New Weight Loss Math (overweight, patient, excercise, exercise)

[grannynancy]

New Weight Loss Math Makes Task More Daunting - The Early Show - CBS News

Makes significant weight loss / gain a more daunting proposition.

I think the point here is it is NOT as simple as some folks want to make it.

That does not make it impossible. I have lost 45 lbs and have about 80 to go all with nothing but proper food choices and excercise but I sure hope something like this helps the condescending "just do it" and "3500 calories a pound" crowd to be a little more understanding and supportive.

As for me, I am presently at 1300 calories a day and 75 minutes of aerobic zone excercise [80% HR Max] 5 days + 2 30 minute weight sessions with a personal trainer each week. All to loose 1.5 lbs a week.

The challenges - that caloric requirement will theoretically still continue to drop and at the current rate would be 500 calories a day at my goal weight [obviously that won't work and I don't plan to go below 1200 mainly because then you start worrying about blood chemistries] and the aerobic excercise will have to get more robust to burn same amount of calories as the weight drops.....add to that the fact that as you get older that max HR drops gradually....Definitely a daunting prospect.

Your metabolism does drop as you loose despite all precautions, and a person who was once overweight and now thin will have to eat fewer calories than the same person who never gained just to maintain. The added muscle mass from weight training apparently adds little to resting metabolism unless you are really bulked up.

But I think where we fail is in not realizing it is what it is and the fact that things are not "fair" is irrelevant. There are those who have succeeded without drastic medical intervention, even if it is only a small percentage. These people need to be emulated.

[Niceguy89]

The article you refer to trips on itself through(with the best of intentions) oversimplifying by cutting the facts to what is believed to be too complicated for the average patient/customer. The basic meaning is that you have to increase your efforts in line with your success to keep you success up. the caloriecount will still hold up, but the less you weigh the less calories you will need to eat or the more will you need to exercise, at some point I recommend you to stop cutting calories and only increase exercise, because if you cut your calories too much your body goes into starvation-mode meaning it does everything to preserve current weight like slowing down metabolism, leading to a halt in the loss of lbs...
My advice is to never go below 1500 kcal/day. (I never go below 2500 while cutting, and it was over a year ago I went over 4000 kcal/day while building) Better to increase exercise then.
I would also say it may be a good idea to increase both exercise and calorie intake to abnormally high levels for short periods of time every once in a while. this will keep the body from decreasing the metabolism too much...

[grannynancy]

I think this is going to vary based on individual sex, age, metabolism. A nutritionist set me a 1600 with daily aerobics and 3x light weight training and in three months, I lost 5lbs.

I started loosing on about 1500 and have dropped over time to about 1300 based entirely frm assessing weight loss the month before and adjusted accordingly. The weight loss has been remarkably steady with a slope of -.21lbs /day and R^2 of .985 since Oct 2009. I have also steadily increased the excercise. There was an initial big drop but that is common water loss whenever you start any kind of diet program.

I agree that you need less as you loose, your body also becomes more efficient if you constantly use the same muscle groups so that burns less, and it takes less effort to move less weight.

I did try zig zagging and that did not make any difference at all for me. I do see that the excercise will have to constantly go up as I won't drop below enough calories to provide adequate nutrition and it is already hard enough to get adequate potassium at 1300 caslories.
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The article does, however, point to some new research info that is in peer reviewed journals but I have just not spent the money to locate and am not too near a university library. It just supports what many have observed.

[Niceguy89]

One trick is to exercise before breakfast... has to do with insulin levels etc which I'm not very good at explaining in english, a brisk walk is supposed to be enough according to many, but I seldom get any result unless I at least jogg...
Intervals are nice as well because the body keep burnings wile recovering on a different level than it would if we compare to constant pace/effort

Exercise is easy to adjust, nutrition gets harder and harder the fewer calories you limit yourself to...
And by the way there are different kinds of dietitians(or more precisely different dietitians have gone through different amounts of education), some have gone trough a 2-week course while others have read physiology and similar subjects at a an academic level for at least one semester... and both get to call themselves dietitians...you might want to find out which kind you go to...