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| Weight Loss | One Meal a Day? | Oct 01 2008 18:08 (UTC) |
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Please see this older discussion for pointers to relevant research. If you want to try this, definitely download and read the short book (it's free!) recommended there. |
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| Weight Loss | Dieting style acccording to Blood Type | Sep 30 2008 21:40 (UTC) |
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Changing routines is definitely a Paleo idea I bet you'd enjoy Arthur De Vany's essay on the topic (click here): he's a mathematical economist who relates the idea of consciously varying what we do to specific models of random events following power-law distributions. I don't usually recommend this essay because "the math" tends to scare people off, but with your background in physics you should find that part of it easy to follow. |
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| Weight Loss | Dieting style acccording to Blood Type | Sep 30 2008 02:07 (UTC) |
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dieteoctober, if you like Paleo-style advice, you should love Mark Sisson's "Daily Apple" blog. I'm attracted to evolutionary arguments too, although I have to say that, as with any belief system, the Paleo community has its share of those unreasonably convinced they're right about everything and that everyone else is wrong In my own experience, all non-insane dieting schemes work for losing weight, provided you follow them exactly as instructed. And I believe that's why, for example, the "blood type" scheme can appear to be successful: it's actually a collection of several different dieting schemes, from which you pick one based on your blood type. I have no reason to suspect it would be any less successful if, for example, you picked one of the diets based on your astrological sign, or eye color, or musical tastes ... or simply rolled dice to pick one. For any given dieting scheme, some people will have a much easier time with it than others (for example, some people can't tolerate cutting carbs, while others thrive on that -- and, no, there's no evidence that blood type has anything to do with that), and if you were lucky enough that the "blood type" gimmick gave you a scheme that works well for you, that's great! Keep on trying lots of things ("surprising your body" happens automatically then.), keep the ones that work for you as long as they keep working, and forget the rest. It's easy |
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| Calorie Count | BMI number in Burn meter | Sep 28 2008 18:23 (UTC) |
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Original Post by coach_k: This varies according to a person's height. By definition, BMI is just weight divided by the square of height, where weight is measured in kilograms and height is measured in meters. So if starting weight is W, height is H, and the number of kilograms lost is D, the change in BMI is:
W/H^2 - (W-D)/H^2
So that's the answer: for a person H meters tall, BMI drops by one every time they lose H^2 kilograms (or, same thing, BMI rises by one whenever they gain H^2 kilograms). Of course since BMI is defined using metric units, it's a bit clumsier to figure out using pounds and inches instead of kilograms and meters. Skipping details, it works out to that a person h inches tall sees a one-unit change in BMI when their weight changes by h^2/703 pounds.
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| Weight Loss | Dieting style acccording to Blood Type | Sep 27 2008 19:33 (UTC) |
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Regardless of motivation, if you've cut out grains, dairy, and legumes, you're almost certainly on what anyone else would call a more-or-less plain old low-carb diet now. Combine that with intense but briefer forms of exercise, and you can find out a lot more grounded info on such schemes via searching for terms like "Paleo diet" and "evolutionary fitness". For example, read Loren Cordain's "The Paleo Diet" and the Eades' "Protein Power Lifeplan". An advantage to those is that they're supported by real research, not just by made-up fanciful gibberish about blood type |
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| Fitness | Walking with wrist weights | Sep 19 2008 07:23 (UTC) |
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About Vo2max, it seems intuitively obvious that firing more muscle tissue requires more oxygen for fuel, and for a pleasant change reality actually seems to match intuition for once What's surprising here to me is how much tougher walking or rebounding can be made by adding vigorous & "long" arm movements while holding small hand weights. Suppose you do add a pound to each hand. Then each time you pump your hands to waist level (basically half a curl), you're doing 2 foot-pounds of extra work (rasiing 2 pounds total about a foot). Raise the weights all the way overhead, and that's about 3 feet, for a total of 6 foot-pounds of extra work. But, just try it, and I expect you'll find it increases the intensity by much more than a factor of 3 (compared to pumping just to waist level). IOW, there's a seemingly "something for nothing" boost here. Maybe it's because just pumping to waist level is essentially hitting only forearms and biceps, while going all the way up forces the larger triceps and delts to do work too? That would make sense if oxygen uptake spikes in response to engaging a muscle at all. Whatever the reason, the end result is all good
