Trying to reduce weight!

Yes, the wrong kind of exercise is pretty useless. Go to any gym, where do you see the people with the most body fat at? The treadmills. For months my gf would not listen to my advice on working out. For months she made little to no progress. Until one day I finally said to her, go to your gym today. Tell me where the most overweight and out of shape people are. She came back and said the treadmills.

Exercise is most effective if you’re also building muscle. Muscle mass is harder to maintain and basically increases your metabolic rate without even doing anything. Not saying walking and jogging isn’t good for you and you should never do it. But all exercises are not equal and effective to what you’re trying to accomplish. For example, I would never tell a basketball player to jog 5k for conditioning. It’s stupid. Basketball is a sport that requires short spurts of explosive movement follow by little to no movement and everything in between. So why would a basketball athlete jog around? He doesn’t jog in a game. He sprints, jumps, cuts and slowly holds positioning. So you need to know what you’re trying to do and not just aimlessly exercise.

3 Likes

My understanding is that one of the goals in exercising is to ramp up the number of calories we burn a day naturally (without exercise). A quick search just now reveals about 2,000 calories per day for a woman 31 - 50 years old. So this is where Andrew’s advice to lift weights come in to play- we burn more just naturally if we have some muscle mass.

But I have two comments on this. First, we need to find a form of exercise we like and hopefully get addicted to it. If it’s swimming, then I would say just go for it all the way. Secondly, aerobic exercise (mountain climbing, running, cross-country skiing, etc.) is just great for the mind and heart. This is well documented.

High intensity training is just awesome. But it’s really hard to do every workout- both physically and mentally. I see a lot of people quitting sooner rather than later if this is your only form of exercise.

To put it simply: There are two kinds of exercise. One is aerobic, increase your heart rate is the goal. Running, skating, etc. The other is muscle building, like weight lifting. This last one is very good as muscle burns more caliries, more burning for longer time equals pretty you.

Problem in Taiwan is that no one wants to build muscle when losing weight, as you are “exchanging” the weight. the machine will still say you are heavy but it is a good kind of heavy. But they want instant results…Oh and women think it is unfeminine.

Jumping and all that stuff is still necessary, it is good for your heart. But you will lose weight more effectively with more muscle building.

Got down to 86 kilos, decided to go down to 85 but it has been impossible. I’ve been very good at keeping things at 86 and slightly below, but it’s like I hit a wall and 85 kilos is just not in the cards. Is there such a thing as an unnatural weight for people? I feel maybe 85 kilos is that for me.

1 Like

What’s your workout like? And is there a reason why you’re aiming at 85? 86 and 85 is not that big of a difference.

I have this issue with a lot of women clients. They think any kind of lifting and the next day they become an Olympic power lifter. It’s incredibly hard to build muscle, especially for women due to females having less anabolic hormones. If they can even get bulky and strong even half as much as a female power lifter or bodybuilder, they are genetically gifted. Very few people can achieve what bodybuilders and powerlifters have. Let alone have the work ethic and dedication in their training and diet. If anything people in Taiwan don’t eat nearly enough protein and lift.

I know. I see all teh work my coworker puts. She is a two hour a day gym addict … until she hurts herself. Then it is just one hour a day. Yet, you do not see her sprouting Arnold muscles. Yet, when she starts getting definition, bam, the people at the gym start whispering she does not look femenine. We are talking definition here. She is really pretty overall.

She has fellow gym warriors who go all morning for several years… yet you do not see results. She knows it is because of the diet but who will listen to sense?

I guess it’s been fairly easy getting to 86 and the difficulty of continuing downward has turned this into kind of an obsession. But I’m actually fine with staying at my current weight.

I workout 4 times per week. Running twice, swimming once, cycling once. All about 30 minutes. I do one or two interval training sessions (15 x 400m on the track with rest between, for example). I do a long run once every two weeks (about an hour at a medium slow pace). I change all this around every few months, changing my focus mostly from one discipline to another.

