Posts by jc343

Okay -- I see your problem.  But 2 weeks is a pretty short interval.  You have switched to biking -- one of my favorites and you are riding hard  for 5 to 10 miles a day.  That won't qualify you for the Tour de France but so what.  Fitness is always measured in terms of some goal.  I have been challenged to ride back to back centuries so I am riding 100+ miles per week.  That is insane.  It is a big investment in time and energy but has little real value.  I would probably be just as well off cutting that in half.  But I wouldn't be able to meet the challenge, if I cut back.

I have no doubt that you could get back into your workout routines in a week or less, if it was worth your while.  But you should be looking at your lifestyle.  How much time do you need to invest in exercise to maintain your gains and sustain an acceptable level of exercise?

I would would guess that an hour a day would be pretty good.  Supplement your biking with some calesthenics and resistance work and try to walk as much as possible.

Good luck

I am in favor of daily weighing as long as you don't worry too much about the fluctuations.  Certain foods -- pancakes and syrup, pizza -- always push my weight up -- usually a day or two after the meal.  Certain activities -- a 60 mile bike ride -- will push my weight down temporarily.  So, if my children come for a visit and we socialize over pizza and beer and then have a big breakfast the next morning, my weight will shoot up 3 or 4 pounds.  When I bike commute the next day, those pounds will disappear.  Most of that fluctuation is fluid build up and release.

The weight that you are interested in changes slowly over time.  We get fat over years for the most part.  And it takes years for the excess weight to really go away.  If your weight suddenly shoots up or drops down, you will come back to your set point fairly quickly.

What you haven't mentioned is your per cent body fat (BF%) and your ideal weight.  If you don't know what your BF% is, you should find out and set your weight goal rather loosely -- within a couple of pounds plus or minus of weight that puts you say in the 15% to 20% body fat range.  In other words the weight fluctuations that you are fretting over have very little impact on your BF% or BMI.

Ank: You have to do a little math.  You started at 110 with a 19% body fat which works out to 20.9 lbs of fat on 89.1 of bone and muscle (and other stuff).  You have moved to 112 with 18% body fat which works out to 20.2 lbs of body fat on 91.8 lbs of all the other stuff.  That presumably means that you have a) shed almost 3/4 pound of fat and b) gained over 2 pounds of muscle.  These are only estimates of course but they show pretty significant improvements.

Good news and bad news.  You have received some pretty good inputs.  You probably cannot do anything about those nagging bits of fat here and there -- they are probably programmed into your genes.  For perspective, I weighed less that 160 pounds the first half of my life.  When my weight crept up to 160 -165, my wife started teasing me about my love handles and double chin.  I was running and doing mult-hour martial arts workouts.  I was in the best condition of my life.  I was getting fat(ter) anyway.  Eventually, I stopped working out and devoted my life to earning a living.  My weight crept up over 200 pounds.  Eight or nine years ago, I started turning it around.  I am back down to 170 -175.  I still have the love handles and double chin.  But I think that I am the only one who notices -- everyone else is amazed at how skinny I have become.

Try not to worry about that fat.  Keep working but remember to keep your eating under control.  You can be fit and fat too.  That comes from habitually eating more than you are expending.

Try brandy.

Night: That's pretty good and I can tell you that for a given course or route, my heart rate and energy barely register on my  HRM when I am walking but they show up big time when I am running.  However, it might be worthwhile to mention a few technical details.  Energy and work are equivalent except that in the real world there are no 100% efficient systems so the energy required to produce a given amount of work is always higher than the work itself.  Power is the rate at which energy is produced or work is done.  So for your electronic devices, watts or kilowatts tell you the rate at which energy is used or needed. Watt-hours or KW-hours tells you how much energy you actually used.  So running 3.5 miles requires higher power than walking 3.5 miles because you are doing at least the same amount of work in less time.  Your heart and breathing apparatus have to work harder when you are running because you need more power, which means more oxygen, more fuel (sugar, glycogen) and more waste per unit time, to do the work in a shorter time.