Hey, you write that as if it were a personal opinion -- but it's objective truth A rebounder is great for the latter: there are half a dozen different basic things you can do with your legs, and dozens of different things you can do with your arms and trunk, and that multiplies out to hundreds of possible variations. Do 30 repetitions of one combination, and if you get bored you can instantly switch to a different combination. Intensity can be changed instantly too (e.g., switch between jumping high and easy in-place jogging, or even just bouncing lightly keeping both feet on the mat). In fact, I find it almost impossible not to do a form of interval training on a rebounder. Even if I intend to do nothing but three minutes of baby bouncing while watching TV, after a minute that's so relaxing and refreshing it's just natural to want to go harder. So, ya, if you suffer "cardio boredom" too, I recommend giving it a try. Bonus: I can't find a reference now, but a study I read long ago matched my own experience: across various forms of aerobic exercise reaching a given heart rate, the perceived effort ("how hard" a person believes they're working, on a subjective scale from 1 through 10) was lowest for rebounding. I'm not sure why that is, but the upshoot is that it makes exercise at a given level less mentally demanding. I suspect a large part of it has to do with the mild G forces at work. For example, you literally feel weightless for a brief time at the top of each jump, and that's refreshingly fun. For another, you feel 2x (or so) heavier at the bottom of each jump, and, among other things, if you're relaxed enough that tends to drive the air out of your lungs, which in turn makes it feel like breathing is effortless (even when you're actually breathing pretty hard). Even so, lifting weights is more fun |
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| Fitness | Walking with wrist weights | Sep 17 2008 21:04 (UTC) |
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melkor: Dr. Schwartz would agree that just sticking weights on your wrists wouldn't be useful. HeavyHands is about much more than just doing that. Done "right", it's challenging. I suspect this enthusiast is sincere
Clarence Bass wrote a few articles about it on his site, and an experiment he tried hints at why "the real deal" can be effective: he set his treadmill to a fixed, relatively relaxed speed, and strapped on a good heart rate monitor. Then he measured his heart rate while doing various things with dinky one-pound hand weights until reaching steady state. Walking without weights, his heart rate reached 86 beats per minute (bpm). As he expected, grabbing 1-pound weights and pumping them to waist level only increased that to 89 bpm -- just a tiny bit harder. Then he tried pumping the weights higher, first up to shoulder level, then to head level, and finally all the way overhead. Heart rate increased significantly the higher he pumped, maxing out at 138 bpm with the full-range "all the way overhead" pumping. Schartz predicted all of that He's in phenomenal shape, so that surprised him: you can indeed greatly increase heart rate (and so also, by implication, oxygen consumption and calorie burn rate) just by adding various sustained, vigorous, full range-of-motion arm movements, against light resistance, to moderate-pace walking. Increase the weights, walking rate, & duration and this can get very hard indeed. But, of course, most people don't follow instructions for long, and then blame lack of results on the program.
Both forms work the shoulders relentlessly, hitting lots of the smaller muscles hard to get at with free weights. It makes a nice complement to lifting weights, and, once you get reasonably good at it, on "cardio days" can get you the calorie burn rate of running hard without the leg and foot pounding running entails. I prefer the rebounder form, because that's easier on joints than even walking is, more core muscles are engaged to maintain balance, and boosting jump height hits leg muscles harder than walking can. |
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| Weight Loss | I need advice about halting a low carb diet | Jun 21 2008 19:21 (UTC) |
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feanor, if mom has a history of binging, what kinds of foods triggered it? Keep that in mind. I'll hazard a guess it was more likely she binged on carbs than on, say, skinless chicken breasts Plateaus occur under all approaches. If mom's best judgment is that low-carb has been a good approach for her, she should read up specifically on low-carb plateaus. For example, low-carb guru Dr. Eades blogged about this very recently (click that to see his post). Bottom line, according to him: too many calories, probably from too much dietary fat (e.g., from low-carb but very-high-fat nuts, cheeses, etc). Will she gain initial weight even if she goes directly to a low calorie diet?
