Bronze60 - Member

Bronze60

Joined May 2009

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Weight History

Start Weight

174.0 lb

Lost so far: 1.0 lb

Current Weight

175.0 lb
Performance: gaining 0.1 lb a week

Goal Weight

145.0 lb

Still to go: 30.0 lb

I'm a Canadian woman, working hard and trying to squeeze exercise in to my life and a lifetime member of WW who is set on losing the same 20 lbs all over again. I'm living in Utah but on a plane nearly as often as I'm here.

Bronze60's Weight History

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Bronze60's Latest Member Challenges

Remember to Breathe...

status:	Completed
ended:	21 Jun 09
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Bronze60's Latest Posts

Does sitting and resting really burn that many calories?
I just had a revelation today while talking to my trainer. I was using the FS number for my BMR (1812 kcal) - that's with 8 hours of sleeping and the rest just resting. A few months ago I got on one of those body-fat estimators that use electrical impedance to gauge your fat and BMR and my BMR came up as 1468. It's probably a little higher now cuz I've put on some muscle but stilll ... So, on the days when I would eat 1600 calories and think that I was still maintaining, I was really over doing it. To top it off, I was logging desk work and walking in my exercise diary. Now I'm just going to do what katana_x does and only record my workout sessions as extra exercise. I'm also going to mentally subtract 350 calories from my calories-out number when looking at my deficit.

posted 21 Aug 2009, 09:36

for anyone who has had success from 1lb to 20000000lb
Walking is good, as long as you can get your heart rate up so that your breathing a liitle hard and breaking a sweat. Eventually, you'll want to add in some weight training - helps bulld muscle so that you keep buning calories, even when your not exercising, and really helps with keeping your bones strong so that you don't end up with osteoporosis when you get older.

posted 10 Jun 2009, 21:48

Formal Introduction
Hey Mark,
I saw your post somewhere else about having trouble falling asleep so I thought I'd offer a suggestion. My teenage son has been having the same trouble for a few years and we found out that his melatonin production was out of phase with his days. Typically, your body produces some melatonin about 2 hours before your normal bed time and that helps your body and brain wind down so you can sleep. He was only starting to produce melatonin well after midnight so he was up half the night unless he was so tired he couldn't walk. The solution proposed by the sleep clinic I took him to was to take melatonin (you can get it over the counter) at the same time every night (even weekends), two hours before the time he wanted to be falling asleep. It works. You should give it a try.

posted 10 Jun 2009, 04:01

Kcal Help
Wow, you sound really disciplined - and on a great path to success too. I like the eat-often strategy too. It keeps the old blood sugar stable.

I've tried low-carb diets a couple of times but I find that I just don't have the energy to work out often enough and I get feeling a little sick (maybe the way it puts you in a high acid state). A friend of mine calls low-carb the "slacker diet".
I've done WW three times successfully (you'd think "success" would mean I'd only had to do it once, but the three times were in three different decades) and it's really the only thing that works for me. I'm just not good at being very disciplined about preparing food in advance or making new things on a weekday. I'm good at eating in whatever my current context is and WW lets you do that.

posted 06 Jun 2009, 11:21

Kcal Help
If you're looking at the exercise kcals versis the food kcals in your Diet Calendar and you have a 3000 deficit then, you're right, you're burning 3000 more kcals than you're eating.

Calories are just a measurement unit for energy. The food we eat will release a certain amount of energy (= a certain number of calories) when it is digested and metabolized and all that biological stuff. If that energy that is made available by the food is not used up, the body stores as much of it as possible in preparation for the next famine. The most efficient way to store it is in the form of fat.

When we exercise, it takes a certain amount of energy to move our muscles (and all the stuff covering them) so the body uses the energy from the food we ate recently. The calories are still the same units of energy, this time they're being used to power movement. When the body needs more than is ready and available from our recent meals, it goes and gets some of our fat supply to burn to make more energy to power our muscles. To use up one pound of fat, you need to burn 3500 kcals.

So theoretically, you could lose a pound every time you run up a 3500 kcal deficit. That doesn't work perfectly in real life, though. The body has a limit to how fast it can retrieve and burn fat so, if you have too big of a daily deficit, your body will burn whatever is easiest - and muscle and other tissues are easy to burn too. Another thing the body does when it's calorie-short is to get very, very efficient by dropping your BMR to burn low and slow and to use as little energy as possible (it thinks it's famine time).

I guess you're burning high because you're a man. I do a one-hour workout with my trainer and I figure it only gets me an extra 500 kcals burnt - but I'm not a man and I'm on the slippery side of my 4os. I've also consistently run a 500 kcal - 1500 kcal deficit a day for weeks and have very little weight loss to show for it. Having said that, my clothes are looser and I have little biceps that I never had before so I'm likely burning off fat and building muscle at the same time.

It's all just a question of energy balance. Our bodies are pretty complex but, in the long run, if you use up more than you eat, and you keep your body moving, it will work.

posted 05 Jun 2009, 03:15

Bronze60 has submitted 5 posts