet is mainly lots of chicken w/rice... with either a moderate protien (eg lean sirloin or chicken) with salad for dinner. LOTS of water. No sodas or sweets, other than an "attaboy" treat to myself no more than ever other day... -"treat" = something nice, but tiny... for example, last one was a coupleof days ago, and was one o' dem "Ferero Rocher' Hazelbut chocolate ball thingies.

 

[Ethan]

"Ferero Rocher' Hazelbut chocolate ball thingies.

That stuff is soooooo good.  Enough to bring any dieting man to his knees.

 

[living sounds]

Lot's of good advice. Here's mine:

Food
Take it slow. Don't starve yourself.
Cut down on sugar (especially fructose, it's one half of table sugar, too) and alcohol. Make sure your died has a low glycemic load:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_load

Drink lot's of water during the day.

Excercise
Instead of steady-state training like cycling try high intensity interval training:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_interval_training

It's the most effective as well as efficient way to get fitter quickly.

Lift weights until muscle failure so they adapt. More muscle mass will help you loose weight faster.

Also
Get up early and get lot's of sunshine during the day if possible. Get enough sleep. Be patient.  8)

 

[JohnRoberts]

Along the lines of portion control, and perhaps my engineers desire to work efficiently, I have some small sealable pyrex freezer containers that I use to freeze modest meal sized portions for later nuking with microwave. Coincidentally today was my day to cook lunch. A salmon (healthy fat) based stew full of multiple vegetables, corn and rice. I use a smaller (lunch) sized freezer container and cooked up a huge pot of this healthy balanced meal. Since I just did it I recall the count. I filled up 19 freezer containers, and ate the dregs from the pot for my lunch today. So I am set and do not have to cook lunch again for almost three weeks.

=====

For dinners I make several variants but similar heavy on the vegetables with a tomato base (not store bought tomato sauce that is full of sugar and salt, but just chopped tomatoes that simmer into a sauce). but alternate between different meats; chicken, beef, pork, whatever. I use larger freezer dishes for dinner than lunch so only get 8 or 9 meals out of a big stew pot. I generally do my food shopping once a week and cook dinner once a week, the other 6 nights I just microwave one of my pre-saved meals. You can mix and match so you don't eat the same thing every night while my recipes are pretty similar. I put chili powder and hot peppers in almost everything.

The discipline of eating meals from these freezer containers limits my portion size and there are no second servings and no dessert. While I could eat a larger portion if it was available, minutes later I am no longer hungry.

So I only need dietary discipline once a week when I go shopping, my day to day eating is pretty well managed.

JR

PS; I tend to slow cook my stew all day on the lowest heat. I am thinking of making a summertime high tech crock pot that uses a Peltier heat element so I can cool the room while cooking the meal.  8)

 

[[silent:arts]]

if you want to gain weight , drink beer it makes you invinceable and thus able to actually eat the whole pizza as well!

tried beer [extensive, rock'n'roll style] for years, without any results.
186cm / 60kg for 25+ years.

 

[CJ]

do whatever works for you, every body is different,

i got into rock climbing a while back and you feel every ounce when you are pulling down on limestone,

i am 6 feet tall and wanted to get down to college weight which was 155,

did this by drinking a lot of Twinings Earl Grey and not eating very much,

lost 30 lbs in a month,

i have a sensitive stomach, so the idea of working out and limiting my intake was not an option as the hunger pangs after exercise developed too much acid  which made me nauseous, and real hungry all the time,

so sitting on the couch doing nothing while drinking something that filled the stomach and killed the appetite at the same time worked,

if you can get to sleep on an empty stomach, then you will lose a couple of pounds in your sleep, which is relatively painless,

once we got the weight off we switched to Red Bull at the climbing site,

thank God for model trains,

if they didn't have those then they wouldn't have gotten the idea for the big trains,

what? 

i better go eat a grapefruit,

 

[thermionic]

If the calorie counter on your software is accurate and you're burning an average of 2,500 calories per workout then you're really going some - the weight should be piling off. If it's not, then it's time to look at the diet.

I lost around 3.5 stone between 20090-10. My method was as follows:

Cut out second portions of anything
Exercise every day - a mixture of core, weights and cardio
Less Alcohol - this stuff really packs on the pounds

Since then I've gotten a bug for lowering my 5K run time. I came across some research that shows (there's a few studies showing this) how - if you can - exercising before breakfast burns most calories, particularly fat. Last year I was having 30-minute shake out runs before breakfast - this got the weight down a little. I wouldn't recommend more than 30-mins to start as you don't want to 'bonk'.

Good luck!

 

[SSLtech]

If the calorie counter on your software is accurate and you're burning an average of 2,500 calories per workout then you're really going some

I doubt it is. -I think it assumes solo riding (much is group 'drafting', which uses about 30% less energy) plus things like treaded tires. -in fact all of my bikes are full carbon-fiber, and use slick tires (23mm overall width), so the count is probably at least about double the correct number...

-In fact the bikes are so light that two of them weigh less than my 30lb target weight... (MUCH less if you include the new bike I just bought for my son!)

 

[MatthisD]

On those long spins are you eating much? you should have a steady intake of food after the first one and half or two hours. I wouldn't eat gels if I was you I would eat solids, bars, bananas or something that will fill the space more than a couple of gels. If you finish extremely hungry or with 'the knock' then you risk over eating afterwards.

Do you have nice routes on good roads with warm weather? if so then it takes the chore out if and it should be enjoyable. Some people don't like walking and as you cover more distance cycling, it can be more stimulating. Although a decent walk now and again would be no harm to stretch those under-used parts of the legs.