What can I do? Please Help!

HappyHendrix

New member
Hello all I am still fairly new here I love this place! It's great!

I need some workout help. I work out about 7 days a week for about 35- 55mins. I am a full time college student, with no breaks between classes then head to work right after I work full time too.

It's a 4pm-12am shift so when I come home thats my workout time. I have been doing Tae bo Bootcamp. Its hard stuff, but not my fav thing. I got a recumbent bike for xmas but its out of order right now. ( Im waiting for parts) I was doing that first.

What do you guys do and have had success with? I have only lost 10lbs :( in about a month. How is yoga and pilates? What is a high energy fat burning workout? As you see I don't have time for walking unless its those two days I am off.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.
 
look not so much exercise but you're diet.

signup at or sparkpeople.org and log what you eat and what exercise you do (if you dont already)

calories is simple math, 3500 calorie deficit is 1lb lost. so if you eat say 1500 calories for the day, and use 2500, then thats 1000 a day, over a week you will loose 2lb at that rate, got it?
So if you throw in another 1000 a day of exercise (which is probably a little too much) then you loose twice as much.

Tae bo is good, but its not as much of a calorie burner as say running, cycling, swimming etc.

Anyway sign up to the sites mentioned above to have the site automaticly work out your stats. Find your sweet spot, and dont starve yourself. try and keep calories above 1200 for female or 1800 for a guy a day.
 
Wishes is right, fat loss is mainly a function of energy balance. The way to manipulate your energy balance in the easiest fashion is through the foods you eat.

So, what are you eating?

I have a lot of respect for you for sticking with it with such a hectic schedule. Most would give up, so good for you!

Yes, there are 3500 calories in one pound of fat. So, theoretically, if you created a weekly caloric deficit of 3500 calories, you would lose approximately 1 lb of fat per week.

However, there is sooooo much more that goes into it than that and it really doesn't work like this. Maybe in the early stages of a caloric deficit it does, but not so for any length of time. You will have a lot of up-regulation and down-regulation of certain bodily variables (namely different hormones) that will control the rate at which your body burns tissue.

This said though, you will never truly know which direction you are heading until you workout your food intake and energy balances.
 
Well thank you guys for your advice. I am limiting myself to a 1600 calorie food plan. I am logging everything I ear in my own paper food journal. I am trying to lose the most weight I can by my 21st birthday in november.

I know it goes into what I eat but I believe I need some kind of workout too.

Thank you for the encouragment. It's time to get healthy I feel. :)
 
Well thank you guys for your advice. I am limiting myself to a 1600 calorie food plan. I am logging everything I ear in my own paper food journal. I am trying to lose the most weight I can by my 21st birthday in november.

I know it goes into what I eat but I believe I need some kind of workout too.

Thank you for the encouragment. It's time to get healthy I feel. :)

How did you go about choosing 1600? Not saying you are wrong, just curious.

Sure, everyone needs some workout IMO. I think wishes and myself brought up nutrition so much simply b/c you seemed to weight exercise over nutrition, when in reality, it is quite the opposite.
 
Well thank you guys for your advice. I am limiting myself to a 1600 calorie food plan. I am logging everything I ear in my own paper food journal. I am trying to lose the most weight I can by my 21st birthday in november.

I know it goes into what I eat but I believe I need some kind of workout too.

Thank you for the encouragment. It's time to get healthy I feel. :)

Dont forget to give yourself a day off once a week from working out - the body needs time to recover or you probably wont loose as much :)
I give myself 2 days usually, and on those days i just do some sort of 'active sport' so im still doing a form of exercise but not a hard core training style one. (ie ill play soccer with the kids or something, or go bush walking)
 
How did you go about choosing 1600? Not saying you are wrong, just curious.

Sure, everyone needs some workout IMO. I think wishes and myself brought up nutrition so much simply b/c you seemed to weight exercise over nutrition, when in reality, it is quite the opposite.

I think I read on here 3500 cal is one pound so I kind of cut it into to half. Was there a different way to do calorie deduction? Please share!

I just think you need to do an equal balance of nutrition and work out.
But that is just me.
 
I think I read on here 3500 cal is one pound so I kind of cut it into to half. Was there a different way to do calorie deduction? Please share!

I just think you need to do an equal balance of nutrition and work out.
But that is just me.

The most thorough and well-done scientific study on starvation was known as the Minneapolis Starvation Experiment. In this, Dr. Keys wanted to look at the effects starvation had on the body, as well as the proper way to rehabilitate someone coming off of starvation. It was during the World Wars and Nazi camps, where hundreds of thousands of people were starving, hence the relevance of the study at the time.

Dr. Keys tested 36 "guinea pigs" by going through a control phase where calories were kept at maintenance, a starvation phase where calories were reduced drastically relative to maintenance, and a rehabilitation phase where calories were reintroduced gradually into the diet.

Guess what the caloric intakes were, roughly, during the starvation phase?

Roughly 1500 calories. And these people were smaller than most of the people on this board trying to lose weight. I think the heaviest was 190 lbs, and all of the test subjects were male. Remember, the bigger you are, the higher your caloric requirements are.

Simply basing your caloric intake off of how many calories 1 lb of fat contains is very primitive and leaves out every ounce of science as to what happens to your body when you starve it.

My suggestion, don't starve yourself. But that seems to be a common theme on this forum.
 
calorie

so i just checked my calorie book and this is the menthod they say to use

target weight
activity factor is
1 20 very active men
2 15 moderately men or very active women
3 13 inactive men, moderately active women , and people over 55
4 10 inactive women, repeat dieters and very over weight people.

target weight x activity factor = calories needed each day

:eek: mine is 1820 calories a day

seems a lot to me
 
so tell me... i am 180lb I work out a fair bit and i want to lose about 40lbs so how many calories a day

If we are talking basics, 15 cals per pound of body weight gives you a good estimate of what your maintenance level caloric intake is. From there, I like to start with maybe a 15% reduction.

If this isn't working, I don't mind a deeper deficit, but at some point, you reach a point where you are doing more harm than good. Not harm as in injury, but harm as in, inability to lose more weight based on the physiological survival adaptions that take over in your body.

At that point, linear caloric restriction may be obsolete and a fashion, such as zig zagging your calories my be required.

The closer you get to your setpoint weight, and even more so the further below that you get, the more you have to play with the numbers to provoke weight loss.
 
Okay thank you for responding everyone!

I am a 258lbs 20 year old woman,how many calories should I eat a day?

Oh trust me going into starvation mode is the last thing I want to do!
 
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