Today’s milestone is that I’m overweight.
Normally, that’s not cause for celebration. But in this case, it means I’m no longer obese, based on Body Mass Index (BMI).
Base chart source: Healthjade.net
Just over a year of this, and I’m now down 65 pounds, to 220*.
* Under ideal conditions. Barefoot, summer-weight clothes, pockets empty, post-gym, post-bathroom. Helium inhalation optional.
In this post I’m going to record a few random observations on this most recent round of weight loss.
A few recent surprises
Source: Western Oregon University.
PROTEIN! I’m now a walking endorsement for the muscle-gain benefits of adding protein to the diet, for the elderly who routinely engage in weightlifting (resistance training). Over the first 11 months of weight loss, I lost enough muscle mass to reduce my upper-body strength by about 15 percent. That’s normal, but it’s a little disconcerting when you’re over 65. Then I changed my diet to ensure that I got 100 grams (or four ounces) of protein a day, or 1 gram per kilogram of body weight. A month and a half after that, I’m back to lifting as much weight as I have at any time in the past decade or so.
Whey protein powder — the stuff weightlifters use — turns out to be really handy if you want protein, but not calories. Without that, I saw no easy way to hit my daily protein target, yet keep under my daily calorie limit. E.g., I’d have to eat more than a pound of lean hamburger a day to get that 100 grams of protein.
Source: Monsters in Motion.
WEIGHTLIFTING! As a mere recreational weightlifter, I have no interest in spending hours at the gym. So, I do a HIIT-style (short, high-intensity) workout on Nautilus-type machines at the gym. Effective weightlifting, if done efficiently, takes remarkably little time or effort.
- Two sessions a week
- 12 to 15 minutes per session
- One set (only! see below!) per exercise (per weight machine).
- Each set is 8-12 slow repetitions (aiming for 7 seconds per rep).
- Lift enough weight to work the muscle group to failure (to the point where you can’t lift the weight again).
- Get up, move to the next machine, repeat.
Tip for geezers: As I read the medical literature on this topic, lifting a second set provides zero additional benefit. Or very close to that. Once you reach middle age, one good set (to failure or exhaustion of the muscle) sends as strong a message as you can send, to tell you body to build more muscle. Sending that message a second time, in a day, doesn’t strengthen the signal. Or you. The logical consequence is that to get the most benefit for the time invested, do one set and move on. Unless you enjoy weightlifting.
WARDROBE! After downsizing just about my entire wardrobe, I finally arrive at a change that I did not anticipate. I need to replace my tighty-whities. They are no longer tighty.
You may think that, well, undies have elastic, and your pants hold them on anyway, so I don’t really need new undies. And there’s a grain of truth to that. But at some point their size makes them comically dysfunctional. So off it goes, to that great rag bag in the sky, to be replaced by smaller versions of itself.
It’s a 60% cotton, 40% polyester metaphor for life itself.
CARBS! Eating a high-carbohydrate meal strongly affects your day-to-day fluctuations in weight, particularly when you are restricting calories. It’s a long story, involving the water that is associated with storage of carb-derived glycogen in muscle and liver tissue, in combination with further water weight gain from the effects of the insulin spike associated with digestion of a high-carb meal. (The latter explains how a big starch meal can give me fat fingers the next day.) You don’t see it clearly when you’re eating whatever and however much you want. But in my current calorie-deprived state, eating a modest (six-ounces-dry) bowl of pasta, as a meal, generates a temporary four-pound weight gain.
The moral of the story is “don’t do that”.
I read credible sources suggesting that some runners can put on eight pounds, overnight, when carb-loading for a marathon. And, conversely, this is what leads to rapid initial weight loss, in many people, if they eliminate carbs from the diet. But in both cases, that’s not a gain or loss of fat, it’s almost entirely temporary “water weight”.
Conclusion
After a brief hiatus in September, I’m still losing weight at a fairly steady five pounds a month.
Why am I able to keep this up, at this point in my life, when I’ve never been able to do that before, I really have no clue.
Best not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
