Thursday 2/28 weigh-in

Hi there. I didn't see a thread for this week, so I decided to start it up. This is my first week. I was in the fitness challenge last year but never got down to my goal weight. Now I am back. I still need to lose 35 lbs. to get to my goal. I won't actually say what my beginning weight is :11: but we'll say this is my starting point for the weeks to come.

How's everyone doing?

Welcome back.

I'm holding steady - for almost a month now (a week long dive trip and a weekend retreat with unhealthy food interrupted my loss).

I had hoped to get back to the downward trend this week, but my body is not yet cooperating. Given my pattern of dropping a pound a day or every other day for a few days followed by a plateau of several days, it should be about time to for the plateau to end - really soon.

I almost forgot...

Since starting...

Week 1 = -2
Week 2 = +2
Week 3 = -6
Week 4 = -5

This is week 5 for me... In order to get the weight down this week, I really had to step up the workouts... I missed Friday and Monday, At big Sunday and went to OutBack on Tuesday... (bad boy!)... Over the week I worked out and burned 4100 extra calories...

Week 5 = -4 lbs...

Overall loss for 5 weeks = 15 lbs... (A better loss program than last year when I was losing 5 lbs per week... had to stop because I began to develop skin folds... not pretty, and not what you want to have leftover!)

By the way... 60 lbs to go!

Great progress everyone. It would be friggen awesome if I could achieve that rate of weight loss. About 5 lbs a week would be... woo hoo :bang:

I just started going to the gym every day so I know it will probably take a little while to get my metabolism going. I'm kindof undecided about strength training, though. I have had a tendancy in the past to bulk up and I don't want to do that since I'm a lady However, I know that muscle burns more fat so I am not sure that best way to go.

FL_DVLover:

I'm kindof undecided about strength training, though. I have had a tendancy in the past to bulk up and I don't want to do that since I'm a lady However, I know that muscle burns more fat so I am not sure that best way to go.

Click to expand...

My opinions don't conform to the norm - but for what it's worth:

Exercise doesn't make a diddly squat's worth of direct difference in my weight loss/maintenance. Even on my hardest exercise days (7 hours on a bicycle) that's only an extra 3000 calories, less than a pound. For a regular day of exercise, I might get to eat one or two extra cookie (in the range of 2-300 calories). If I don't eat the extra cookies, in 12-18 days I would work off one extra pound.

To the extent exercise helps at all, it is only because it is time I can't stuff my face - and exercising makes me less inclined to eat.

That is not to discount the importance of exercise for other reasons - it just doesn't play a role in my weight loss/maintenance program.

As to strength training - be careful with upper body strength building if you have any symptoms of thoracic outlet syndrome (the most commonly noted one being your fingers fall asleep when driving in the 10-2 hand position). Deep vein thrombosis at the thoracic outlet (shoulder area) - a manifestation of thoracic outlet syndrome has become notably more prevalent since the body building trend began. I had it when there were only a dozen or so cases written up in the medical journals - I had a reoccurence 10 years later (after weight lifting) and was amazed at how much more common the problem had become, and was told it was because of weight lifting.

You might want to check your understanding that muscle burns fat - my understanding is that the two processes (muscle building and fat burning) are unrelated - except to the extent that the exercising you are doing to build the muscle uses calories which would otherwise be used to maintain the fat.

Good luck with it all!