Switching to a higher-carb diet gradually is the most effective way to limit (but not eliminate) this effect. |
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| Fitness | Help me make the argument against one giant meal | May 02 2008 02:20 (UTC) |
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finnsal, I suggest you've both focused on an unhelpful thing here. Fact is prospective studies have been done comparing meal frequencies from one a day to 17(!) a day, and overall they find little difference in pretty much any measured outcome. For example, no difference in resting energy expenditure (REE -- aka base metabolic rate), no difference in body composition, and, in hypocaloric diets, no difference in rate of weight loss. If your friend were, say, an elite bodybuilder, then sure, eating 7 meals a day may be necessary to continue making progress. But sounds like he's a middle-aged couch potato. For him, the most important things are the true basics:
Those will change body composition (for the better As to aging and metabolism, this isn't fully understood. The strongest factor in slowing metabolism with increasing age currently appears to be simply that sedentary adults lose muscle and gain fat, relentlessly, as they age. Less muscle decreases REE directly. Strength training can stop muscle loss, and even reverse it, and this has been shown to be true even for people who start lifting in their 90s. Strength training also acts to slow bone loss, etc, etc. Since he's an executive with a background in science, challenge him to follow the same general plan he'd follow with any other project:
If measurement shows acceptable progress while he's eating one meal a day, neither of you can really complain One thing to note: in my experience lack of progress is often due to inadequate protein intake. If he does eat once a day, he's probably going to spend much of each day in a state of ketosis ("lipid metabolism"), but not all cells can utilize fatty acids and ketone bodies for energy. Some cells require glucose for energy. If glucose isn't coming from food for a time, the liver manufactures glucose, primarily from certain amino acids. This increases his overall protein requirement (while he's in ketosis, protein is his primary source of glucose). That's one reason I can see for reduced meal frequency increasing desirable protein intake. He should also get plenty of plain water all day long. That's needed for protein metabolism, and also to flush unused ketone bodies (byproducts of fat breakdown) out of his system. BTW, sumo wrestlers don't skip breakfast "to get fatter". They're strength athletes, and typically begin intense strength training, for hours straight, immediately upon waking. They'd puke their guts out if they tried that on a full stomach. So they do it on an empty stomach instead. After the morning exercise, they stuff themselves to the gills and go back to sleep. Then they get up and eat again (they generally eat twice a day, not once). Weight of any kind is helpful in their sport, and they'll settle for fat weight if they can't get more muscle weight. What makes them fat is eating upwards of 10000 Calories/day, not merely eating twice instead of three times |
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| Fitness | Help me make the argument against one giant meal | Apr 29 2008 17:40 (UTC) |
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There is strong research showing major health benefits from various forms of intermittent fasting, although most of it was done with lower animals. Sorry, but you're not going to find any "hard science" telling him this will kill him This human pilot study from last year is often referenced, comparing three meals per day to one: A controlled trial of reduced meal frequency without caloric restriction in healthy, normal-weight, middle-aged adults However, it's very important to read the full paper, because the results are muddy on grounds not made clear in the abstract. For example, cortisol was measured in the morning for the 3 meal/day subjects, but late afternoon in the 1 meal/day subjects, and it's normal for everyone that cortisol falls significantly from morning until night. IOW, the decrease in cortisol seen in the 1 meal/day subjects may simply be due to the difference in the time of day cortisol was measured. There are a number of potential confusions like this, acknowledged in the abstract only by the cryptic disclaimer "diurnal variations may affect outcomes". It's also important to note