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Fat Mass Detail from Repeat DXA Scan
12 Apr 2015, 15:51

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Maintenance Mundanities

I'm in maintenance but still whittling down my body fat levels in order to achieve a reasonable body composition. I have very low muscle mass so, although I have a low scale weight and look slender, I have an unwelcome kinship with streaky bacon, except that the bacon has a more favourable fat:lean ratio. :oops:

Thoughts on the non-too scenic route to weight loss

by SSure on 30 Nov 2014, 17:58

I'm in maintenance and I definitely took a (non too) scenic route that left me feeling as if I'd never escape from the inhospitable scrublands of weight loss mode. (I'm sure there's a weight loss version of Pilgrim's Progress waiting to be written.)

It took me a long time to realise that my pattern was going to be bone-achingly slow losses or lengthy plateaus with periods of dropping every day for a while then back to another plateau (16 weeks and more). This was a disheartening and thoroughly miserable experience that caused me to second-guess my own perceptions and actions.

Seeing other people's accounts in the Scenic Route Tent, it seems to be sadly common that we can sometimes show a negligible outcome for what feels like a remarkable amount of strategising, self-restraint, self-abnegation etc. and it is thoroughly demoralising - there's no getting around it. It feels like part of your life has been given over to participating in a particularly gruelling endurance event with a maddening vagueness over the location of finish line and how long the event is expected to take. The worst thing about it is that you have to participate in this endurance event in parallel with managing the rest of your work, family life etc.

You're also surrounded by a public rhetoric that makes weight loss appear to be linear, rational, and predictable. So, if you're not conforming to this, then, somehow, despite your personal integrity, somehow, you must be 'cheating' or suddenly developed calorie intake blindness. (I wish that I'd trusted my own experience sooner, stopped assuming that I must be doing something 'wrong', and had a body composition analysis done so that I'd known about the reduced lean body mass/muscle at a much earlier point.)

Thing is tho' - even when it's impossible to see our own progress, it's too easy to overlook that we're still in the endurance event and we're still going. And particularly that it's to our credit that we're still slogging along with no thought of dropping out and a small sense of gratitude that we are achieving something by not making our situation worse.

This has, as ever, turned into an essay - so I'll spare you the remainder which would just riff off Cavafy's Ithaca.

HW: 168lbs (2011) CW: 102lbs BMI: <19
Maintenance IF 4:3

Dexa scan reports that I have low skeletal muscle mass and I'm categorised as sarcopenic, despite my age and fitness activities: body composition changed from 42% body fat at 127lbs to 20% at 103lbs.


SINS - Simple Is the New Sustainable
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