I really need your help. I'm a 61-year-old male, 5-11", who's ballooned to 260 pounds, mainly from lack of exercise and eating all the wrong foods.
For the past 50 days, I have been extremely diligent about watching calories, eating nothing white whatsoever, no oils (except some olive oil), no sweets at all. I am trying to keep my calorie intake under 1200 a day, eating only whole grain products, salmon, canned tuna in water, fresh raw spinach, no-fat dressing, tomatoes, blueberries, 2-4 cups of green tea a day, oatmeal, an occasional egg, a cup or two of 1% milk, 1-2 ounces of vodka a day...NOTHING bad! I am taking one turmeric capsule (600 mg/day). For the past 50 days, every day, I've been walking between 4-5 miles every morning at a pace of about 4 miles/hour, sometimes adding a jog of 1/2 - 1 mile.
My problem is this: I am not seeing hardly ANY improvement in my Body-shape. Old clothes still don't fit, etc. I'm beginning to get really discouraged after all my physical and dietary work. Am I expecting
too much after 50 days? Your help would be so greatly appreciated!
- Nick
Nick, the truth is you haven’t failed, the diet you have attempted has failed you. Sadly the average body fat percentage of men over 30 years old in NZ is over 20%, as a muscle to fat ratio, this is extremely over fat. The ideal healthy range for you 12 -20% and that’s a wide range.
A quick tally up on my calculator tells me that 2500 calories per day should give you a loss of 1.18 kilos of fat per week if you keep up the daily walk. That means that you are seriously under eating. Diets fail us for a number of reasons. When the human body is faced with a shortage of nutrients, its survival response is to conserve fat. Let me define the word “Diet” for you a diet is a temporary severe restriction of food or calories. Most diet programs call for extremely low calories of 800-1200 for women and 1500-1800 for men. When you cut your calories drastically like this you lose weight, simple! But there’s a problem with this, the weight loss almost never lasts, 95% of dieters can’t keep the weight off, secondly, most of the weight loss has occurred through loss of lean muscle or lean structure, so you’ll end up fatter.
That said you should still be able to lose 1% of your weight as fat per week without a loss of muscle. You should be able to achieve a loss of 8.4 kilos of fat over 50 days. Keep in mind that as you body adapts you will most probably have to increase your calories. Because a male will typically lose up to 1 kilo of muscle a year from the age of thirty, you will probably gain 5 – 6 kilos of muscle naturally as you lose the10 - 20 kilos of ugly fat. Without complicating things, I reckon you should sit down with a nutritionist and have a 2500-calorie food plan designed to suit your lifestyle. As long as you incorporate some alcohol free days to aid your liver, you can still include 6-7 drinks a week without hindering results. As an after thought, take a multivitamin as soon as possible. Eating 1200 calories a day has depleted many of your nutrients already.
- Jacquie