Burning Calories.

[aironite]

Hey there,

I've been exercising and dieting for a little over 6 months now. I have lost a total of ~55 lbs. Right now, I weigh in at 245 lbs, being 6'2" tall. (Still a bit overweight.).

Here is my regular workout routine, 3-5 days a week:

35 minutes eliptical trainer: (H.I.I.T. style, Calorie meter reads ~650 calories burned each session)

60-90 minutes weight training. Just started doing the pyrmid method recommended by jpfitness in this forum. Before, I did a similar workout that was equally intense.

This seems like quite a bit of a workout, but considering I sit on my bum all day at work doing computers/graphics, I feel i need to push extra hard at the gym. I take the stairs every day up to work (4 stories), which helps, but i still feel like i'm not going to get anywhere as long as i have an inactive job like I currently have.


Even though I have lost so much weight already, I still need to lose more, and it's not dropping near as rapidly as it was. Not even close. What should I do?

***Average Daily food intake***

Breakfast:

EggBeater eggs w/ Lean Ham.
Glass of milk.

Snack: Beef Jerkey

Lunch: Sandwich loaded with lean meat and cheese, lightly spread w/ Miracle Whip. Baked lays doritos. (Small portion)

Snack: Peanut Butter Crackers

Dinner: Small portion of spaghetti, or another sandwich, or sometimes home-cooked grilled chicken.

Snack before bed: Yogurt or equivelant.

********

Does it look as if I'm burning more calories than I'm consuming? What can I do to shed the pounds faster?

[Kalrog]

That sounds very similar to the position I am in. I started at 270 in Feb and am at 220 (just below) now so I am down 50 pounds in about the same amount of time and the weight loss is certainly slowing down for me as well (oh, I am 6'3" so pretty close on that one as well).

One thing that I don't see listed here is what your BF% is. I know that when I started, I was at about 38% BF (102 lbs of fat) and am now down to 25% BF (55 lbs of fat). So I have lost 47 lbs of fat out of the 50 lbs that I have lost. Now, that is a pretty good ratio as far as I am concerned (and based on rounding errors that could sure be off a little bit).

Even though my weight loss has slowed down, I have been trending both my weight and my BF% and the BF% is still going down at about the same rate, while the weight isn't. So I am still losing the fat just as fast as I was before, even if the weight isn't going down as much. I think this means that I am starting to build muscle instead of just maintain it. This makes sense as I started working out about a month ago in addition to diet and that is when the weight loss lessened. I also upped the number of calories I was eating at about the same time, but I really needed to with the exercise I added.

Depending on your BF%, I would say that you are probably doing fairly well on your diet (for a sedentary lifestyle), but if I were you I would think about increasing your caloric intake because of the amount of exercise that you do. You might be throwing your body into starvation mode and that will slow any weight loss drastically. You could probably start with a "power bar" type thing before you work out (mainly carbs) and a protien shake afterwords (mainly protien) and add a couple hundred calories fairly easy and add almost no fat to your diet.

Whatever you decide to do, good luck! And keep up the good work!