[Results] 47 weeks on 0.5mg, full numbers, ask me anything boring
Here it is: 47 weeks on 0.5mg, full numbers, ask me anything boring. One person, one log, no control group, so read it accordingly.
47 weeks and 0.5mg — those are the numbers, and they are the ones I am willing to defend.
How to make a DEXA comparison mean anything.
Same machine, same clinic, same protocol. Same hydration and fasting state, as far as you can manage. At least three to four months apart, because the measurement error is large relative to short-term change. Three scans rather than two, because the first pair cannot distinguish a trend from noise.
Do less than that and you have two numbers with an offset of unknown size, which people then react to by rebuilding a training programme. The free alternative — a few tracked lifts and a monthly waist measurement — is directionally informative, costs nothing, and is far harder to over-interpret.
On comparing yourself to composition figures from trials.
Published composition data comes from supervised populations with structured protocols, standardised scanning, and analysis populations that have been defined in advance. Your two scans at a local clinic, taken in different states of hydration, are not the same measurement.
Use your own baseline. The question worth asking is whether your own trajectory is going the way you want given what you are actually doing, and the honest answer usually requires measuring protein rather than estimating it and being truthful about training frequency. Neither of those is advice — a programme and a target are things to work out with somebody who knows your history.
If two or three other people have done the same thing we might actually learn something. Alone it is an anecdote.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Fat-free mass index is a ratio of fat-free mass to height squared. It moves when either term does, which makes it awkward to interpret during active weight change.
Strength retention is an imperfect but free longitudinal proxy: it is affected by neural factors and by being in a deficit, so it tracks tissue change loosely rather than exactly.
Lost slower for six months deliberately and my composition change was not obviously different. Training was what mattered.
Strength retention is an imperfect but free longitudinal proxy: it is affected by neural factors and by being in a deficit, so it tracks tissue change
mariam_cabrera is right that protein becomes a logistics problem when appetite drops.
Nothing here is a training or nutrition prescription. Targets and programmes are matters for somebody who knows your history and your training background.
Retitled — the original claimed a composition change the scans cannot distinguish.
Two scans on the same machine 9 months apart. Lean mass held better than I expected and the lifts told the same story for free.
What the evidence actually supports, stripped of the arguing.
Some lean mass is lost in any weight-loss deficit. Resistance training and adequate protein intake are the two interventions with real support for limiting the proportion. Nearly everything else discussed on this board is a rounding error on those two.
The complication specific to this site is that appetite reduction makes protein intake a logistics problem: you are being asked to eat a fixed amount of something at exactly the point when eating anything is less appealing. That is why the practical threads here are about timing and food choice rather than motivation, and why measuring intake rather than estimating it is the single most common useful correction.
Right — strength retention is a free proxy and it tracks better than most people expect.
Correction: those scans are from different machines, and the difference you are describing is within the measurement error.
Correction: those scans are from different machines, and the difference you are describing is within the measurement error.
This is the whole intervention. Protein and resistance training.
Protein was the whole problem. Appetite dropped and I was eating well under target without noticing for a month.
Yes. Nobody here is prescribing training or nutrition and the good posts say so.
Started weighing protein rather than estimating it. The gap between what I thought and what I ate was embarrassing.
Have the lifts held, dropped, or moved around?