“Well, you are over fifty now,” said the doctor when I asked again about the stiffness and pain in the morning, the inability to get out of a booth or a car without help, the difficulty in sleeping, the upward creep of the blood pressure reading. “This is all just a part of the aging process.”
At fifty-one, I was tired all the time. Everything hurt. I planned my day so I didn’t have to climb stairs much. Exercise meant a hard slog in the dark and rain in a heavy coat and then feeling exhausted for days. Dieting meant no fat, or chewy microwaved frozen broccoli – so dieting never lasted long! I weighed 210. I was depressed. I felt ugly. I felt hopeless. And after that visit to the doctor, I felt old.
But that doctor's visit finally woke me up. I got mad. "No way! That CAN'T be right!" I started working with a trainer and nutritionist, James Dubberly, to make permanent changes to my life. I changed my attitude, started eating in a healthy calorie window, restored physical activity to my life and started building muscular and cardiovascular strength. One year later, I had lost sixty pounds, my blood pressure had dropped twenty points, I no longer needed knee surgery and my chronic fatigue and depression were gone.
I've maintained these changes for two years, with a busy life, through menopause and with a husband and a teenage son to feed. I've been asked over and over how I did it. James and I answered that question in our book, The Real Skinny: The Practical Guide to Fat Loss and Health Gain, but the learning opportunities continue to come weekly, if not daily.
This blog is the ongoing story of how this new life works. Setbacks, realizations, progress, recipes...it'll all be here!
Welcome!
So first of all, let’s talk about what really causes your body to get to and then maintain a healthy weight.
To be healthy, the human body (any mammal, really), needs five things:
1) Achieving and then maintaining a healthy muscle-to-fat ratio
2) Cardiovascular strength
3) Muscular strength
4) Adequate daily physical activity
5) Eating in the right calorie window.
If you’ve read The Real Skinny, you know this already – but I’ll review for those of you who haven’t. I will expand on each of these topics in later posts.
A healthy muscle-to-fat ratio.
For women, health problems start, in general, when your body is more than 30 percent fat. For men, more than 20 percent! And that’s not what’s optimal, either. The optimal fat percentage for women is between 18 – 24 percent, and for men, it’s best if you no more of your body is 10 - 15 percent fat.
So, this is a pretty important number to know. How do you determine your lean-to-fat ratio? Get a body composition test from an experienced trainer who knows how to do the caliper test, or buy a bio-impedance machine. You can get one from Costco that measures your weight plus the fat ratio of your upper and lower body for less than $60.
This ratio turns out to be a handy tool for a number of reasons.
1) It tells you if you’re at risk for weight-related health issues (which can include diabetes, heart trouble, and cancer, among other things).
2) If you are over-fat, knowing your starting point helps you track your progress as you lose fat over time.
3) This is my favorite. Knowing how many pounds of muscle tissue you are carrying allows you to compute how many calories you can eat in a day before you start to store fat – boy is that a critical piece to putting together a daily eating routine that works.
4) As you gain muscle, not only you’re your lean-to-fat ratio change, but it means that you get to eat more calories in a day because your lean tissue burns more calories, even while you’re sleeping!
How do you change this ratio?
You change how efficiently your body burns fat through cardiovascular exercise.
You change how many calories your body metabolizes through resistance, or muscle, training.
You change how many calories you burn through your daily physical activities.
You take in the right amount of calories for your own body composition.
So let’s take these one at a time.
Cardiovascular strength.
Cardiovascular strength is built and maintained by what many people call “cardio.” Building cardiovascular strength involves getting your heart into its training range and keeping it there for thirty or forty minutes, three to five times a week. To maintain (not improve) cardio health, you can get by with twenty minutes, two or three times a week.
What’s your training range? Working your heart at 60 to 80 percent of its maximum rate. (50% of your maximum qualifies as a low-level aerobic work out, and is good for a warm up or if you are not accustomed to exercise. More than 80 percent and you would be working in the anaerobic, elite athlete range.) Any gym will have a poster in it with the average training range for your age. But it's better if you can calculate your individual training range, using your maximum heart rate.
Your Maximum Heart Rate is the fastest your heart can beat in one minute. Unless you want to go do a stress test, you can get a good idea of what yours is by using this formula:
Males: 210 minus 1/2 your age minus 5% of your body weight + 4
Females: 210 minus - 1/2 your age minus 1% of your body weight + 0
So for me, my calculation would look like this: 210 - half my age, which is 54 - 1% of my body weight, which is 165. 210 - 27 - 1.65 = 181 beats per minute.
Again, using me as an example, 60% of 181 beats per minute is 108 beats per minute. That's my warm up goal. Then I'd keep my heart rate between 70% and 80% of my maximum heart rate for a cardio training session. For me, that's keeping my heart rate between 127 and 144 beats per minute, for twenty to thirty minutes.