that, in this study, the 1 meal/day subjects were compelled to eat more than they wanted to eat -- it was more a study of forced once-a-day binging than of what people who eat once a day "naturally" do. The study authors wanted to eliminate weight loss as a confounding factor, so forced the 1 meal/day eaters to consume as many calories as the 3 meal/day eaters (previous studies all showed that humans left to their own devices generally consume fewer calories overall when put on any sort of intermittent fasting schedule). By far the largest body of more-or-less relevant human research has been done on Muslims doing Ramadan fasting: during the month of Ramadan, all eating and drinking is prohibited from sunrise to sunset. There are many dozens of studies on what happens as a result. Most show mildly benign consequences. If your friend wants to try this, I strongly recommend downloading the free book here: The Fast-5 book advocates fasting (at least) 19 hours per day, confining all eating to a (at most) 5-hour window. The author is a doctor and explains the relevant biochemistry well, although at a shallow level. There's lots of practical advice on how to ease into such a scheme, and wise warnings about what to look out for (e.g., while there's no particular physical danger for most people, any form of fasting can trigger eating disorders in people prone to such). |
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| Weight Loss | so iv a question that'll get a few heads going!!! | Apr 21 2008 05:10 (UTC) |
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Human fat is between 10% and 15% water by weight. Therefore a pound of human fat contains between 0.85 and 0.9 pounds of pure fat. At 9 kcal/gram for pure fat, that's between 0.85 x 453.6 x 9 ~= 3470 and 0.9 x 453.6 x 9 ~= 3674
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| Fitness | Gain muscle while losing fat | Jan 24 2008 16:06 (UTC) |
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treanop2, you can gain muscle and lose fat "simultaneously" if you stick to an overall calorie balance. You can gain muscle faster if you maintain an overall calorie surplus (but will also gain fat then), and you can lose fat faster if you maintain an overall calorie deficit (but will be doing well to avoid losing muscle then). Whether you want to make "quick" progress toward one goal, or "slow" progress toward both, is up to you. Most competitive bodybuilders (who gain an extraordinary amount of muscle and lose an extraordinary amount of fat) alternate between "bulking" (gaining muscle and fat) and "cutting" (losing fat while trying to preserve muscle) phases. Here's a popular article aimed at people who want to do both simultaneously (a particularly simple version of "zig zag" calorie manipulation): http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/drsquat6.htm For more detail, read a lot more |
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| Fitness | Gain muscle while losing fat | Jan 22 2008 15:02 (UTC) |
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Original Post by jjlewis305: It's unclear who you're replying to, but I didn't see anyone here make that claim. If you stick to a significant calorie deficit, of course you'll lose weight. What you're unlikely to do is gain a significant amount of muscle while in significant calorie deficit. Calorie restriction most days + strength training is very good for losing fat, but to speed that challenge yourself beyond "just a couple 10/15 DB". Since you read T-nation, read this: |
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| Fitness | Gain muscle while losing fat | Jan 22 2008 05:06 (UTC) |
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humantarget, I expect you're talking about the Men's Health TNT Diet. There's nothing truly new in that -- earlier versions date back decades, under names like "carb cycling", "metabolic diet", and "cyclic ketogenic diet". They're all based on by-now old knowledge with some speculation:
I didn't see a reference to any "long-term study" in their article, just a brief anecdotal mention of positive (but unpublished) results in their lab. Will it work to lose fat and gain muscle? Provided you're neither in significant calorie deficit nor significant calorie surplus, probably, but so will just about any approach that emphasizes intense resistance training while keeping near calorie balance and getting adequate nutrition to support muscle growth. I don't know of any peer-reviewed formal study confirming (or refuting My own impression is that carbs do nothing directly for muscle fiber growth, but at least I personally have a very hard time working out intensely when low on carbs. So, at least for me, carbs have the indirect virtue of supplying the energy needed to perform effective muscle-building workouts. OTOH, I've never "gone low on carbs" for a long sustained time, and many people who have claim the body eventually adapts to using ketone bodies (instead of glucose) even for intense work. |
