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<p>In fairness, not all lean body mass is muscle. Us ol’ fat guys have a lot of extra weight in connective tissue, water, and so forth just to support our overly large bodies!</p>
<p>Nevertheless, it’s an important point. It’s not a great idea to just shed pounds without working to preserve or build muscle. Resistance strength training is an important part of a smart weight loss plan, IMO.</p>
<p>My calves and thighs are pretty big - it takes a lot of muscle to do sprints around the tennis court at my current weight. When I was 160, my thighs and calves were considerably smaller and I could get around the court better than with more weight and bigger muscles.</p>
If you’re an elite runner, do you need to worry that much about losing weight?
<p>I let my weight creep up in my 50s, and I wasn’t really running competitively during those years. I am not elite, but I’m a strong regional runner and I do have a day job, I’m older and I like to eat. I do watch myself to try not to creep up in weight. It’s so easy to go in the wrong direction- especially when injured…</p>
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<p>I don’t think you could be an elite distance runner without an elite distance runner’s body – genetically lean. At the recreational level, distance running doesn’t always correlate with being skinny. The body adapts.</p>
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<p>Haven’t we all, haven’t we all…</p>
<p>It now would appear that low thyroid probably contributed to my weight gain. The crazy thing is that I’ve been able to lose so much weight with low thyroid. It’s going to be interesting. The warning with the synthetic thyroid I’m now supposed to take is to NOT use it as a weight loss medication. Sheesh. I hope I don’t have to start eating Doritos and sour gummy worms to keep from losing weight! :)</p>
<p>Two days with no official workouts for me. :(</p>
<p>New carpet in four bedrooms, hall, and stairs. They’ve been chasing me from room to room as I try to move furniture and junk out of closets to stay ahead of them. I finally said, “STOP. Finish this room first, so I have some place to move stuff into!” They want to work in every room at the same time and I guess they expect you to carry all your stuff outside on the lawn.</p>
<p>At one point, they said, “We’ll just move stuff in here, are you going to need to go in here?”… pointing to the one bathroom upstairs that you can still get to. I said, “Yeah, I think I’ll probably have to go in there!”</p>
<p>I’ve learned that when they say, “No problem, we’ll move it”, it means that you will have no earthly idea where it ended up.</p>
<p>So, my last two evenings have been spent using my KMart valslides to move furniture around from room to room. I’m glad I’ve been weight lifting, that’s all I can say.</p>
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<p>That’s the bottom line, for better or worse. For me, the main thing is mobility. That is definitely something we can do something about, by remaining active.</p>
<p>My cholesterol is high — can’t remember the exact numbers, but the total number is over 300. My HDL is around 90 though, so I’m not going to worry about it. I wouldn’t worry in any case because it’s not my temperament, and also, my father has high cholesterol and is skinny as a stick, and still active, at 84. He did go running every day for nearly his entire adult life… something I’ve yet to emulate. Interestingly, he’s never had any knee/hip problems ever. My mother, who is very sedentary has had a hip replacement. However, she’s as healthy as a donkey and will live forever, I’m betting. I’m counting on good genes from both sides!</p>
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<p>You did not mention LDL. The usual calculation gives 217 (assuming mg/dl).</p>
<p>This is quite high; do you know how much of the LDL is the higher risk small dense LDL as opposed to the lower risk large buoyant LDL?</p>
<p>Total / HDL of 3.6 is below average risk, but not as low as the range where risk is less than half that of average.</p>
<p>I should get blood tests taken - haven’t had them taken in probably 15 years.</p>
<p>I’ve been in 1,000 calorie starvation mode for the last three days. I pack breakfast and lunch of about 600-700 calories and eat them in the office and then have 400-500 calories for dinner around 8:00 PM when I get home and that’s all I feel like. Basically time pressure not leaving a lot of opportunities to eat. Today is tennis day so I will eat more for breakfast and lunch.</p>
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<p>Yes. A calculated 217. 3.6:1 LDL to HDL ratio. </p>
<p>He didn’t test for LDL particle size, but that tracks with Triglycerides. High levells of Small dense LDL particles and Triglycerides result from the same processes: metabolism of sugars. So, with my very low Triglycerides and high HDL, it’s almost a certainty that my LDL is “pattern B” – the large fluffy kind.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the bloodwork was a big red flag. My TSH thryroid test showed that I was signficantly hypothyroid (low thyroid). That goes hand in hand with the elevated total cholesterol. I’m always going to be high on total cholesterol with my diet – I don’t think you can have an HDL of 88 without higher total cholesterol, but it is a matched pair of indicators with the thryroid – thyroid being a hormone that regulates fat metabolism. I started taking the synthetic thyroid yesterday.</p>