The idea that walking and running burns the same amount of calories for a given distance is based on the idea that you are doing the same amount of work -- i.e., moving your body through a given distance -- whether you are walking or running.  The problem is efficiency.  Walking is far more efficient than running in terms of energy expenditure.  For example, in order to produce the higher energy levels that you need for running you have to pump blood at a higher rate AND you have to handle a lot more air -- oxygen in and CO2 out.  Some extra energy is released as heat -- you get a lot hotter and sweatier running a mile than you do walking a mile.  That heat is over and above the energy you need to do the work of moving your body through the mile.

There used to be a website that listed the normal expenditures for walking a mile at different speeds.  Walking (?) one mile at 7 mph only costs about 120 calories while walking the same mile at 4 mph cost about 80 calories.  So it is much for one mile but if you walk 3 miles a day 5 days out of a week, you burn an extra 600 calories that week.  If you crank your pace up to 9 or 10 mph (very doable paces), the difference is even bigger.  For 5 miles per day, 25 miles per week, the difference is 1000 calories  -- about 1/3 of a pound of fat.

Here are a couple of things to think about: In the olympics, the ultimate distance run is 40 km (26.2 mi), the corresponding distance for walkers is 50 km and it would probably be longer if there was enough time in the day, for cycling, the distance is 160 km (100 miles).  No one ever developed a 50 bpm heart rate by walking but a lot of people develop that kind of heart rate from running.  Competitive runners and cyclists need a VO2Max in the neighborhood of 70 to 80.  VO2Max doesn't seem to be a factor for walkers.  I can easily walk 3 miles in 45 minutes but I have never been able to run 3 miles in 15 minutes.  Running 2 or 3 miles a day erases a lot of my eating sins but walking is no help.  As a practical matter, running is much better than walking for weight management but if you want an exercise that you can fit into your everday life, walking wins hands down.

Well, your diet sounds okay.  I don't believe that the low-resting heart rate should be a problem.  Mine is around 50, which is pretty low and light headedness like that is very unusual for me.  I also drink too much coffee so I wouldn't expect caffeine to be a problem.

Good Luck.

First off - I believe the answer to the question is really that per cent body fat is a very important health factor.  Your BF% or %BF should be in a fairly narrow range -- roughly 10% to 20%.  Getting below about 7% is dangerous but most people don't have to worry about that because it generally takes a lot of sacrifice to get there.  Once you get above 20% to 25% (roughly speaking) you start increasing your risk of bad things like heart attack and stroke.  So %BF is an important number but a difficult one to get a hold of. 

All methods of getting the number are estimates.  The most accurate method is dunking -- water displacement, which is expensive.  The next most accurate is the skin fold but there is an art to doing it right.  Electrical resistance can be accurate but there are a number of assumptions that go into producing a result.  For one thing, commercially available scales use formulas that are highly dependent on age.  I can get whatever %BF I want from my scale merely by adjusting my age.  There are some scales which have the option of using a fitness level to adjust the calculated result.  But a) you have to guess at your fitness level and b) if you are using %BF as an indicatior of your fitness level then you shouldn't be using fitness level as input to the calculation.

A lot of people, medical professionals included, have to body mass index (BMI) as an alternative to %BF because BMI can be easily and reliably calculated.  However, BMI has no direct correlation to your health unless your body happens to fit the model used to derive the BMI formula.  Many of us don't fit that shoe.  For me BMI is meaningless.  On the other hand, I can use a %BF formula derived for U.S. military simply by adding hip, waist and neck measurements to height and weight.  Based on detailed study that formula produces results that are within 3% of the actual %BF (based on immersion ??).  But again there is a certain amount of art to getting the correct hip, waist and neck measurements.

I would go with the measurements at the gym, which will probably be done with calipers by someone with at least a modicum of training.  Then I would get a scale with a %BF readout to monitor for changes.  But I would definitely use %BF as an indicator of healthy weight.  When your %BF is in a healthy range, your weight will be in a healthy range.