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| Weight Loss | the biggest loser show is that healthy | Jan 19 2008 04:57 (UTC) |
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No, it's not healthy -- that's why the show employs 4 doctors to monitor the contestants closely |
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| Weight Loss | Body fat scales | Nov 21 2007 03:21 (UTC) |
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chelseagirl, the 3 categories aren't mutually exclusive, and that's why they add to more than 100%. Human muscle is in fact 70-75% water, and human fat is 10-15% water. The total H20 measure includes some of your muscle weight and some of your fat weight accordingly. It may help to clarify by considering an impossible extreme: suppose you were 100% muscle, and had no other tissue of any kind. Then you would have 0% BF, 100% Muscle, and somewhere from 70-75% H20. |
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| Foods | question about Vitamin C | Nov 13 2007 09:33 (UTC) |
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There's a great deal of controversy over how much vitamin C is optimal. Humans (simians in general) are among the only animals that can't synthesize vitamin C -- we have to obtain it from food. Part of the controversy stems from that our closest relatives (apes) consume far more vitamin C than humans typically do. If it's good for them, why isn't it good for us In any case, the RDA for vitamin C in the USA varies from 40 to 155 mg/day, depending on age, gender, pregnancy, lactation, and exposure to smoke. Click here for all the gory details. As that also shows, for people over 18 daily consumption of up to 2000 mg of vitamin C is considered at worst harmless, so you're nowhere close to trouble getting 500+12 = 512 mg. Some serious researchers suggest you get much more than that -- as it says in that link, two-time Nobel prize winner Linus Pauling took 18000 mg of vitamin C per day, about 35 times more than you're getting with a full pill. Since he lived to be 93, it's hard to make a convincing case that it hurt him |
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| Weight Loss | Question | Nov 12 2007 16:46 (UTC) |
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| If you're going to weigh yourself every day, then enter your weight here every day too, and pay attention to the green trend line instead of to the blue weight line. The trend line is a moving 10-day average of your weights, and that's usually effective at "filtering out" random fluctuations due to all the factors others have mentioned (water weight, TTOM, ...). So long as your trend line isn't going up, you're probably not gaining "real" weight. | |||
| Weight Loss | hydroxycut - opinions?? | Nov 09 2007 07:19 (UTC) |
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tomsawyer, that list of possible dire consequences you found dates back to when Hydroxycut still contained ephedra. Then it really did work. Since 2004, it's been illegal to include ephedra in "dietary supplements" in the USA (because ephedra is in fact dangerous), and Hydroxycut hasn't contained ephedra for years. Instead it contains a hodge-podge of other stuff now, like caffeine and green tea extract. Never tried it myself, but then I haven't tried green tea or drinking too much coffee either |
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| Fitness | is a high protein -very low carb diet good for muscle building? | Nov 06 2007 22:07 (UTC) |
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If this appeals to you, you should buy the book on the TNT diet, or at least read the full original article at menshealth.com. What you described is only "plan A", and aims at fat loss, not muscle-building. The other 4 plans in the scheme aren't really low-carb plans, they're variants of carb cycling (alternating low-carb and high-carb meals according to various schedules). Those aim at muscle-building, while minimizing fat gain, or even losing fat too.
