Help me? Please.

[shawty]

Okay so I hate to admit it but I was hella fat. Recently I've lost a bit of weight dropping from 216.8 to 153.4. But the problem is though I'm shaping my lower body pretty well I still have a huge problem with my mid section. For some reason I can't get the bulge to go away. I'm only 5'5 and I think I need to loose about 10-20 more pounds, hopefully a lot of it coming off my midsection. What should I do to promote reduction of my waistline.

Right now my gym routine is about an hour and 15 mintues of cardio. About 40-50 minutes of cross trainer and 35 minutes on the treadmill,which is broken down into 15 minutes brisk walk, 15 minutes running and 5 mintues cool down.

 

[Daisy_Girl]

WAY too much cardio.

How about lifting weights? You doing that? If not, START!!!!!!!!!!!

How is your diet? List what you eat everyday, even plug it into www.fitday.com and see what your macronutrient breakdown is, along with caloric intake.

Check out the stickies at the top - esp "New to EF? Start Here!" and "LINKS TO TOP THREADS!" ..... they will help you SO SO SO MUCH! They have diet plans, training plans, and even article links as to why TONS of cardio will not get you to reach your goals.

CONGRATS on the weight loss and WELCOME!

 

[the-short-one]

agree with Daisy Girl. lower that cardio down and start weight training. Everything will start firming up and fat loss will be excellerated.

 

[Sassy69]

Congrats on the weight loss! As D_G said - helps us a lot if you can post up your current diet - DIET is 80% of your progress and you always need to revisit what you are eating. "I eat clean" is not always very useful - need to know what you are eating (quality of your proteins, fats & carbs) as well as how much (total cals, macronutrient ratios - %protein, %fats, %carbs-- you get all these from fitday.com - and yes it does matter.)

"Weight" is made up of more than just your fat - its the sum total primarily of your bones, bodyfat, lean muscle mass & water. So the scale is actually a relatively crappy measure of "progress" - particularly where you are at - I assume you are more interested in reshaping your body ( changing your body composition - ratio of bodyfat to lean muscle mass) than what the scale says.

Generally speaking, you can't "spot reduce" - you can't pick or force where you want to lose bodyfat - each person has a particular distribution of fat cells and as you cut bodyfat, each of those areas goes down propertionally - so if you tend to hold bodyfat in your midsection (as most women do) - you just need to continue optimizing your diet & training towards your goal. You will see other parts of your body that have smaller fat cell concentration cut up faster, so you just have to keep going after the whole program and eventually all the parts follow the lead.

Another comment is about what makes up how we "look" - "fat burning" isn't everything - how you look is made up of your bodyfat AND muscle mass. Many women tend to not be concerned about losing muscle mass in the process of losing bodyfat - the problem is that if you have no muscle mass - that makes the bodyfat you have look a lot worse - even anorexia patients can have higher bodyfat measures not because they are fat but because they have catabolized all their muscle.

To that end - definitely would alter the cardio program and add in some good quality resistance training - it will make a world of difference. To illustrate - consider the difference in bodytypes between sprinters & long distance / endurance athletes. Neither are "fat" but its all about the muscle. LOTS of cardio will eventually eat muscle as well as bodyfat.

Best place to start are the stickies at the top of the board!

 

[superqt4u2nv]

Ladies have it covered just wanted to say great work thus far on your fat loose just a little fine tunning and you will reach your goal.

 

[shawty]

Thanks you all. =)

 

[Gymgurl]

I would focus more on the weights and cut back the cardio........