How do you know what your heart rate is at any given time? I recommend wearing a heart rate monitor. It is much more convenient and accurate than taking your pulse and multiplying while exercising at the same time! Monitors used to be quite expensive, but you can buy them now for $45 - $90. I’ve found that a heart rate monitor is the most powerful tool for maintaining a healthy fitness and weight level.
How do you get your heart into its training range? This will depend on your fitness level. For some people, brisk walking is enough to get your heart to 70 percent of its maximum. For me, I have to run, bike up a hill or walk briskly on an elliptical. That’s why you need the heart monitor.
If you don’t already exercise regularly, it’s always best to check with a health professional before beginning an exercise regimen.
Muscular strength.
Muscular strength is created and maintained by resistance, or weight, training. To create muscle, you absolutely must demand that your body push or pull weight beyond what it usually does. When you stress your muscles beyond their limits, they break down and then, over the next 24 to 48 hours, repair themselves and, in the process, create more muscle fiber. (A young person can stress the same muscle after just 24 hours – a middle-aged person would want to wait two days between working that muscle to failure.)
Why would you want to create more muscle? Because muscle is active tissue -- it burns fat. As more and more of your body becomes muscle tissue, you increase the number of calories you burn in a day. Besides, you feel stronger. And an upper arm that’s got good muscle definition looks so much better than one that’s defined by flab! Just check out Holly Hunter or Michelle Obama.
Adequate daily physical activity.
We know that humans are built to walk on an average of 18,000 steps a day. Most wellness sites these days recommend that you walk at least 10,000 steps a day, the equivalent of five miles. These steps can be around the house, from the parking lot to the grocery store, or an after-dinner walk. It doesn’t really matter. If you are an average American, you probably don’t get more than 4,000 steps a day and the actual number may be much less. Find out. Buy a pedometer (you can get one for $15 or less), hook it onto your waistband and wear it daily. If you are below 10,000 steps, start figuring out how you can get more steps into your day. Of course there are the obvious methods – walk around the grocery store perimeter once before you start shopping – take the stairs instead of the elevator – park a little farther away. But if you are only getting 3,000 steps a day, this won’t do much. You’ll actually have to start taking walks during breaks, lunch hour, before work or after dinner. A mile is about 2,000 steps and takes about 20 minutes for most people.
Don’t try to go from 3,000 to 10,000 steps all at once. You’ll have to build up to it. If this is you, try adding in a ten to twenty minute walk, most days a week, depending on your fitness level. After a couple of weeks, add in a second walk.
I found myself getting hooked on walking and now I’d rather walk for half an hour after dinner than check Facebook, play solitaire on the computer or watch a TV show for that half hour. I feel better, happier, have more time to check in with my walking buddy, and sleep better. It could happen to you!
Eating in the right calorie window.
Well, and making healthy choices of WHAT to eat, too, but let’s just talk about how many calories for now.
It’s tricky. Most people who have gone on a “diet” know that if they don’t eat enough, they stop losing weight, they lose strength, their mood and maybe their health suffers. On the other hand, look where eating too much got them. We know intuitively that there is a target window that we should hit, not too much and not too little, either.
But how do you know what that window is? It’s different for each person, no matter what the magazines say. It is based on your body composition and metabolic rate. It’s easy to find out what your body composition – the fat-to-lean ratio – is. As I mentioned above, get an experienced, knowledgeable trainer to do a caliper test, or get a water immersion test done, or buy a bio-impedance weight machine that measures both the upper and lower body. You want to know how many pounds of muscle, that is, lean body mass, you have.
Once you have that, you can calculate your caloric window. Get out your calculator.
1. Divide your lean body mass by 2.2. This will give you your lean body mass in kilograms.
2. Multiply that number (your lean body mass in kilograms, that is) by 21.6.
3. Add 370 to that number. That’s your resting metabolic rate (RMR). That’s the bottom of your caloric window. Eat less than that, and you go into famine mode!
4. Now add 300 to that number. That’s the top of your caloric window. Eat more than that, and you may gain weight.
Does this mean you have to count calories? Absolutely, at least until you learn to accurately estimate calories in your usual eating day.
Does this window look smaller than what you usually eat?
Probably. The average fast-foot lunch is about 1200 calories. And my caloric window is 1600 – 1900 calories. So I won’t be eating at Burger King every day.
If you’ve stayed with me to this point, about now you’re starting to ask questions like, “What about traveling? What about eating out? What about dessert, treats, movies, lunch?” You may even be making some strong statements like, “I can’t cook, I don’t have time, I can’t afford this…” Trust me, I’ve been through all this. I’ve learned a lot about how to eat delicious food, conveniently, and stay in that calorie window day in, day out. I’ll be writing a lot about this in the weeks to come.
Thanks for reading my very first post! Stay tuned!
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