Nope! Glucose is the easiest fuel for your body to burn, and a primary effect of low-carb eating is to exhaust the body's glycogen stores (the TNT book and original article explain this in some detail). As a result, lo-carb eating can leave you tireder. If you're still not getting enough sleep, repairing that is the only healthy way to stop feeling tired. |
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| Fitness | how to avoid muscle soreness | Oct 30 2007 18:41 (UTC) |
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ricen, cut the weight! This part of the program you're following could use more explanation:
Your only goal for the first few weeks is to master good form in each exercise. Doing them with an empty bar is fine at the start -- lifting creates new kinds of stresses on your muscles, tendons, ligaments, bones, heart, and even lungs, and giving them a gentle introduction is a good thing. Your body will thrive on these stresses soon enough, but any new thing-- even a good thing --takes time to get used to at first. Extreme soreness isn't necessary to make progress, and, as you're discovering, can make you want to quit. Start gently, and increase loads gradually. I'd be happier with that program if it started you with 2 sets the first week, then added one set per week so that you work your way up to 5 sets over the course of a month. 5 sets is too much volume (IMO) for a true beginner to start with. |
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| Weight Loss | Gained 17 lbs in one week!! How can that be?? | Oct 26 2007 06:31 (UTC) |
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Anyone else notice that the guys all kept their shirts on during the weigh-in this time? They always took them off before this week. My guess is that overly rapid weight loss is starting to leave behind obviously loose flaps of skin on the guys, and they don't want the audience to know this. For those who don't find the show appalling |
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| Fitness | Muscle Maintenance vs. Growth. questions...? | Oct 26 2007 01:55 (UTC) |
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| jazzislove, if you don't want to grow more muscle, why do you think you need to increase the load anyway? Are you losing muscle now? | |||
| Fitness | Muscle Maintenance vs. Growth. questions...? | Oct 25 2007 22:55 (UTC) |
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melkor, De Vany, Bass and Mentzer have at least this in common: they all advocate training intensely, but briefly and infrequently. De Vany is the only one of the three who seems to fear eating, though 2beittybitty, take this to heart even if you can't believe it yet: part of what you're learning now is how to become your own expert on you. You really won't need "a guide" beyond your tape measure and scale (or, better than a scale, finding a way to get BF% (body fat percent) measured and doing so at least monthly). If you stop pushing yourself, you'll stop improving, and that is (or should be) self-evident. Will you also lose muscle then? Nobody can tell you in advance, but you'll know from your own measurements. Then take the obvious steps (resume pushing yourself if you're losing but don't want to; or keep doing what you're doing if you're happy). As to limits, I don't know anyone who reached their true physical limits. It seems everyone reaches a different limit first, such as how much of their life they're willing to commit to physical improvement. For example, I'm willing to spend up to 7 hours a week on deliberate exercise of all kinds (strength, power, endurance, flexibility, balance, coordination), but that's it. There are many other things in life I want to pursue too. That will leave mounds of physical potential untouched -- so it goes. Regardless, with extreme age the body will start to break down beyond hope of reversal no matter what you do -- everyone dies eventually. Although, to be fair, I have no direct evidence that applies to either of us |
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| Fitness | Muscle Maintenance vs. Growth. questions...? | Oct 25 2007 19:58 (UTC) |
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Actually, many got that way by combining heavy steroid use with lifting weights As far as role models go, I let myself slide for about 15 years, and at 55 am fighting (so far) just to regain what I had. I don't really recommend this strategy Clarence Bass seems to be a great role model for those of us more than half way to the second diaper stage of life There's a mountain of interesting, free fitness info on his site. I think he's in his 70s now, and has been lifting since his early teens, but is still making progress -- and he only lifts one day a week now. Recovery time does increase with age, and while my current calorie deficit (most days) confuses the issues, over the last 6 months I've found over and over that fewer lifts per session and more frequent rest weeks (both compared to younger years) actually speeds progress for me. Worse, some of the things Mike Mentzer wrote are starting to make sense 2beittybitty, why are you asking? Are you growing "man's arms"? If not, don't worry about it. Except for a brief spurt at the start of your lifting career, growing new muscle in adulthood is very long, hard work for almost everyone, woman or man. It's not going to happen without years of dedicated effort. As a woman, you almost certainly don't have enough testosterone to support sustained "rapid" muscle growth regardless. And being in a calorie deficit too makes it virtually impossible. If you're on the receiving end of an unbroken chain of miracles and a muscle does get "too big" for your tastes, stop working it. It will deflate a lot faster than it took you to build it. For example, work out for 30 years, and you can lose almost all your gains in one year of sloth. |
