Why is it, though my body weight is going down, my body fat percentage seems to be going up? IT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE THIS WAY!? Nah, I'm not hysterical over it, just confused. Makes me worry I'm not being as healthy as I think with this weight loss.
And different calculators say different things. The one I am using (and damn that math again... and the metric system) is basing the calculation off of height, weight and chest, hip, waist circumference. And being a lady, haha, it also asks for my wrist and forearm, for some reason. From three weigh ins, on the 16th, 18th and 21st (don't worry, I'm gonna do weekly from now on, just wanted to see) it gave me 28.45, 28.49, and 28.50 percent body fat, respectively. Brad's is similar. But this other calculator, which only uses gender, weight and waist size, puts me at 42% (which sure as hell seems more realistic. I thought math was supposed to be a constant and beautiful thing, so why aren't these calculators constant and beautiful, dammit!?
Google has yielded some vague answers, provided by fallible mouth-people, such as loss of water weight. But there was also something troubling, that maybe our bodies are tapping into muscle before fat for energy. How does someone control that shit, I wonder. If it's even true. So I need some feedback, friends. What is going on in here?
Here's the thing - and you're right it is disturbing - you're probably losing muscle. Not good! Now for the truly disturbing part - you need strength training. Weights and the whatnot. This is why men suck, they hardly ever lose much muscle and it's super-easy for them to gain muscle. WTH?
ReplyDeleteAnyway. You need about 30 minutes of strength training 3 times a week, followed by some sort of low-cal protein within half an hour to help rebuild any muscle that was used or torn down during your workout. Plus you need all the lovely cardio to really zero in on the fat.
Isn't weight loss fun?
Ugh, bringer of bad news! Brad is all about starting the exercise, he will probably do so before I do. I'm thinking after two weeks of food focused weight loss, I'm gonna add the exercise. Ever so carefully. We have an eliptical we bought when we first got together, I hope it still works LOL. And Brad has weights we can use. I don't know much about weight training, besides what I learned from Lifetime Fitness at Transy 5 years ago... and I've pretty much forgotten that. Maybe I will join curves just for the weight training. Anyone got any thoughts on curves in Grayson? Or any other gyms?
ReplyDeleteRemember "strength training" doesn't have to be weights, you can start simple with things like wall pushups, crunches, squats, etc. Don't forget resistance bands, they're SO versatile and takes up almost NO space :-)
ReplyDeleteAbout the BF% scale... i found out that my home scale was just flat out WRONG. It was staying around 32% even after I had lost over 50 pounds. Tested it at the gym with a hand-held thing-a-magigger and it was 25'ish%
But yeah, I'm a big proponent of cross training. Start small, 20 minutes a day of movement will make a difference :-)
Make sure you're getting enough protein....I love beef jerky (there are some low sodium varieties but low is relative to the other high sodium varieties). But occasionally satisfies the craving for the salty, chewy stuff and is a good lo-cal source of protein.
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