<p>My mother had significant thyroid problems and my daughter has been diagnosed with hypothyroid, so this isn’t a huge surprise.</p>
<p>LiveStrong moved the nutrition breakdown chart into Gold today - at least for me. I think that I’m going to write a little C program to do this for me.</p>
<p>Edit: it looks like they removed the Daily Intake Totals numbers too. It reports your total calories but leaves the other numbers at 0. Is this a progressive thing where they remove features the longer you use the site? All that I really need from them is the nutrition info for foods, I can write a program to calculate the other stuff by myself. Maybe even store the stuff in my own local database.</p>
<p>What I need now are the formulas for converting grams of protein, fat and carbs into calories.</p>
<p>Edit: 9 calories per gram for fat and 4 calories per gram for carbs and proteins. This looks like a small and fun project.</p>
<p>idad, you’re the first male I’ve known who is hypothyroid. For many of us ladies, it’s a very common condition. The good news is that it’s so easily treatable – just a teeny tiny pill every day and blood tests from time to time. Except for when I was first diagnosed, I’ve never felt any symptoms because of it, even when I’ve been a bit too hypo- or hyper.</p>
<p>Oh,no! I really use the info on Livestrong!!! Guess I will have to find another site that tracks the carb/fat/protein. Bummer!</p>
<p>Livestrong Gold is $3.75 a month or $45 a year. The other useful feature of Gold is much more robust export capability.</p>
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<p>I’ll start a list of other options:</p>
<p>This one has the most detailed nutrition info. I use it to find accurate numbers for various cuts of meat, etc:</p>
<p>[Nutrition</a> facts, calories in food, labels, nutritional information and analysis – NutritionData.com](<a href=“SELF Magazine: Women's Workouts, Health Advice & Beauty Tips | SELF”>http://nutritiondata.self.com/)</p>
<p>A lot of people use this one. It has free tracking online, but nowhere near the food database of livestrong:</p>
<p>[FitDay</a> - Free Weight Loss and Diet Journal](<a href=“http://www.fitday.com/]FitDay”>http://www.fitday.com/)</p>
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<p>Yes. There don’t even appear to be any side effects of the medication. It seems to be literally just a matter of dialing in the dosage. I guess that means I’ll probably be getting a series of blood work done over the next few months.</p>
<p>In restrospect, I’ve had some of the symptoms: very dry skin all winter and constantly breaking fingernails, but my weigth loss and exercise sure runs counter to the metabolism of low thyroid. </p>
<p>I’m guessing that I will probably have to increase my calories when my thyroid levels come up over the next few weeks.</p>
<p>I have the program written but it doesn’t work quite right. I think that one of my assumptions is wrong. I write this stuff because I enjoy writing it. It just screenscrapes the livestrong site and does the calculations.</p>
<p>I need to subtract fiber from carbs and add sugars to carbs at a rate of 4.5 calories per gram.</p>
<p>I’m going to try some of the other sites and their calculators. The numbers aren’t adding up on the livestrong site (they seem too low on the calories).</p>
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<p>LDL pattern B is the small dense (higher risk) LDL, while pattern A is the large buoyant (lower risk) LDL.</p>
<p>Note that while triglycerides usually correspond to LDL particle size, some people do have higher risk small dense LDL even in the absence of high triglycerides.</p>
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<p>Several years ago, my HDL was about that high, out of a total of around 210 mg/dl. A later measurement after increasing exercise and losing some body fat showed a slight reduction in HDL, but greater reductions in LDL and triglycerides (total/HDL around 2.0).</p>
<p>After a little looking at packages, my determination is that the discrete grams of stuff doesn’t add up to the calories on many food packages. That’s fine with me. I seem to have the basic formulas correct but they don’t match Livestrong totals because Livestrong gets the numbers from the nutritional information that doesn’t add up. I’m finding errors in the 3% to 10% range and it always seems to undercount calories. I wonder if there’s some allowed fudging on the calorie numbers.</p>
<p>At any rate, I can still calculate the percentages as I’ll just have to carry two totals for calories - those reported on the nutritional information and those calculated from the discrete items and I’ll do the proportion with the latter total.</p>