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| Fitness | Still sore after 2 days...should I skip today's work out? | Oct 25 2007 15:35 (UTC) |
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Unlike as for cardio work, nearly all the benefits of strength training occur between workouts -- it's only during (relative) rest that the body "gets better" in response to lifting weights. Until the soreness (if any) has mostly gone away, repair is still occurring, so let it In general, the more intensely a muscle is worked, the more rest is needed before hitting it again. This depends on your body's capacity for recovering, and that in turn depends on many things, including age, intensity of workouts, how long you've been doing the same lift(s), nutrition, stress levels, and sleep. One full day off between working the same muscle again is minimum for most people not using "enhancement" drugs. Advanced lifters can need as long as a week. |
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| Fitness | protein question | Oct 24 2007 04:23 (UTC) |
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Don't believe anyone -- find out for yourself! Try different amounts, and measure results. Optimal protein intake really does seem to vary a lot across people, and not enough about this is really known to explain why. On the other end of the "hey, this is what worked for me, so you have to do it too" advice spectrum, this is what bodybuilding legend Bill Pearl claims, and he grew more muscle than everyone replying to you combined To make that concrete, your low-end current 80 grams/day would be sufficient by his lights if you carried 160 pounds of muscle (not total weight, not even lean weight -- just muscle weight). That's an extraordinarily low recommendation, and I also advise going higher at least at first -- the point is to underscore just how much variation there really is across people. |
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| Vegetarian | Are vegetarians smarter than grass? | Oct 24 2007 01:54 (UTC) |
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My favorite vegetarian sandwich fillings are tuna, roast beef, and ham. I suppose that makes me a carnivore dumber than grass  . |
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| Weight Loss | Does the body know? | Oct 23 2007 08:51 (UTC) |
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salomershy, good plan! Like HIIT, the point to strength-training isn't duration, it's hitting it hard and then getting plenty of rest before the next time -- a little goes a long way. 2 or 3 whole-body strength sessions per week, on non-consecutive days, should do the trick, and best if they're done in under 45 minutes (although if you're just starting, take all the time you need to learn and practice good form -- injuries are not necessary Cardio work is still good for you too (it's good for everyone), but if you're getting burned out by HIIT there are hundreds of other ways to go. Perhaps this would be a good time to try gentler things you might really enjoy -- for example, walking, swimming, riding a bike, dancing, rebounding, skipping rope, martial arts, whatever keeps you moving and piques your interest. Since you're so close to your goal, you might want to consider a "zig zag" approach to calories. There are many schemes of this sort, all involving switching between mild calorie deficits and surpluses according to some plan. By staying close to calorie balance, slow but steady progress can be made toward losing fat and gaining muscle seemingly "at the same time". For ample, here's an influential zig-zag plan created by a legendary powerlifter ("Dr. Squat" is the pen name of Fred Hatfield, one of the strongest guys in the world, and notable also for not having a 60-inch waist |
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| Fitness | Professional/Seriously Experienced Weight Lifters, Please? | Oct 23 2007 07:28 (UTC) |
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Note that this site has no idea how much of your weight is fat or muscle. Formulas trying to guess base metabolic rate based only on total weight, height, gender and age have to build in an assumption that you're going to lose muscle and gain fat with each passing year. That's true of the general population. But for the minority of people who keep up good eating and appropriate exercise, it can be false. A better guess about BMR is given by the simple Katch-McArdle formula. Take a look! It doesn't care about your age, or your height, gender or total weight. It only cares how much lean (non-fat) mass you have. Or, IOW, it's not necessarily the case that your BMR will decline with age. There's a lot you can about that -- and you're doing it now. Just keep it up
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. It's sadly hilarious to see two "Paleo people" arguing interminably about, say, whether cashews are or aren't "pure" Paleo fare. The plain fact is that most of what we think we know about how our ancestors lived when the vast bulk of our genes were selected is educated guesswork.
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