Dear FGSG, IMNSHO, I think you need to be careful.   The symptoms you are describing could be pretty serious and you might be well advised to consult with a doctor.  The fact a lot of people find Jillian's DVD helpful does not mean it is a good thing for you.  Jillian is a fantastic coach but using her material without supervision could be dangerous.  So proceed with caution.

Obviously not a topic for a guy to weigh in on but...

I like your attitude concerning amount of weight loss.  Dropping 40 pounds would be a wonderful start for a 300 pounder but a distaster for a 100 pounder.  I appreciate your feeling about pant size.  I was really glad to get down to 34 inch waist from a 38 inch waist.  But I think the numbers are arbitrary.

Consider this.  Thirty years ago, I was a 30 something karate blackbelt (among other things) and in the best shape of my life.  I weighed 165 pounds.  My wife was razzing me about my double chin and love handles.  Today I am in the 170 to 175 range and thinking 165 would be a good weight.  The problem is my per cent body fat.  Its about 16%.  Dropping another 5 pounds or so would push my per cent body fat to levels that are hard to achieve and even harder to maintain.

I have 3 suggestions.  First, figure out what a realistic weight is for you and get comfortable with that.  Second, look into clothes styles that look good on you instead of trying to fit youself into something that looks good on somebody else.  Third, change your attitude and your screen name -- you are too intelligent to be putting yourself down as a "fatnobody".

Patience!  It turns out that you aren't a simple furnace converting food to energy and getting rid of the residue.  Calories are units of energy and as such they have no weight.  Carbohydrates and proteins produce about 4 calories per gram and fats produce about 9 calories per gram.  28 grams are equal to one ounce.  So that excess 500 calories could be at most 5 1/2 ounces of fat.  In fact, some of those calories come from carbs and protein.  So you only burned off a couple of ounces of fat.  Those ounces probably will not show up on a scale.  Besides your body is going to rebuild itself.  So you have to be prepared for a long task.  Change your lifestyle (if you haven't already) and make you health a lifelong goal.

Both sugar and salt are good and evil.  They have both been boon companions throughout my life.  But I am working on it.  So I read a few decades ago that reducing your salt intake could reduce your high blood pressure.  But when my blood pressure went high, reducing salt didn't help.  My blood pressure dropped when I got back into serious exercise.  Nonetheless, I advocate keeping the salt intake down.  The only two ways that I know of are eating unprocessed foods and eating less food (less food = less salt unless you cut out the fruit and keep the chips.)

Sugar is more interesting to me right now.  Again I read a couple of decades ago that excess sugar could lead to arthritis.  I have also read that that's an old wives tale.  But recently, I have been following research on aging and calorie restriction.  About a month ago, I came across several reports that pointed to insulin as a key to the aging processes and suggesting that calorie restriction slows aging by reducing the amount of insulin the body has to process.  More recently, sugar -- glucose, fructose, etc. -- showed up as enemy number one.  Basically, there are two ways that sugar interacts with the proteins in your body.  The right way using enzymes to attach the glucose where it belongs and the non-enzymatic way (glycation).  Non-enzymatic reactions have a high probability of causing the glucose to stick to a protein molecule in the wrong way -- like gum on the bottom of your shoe.  This not only messes up the protein molecule it creates a situation where the damaged protein can bump into and stick to another protein creating and even more unhealthy situation.  Bingo! Excess sugar in your diet can lead to arthritis and other age related maladies.

The damage takes time to become visible -- generally about 50 years.  So you go along in your prime for decades apparently in great health.  Then one day you realize that your joints are no longer working the way they should.  And there is no apparent reason.

I don't think we should say eat less.  We should aim to eat no more than we need -- especially when it comes to salt and sugar.

Ubi: Sound like a great season.

I am starting into transition.  It's still too warm for full winter gear but too cold for summer outfits except when it's too cold in the morning but pretty warm by noon.

I picked up my new trainer this afternoon -- a Kinetic Pro.  It isn't quite what I expected.  I had read that you could get weights of 6, 12 and 18 pounds but it looks like the 6 pound weight is more or less permanently attached so you get 6 pounds or 18 pounds.  Does anybody know if the trainer is designed to have the 6 pound replaced by the 12 pound?