There’s definitely a deminishing return effect when I come to weight loss or gain for fat and muscle. Unless you change something with your diet, or workouts. You might have found a steady weight that fits what you’re doing.

1 Like

We had a class reunion recently and I was very unhappy with my pictures. By myself, I have no problem, but with a lot of my thin Taiwanese classmates… I stand out and not in a good way. :sob:

I recommend trying different approaches. The low carb diet is working well for my wife. It’s slow but the direction is definitely down.

For me, low carb is great for maintaining a reduced weight, but having a low calorie meal once a day produced much better results for me (a drop in 7 kilos over some months). I think I would need to take another drastic step to lose more weight. I’m not sure that’s what I want to do, though.

I recommend trying low carb. You can feel very satisfied after meals and so it’s easier for some people. But I think you still need to be very disciplined since there are foods with high carb levels all around us.

Have you thought about some sort of athletic hobby or discipline you might get into? For me it’s really hard to get in shape for no reason at all. I find the motivation when I’m training for purpose. That way I’m not all over the place with my training. I know exactly what I need to do for what I’m trying to train for.

Yep, something like MMA I would be very keen to learn. Currently, due to long work hours, my only exercise is wlaking the dog, chasing the cats, cleaning the house.

More protein is always good, but cutting off carbs, especially veggies, for me is a no no. My brain needs energy and my system craves fiber.

That said, sugar must be cut to manageable levels, and there are many dangers around us. I had to cut down on coffee because of that. Now it si only green tea, no sugar.

Avoid the white stuff!

I think you’re good to go with the veggies. Avoid the stuff that grows underground and go crazy with the stuff that sprouts skyward.

I’ve heard the white stuff actually makes you lose weight.

image

1 Like

It’s certainly a favorite of many models here.

With HIIT it can be fun if you are playing soccer for example, that is basically hiit because if the ball is far away you are walking and when you loose the ball you run back to defend, you also run if you have a good attacking position etc. Your main point is, it’s supposed to be really fun!

Doing HIIT on a treadmill is terrible hahaha. For myself I want my exercise to have a functional purpose. Taking cones to a park and doing different drills to increase agility, speed, coordination etc like having a ball and dribbling through cones then doing walk/run sprints is way more fun for myself. I think your exercise should also be psychologically stimulating, not doing the same mundane movements every time like I see at the gym where people run on the treadmill for 40mins or use the elliptical machine. Some weeks i’ll run, play tennis once, go swimming once, ride the ubike just to mix stuff up.

Great thing about soccer, you can train/play in the rain too.

1 Like

That’s a good point. But team sports become a struggle as you get older (time constraints, where to find teams and games, etc.). I think there are older people that do play team sports, though (soccer, basketball, and even rugby are what I’ve heard of others doing in Taiwan). For me, I had some knee and ankle injuries playing soccer in high school and college. I’m scared of the sport now.

I think most people can’t handle the treadmill. Personally, I get into the treadmill every once in a while. I might do a routine in which I’m ramping up the angle by 5% every minute then back down, rinse and repeat. Kills me.

As far as mixing things up, I’m completely with you there since I’m into triathlons. I think it also helps to reduce injury. I haven’t been injured once since taking up triathlons three and a half years ago.

1 Like

A treadmill is useful if weather is especially rainy. I work out every morning for about 70 minutes, and it’s dark until just after 7 am these days. I don’t like to run in the park behind my house in the dark (besides, the owls are territorial at this time of year, and attack with no warning), even with a headlamp, so in the late fall/winter/early spring I use the treadmill 3x week. Crank up the angle to 11 - 14 degrees and do long slow distance, intervals or a higher intensity for 35 minutes. What makes it work? A good treadmill with a large platform, music, and a good strength workout before and after. Also, staying off the treadmill on other workout days, and getting outside to bike, run or ski on the weekends.

1 Like