Hi I’m 42 year old male 6’3” tall and I weigh 358lbs. I been working out since Feb 2023 and doing low carb but only down 22lbs. I lift 3 days a week and walk 3 days a week.
Maybe someone can look at my numbers and see if my thyroid levels are ok. I’m on 100mg testosterone cypionate once weekly and take levothyroxine 100mcg once daily. Is this normal to loose this slowly ? Please help!
TSH 2.08 uIU/ml
T3 free 3.7 pg/ml
T4 free 1.26 ng/dl
Testosterone total 599.8 ng
A1c 5.7
Shbg 23.1
You’re losing weight - you should be proud! Your norm is to gain weight over this time period, so that delta is actually greater than -22. Good work!
Let’s not jump straight into adding new exogenous hormones. Especially with thyroid, those two numbers aren’t going to tell us a definitive tale, anyway, and you have been losing weight.
What, exactly, do you eat in a day (weekdays and weekends)? Low carb is an avenue, but we might find we’re not in as deep a caloric deficit as we want to be over the weekly average.
First off I want to make the VERY IMPORTANT POINT that it being your first 6 months of training means you likely would have added a good amount of muscle tissue in that time. This means that the scale may not be replicating how much fat you’ve actually lost. Theoretically, you could lose 10lbs of fat, gain 10lbs of muscle and the scale would stay the same. It may not be as perfect as that for you, but there is an exchange that will be taking place for sure. For all you know, you might have actually lost something closer to 30lb in this time if your training is on point.
Regardless, 22lb down in 5-6 months is great progress. If you had all that fat laid out in front of you you’d be amazed at how much tissue you’ve lost in this amount of time (let’s not forget that it may actually be even more than that). I don’t feel you should be as disappointed as you sound. You’re moving in the right direction and 4lb a month is sustainable progress you should be able to stick to for a very long time. Could you lose faster? Maybe. Would you hate your life more? Maybe. Is whatever you are doing now working? Yes.
As above said, it is way too early and you’re making way too much solid progress to start worrying about this other stuff.
Tell us more about you in regards to diet and training and you’ll be able to get more nuanced advice. There’s a lot of clever people here.
I agree.
Tell us exactly what you ate and drank yesterday.
Let’s see yesterday . My days start at midnight .
Midnight to 8am at work I usually only eat couple handfuls of almonds and two meat sticks and two cheese sticks. I then hit the gym for about a hour and around 9:40am I have a 26 gram protein shake then ate a salad and had like 6 meatballs slightly smaller than a golf ball. I then go to sleep . Woke up and had about 6 Ozs of left over beef roast with broccoli with another salad. The salads are just lettuce with just alittle cheese and ranch dressing. I drink mainly water and occasionally have a Diet Pepsi.
These are all hypo-calorie bombs. Almonds and cheese are VERY calorically dense while being pretty unsatiating, A handful of almonds, in and of itself, is typically in excess of a daily serving of it. Think about if you were to gather almonds in nature: the effort it would take to accumulate a handful of them would be a significant enough caloric expenditure to justify how many calories are present, but when we just sit and munch of them? Not so much.
Depending on what the meatballs are made of, they can also be stupidly dense.
Ranch dressing is, of course, liquid fat and very dense. And the meat sticks and meatballs are processed.
I feel like moving your food choices toward unprocessed, satiating foods would go a LONG way. Instead of cheeses and meat sticks, have you considered meat and some eggs?
I agree 100%!
Especially on the meat and cheese sticks.
Ok I will make a list and hit up the store . Maybe grab some steamer bags of vegis that’s easy to microwave at work and I will precook some chicken breasts. Maybe some red wine vinegar for salads. Hard boil some eggs. I have been pretty lazy with diet and been taking easy way out. I will probably save money preplanning .
Breasts are fine, but don’t be afraid to cook up other cuts as well. Dietary fat isn’t a bad thing: it’s simply a matter of where it’s coming from. Dietary fat attached to a piece of meat is going to satiate differently compared to liquid rendered oil. But you’ll definitely save some cash this way!
If you have a Costco membership, the rotiserrie chickens are a great value as well. $5 for a whole cooked chicken. I’d take off the skin, not because of the fats, but all the other crap they put on the chicken to season it, but that’s just a personal call.
Late to the game, but I completely agree with everything that @TrainForPain, @ChickenLittle, @T3hPwnisher and @cdep89 have said.
Your rate of weight loss is healthy and sustainable. The goal is an average of 1-2 pounds/week. As long as you’re in that range, you’re doing great.
Focus on lean meats, non-starchy veggies and a small/moderate amount of healthy fats. If you do carbs, try to get them from plant/vegetable sources - sweet potatoes, potatoes, legumes, peas, etc. and keep them in the post workout period.
Just keep on trucking. This weight loss and fitness thing is lifelong. Make changes you can live with and sustain forever. Short term fixes = short term results. It’s a marathon not a sprint. Keep us posted on your progress and let us know if you have any questions.
As above, don’t go so deep into trying to be perfect that you sabotage yourself. Just clean up a little bit at a time. Again, you’re absolutely making progress: you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water here.
Some good advice in here so far regarding food choices, however I have to disagree with everyone saying 1lb a week is good progress.
I think 3-4lb a week should actually be the target, at least until you get down to the 200-250 range. Why? Because at your current rate we’re talking like 4 years to cut to a healthy weight and that would be extremely emotionally draining. Add the fact that losing 1lb a week means you won’t really see much change in the motor which can be discouraging and unmotivating. And this is assuming no stalls, so realistically more than 4 years!
How much weight we should lose in a week is not an absolute number but should be measured in percentage of total bodyweight. For a 200lb guy trying to lose some of his midsection for summer cut, 1-2lb a week is a good target. So for you at 350, 3-4 is low end target, and you could even comfortably go higher. And I’d even bet you’d start to feel better at that rate both physically and mentally with more daily energy.
I think what we’re saying is that progress is progress and not to be discouraged. Setting the bar too high can lead to frustration and quitting. The goal is to establish lifelong, sustainable habits - not employ quick fix strategies for the sake of results only to revert to old behaviors once the goal is achieved.
Before I respond, I need to ask, did you read my full post?
Yes . I’m prepared for this week with unprocessed foods. I brought two steak burgers I grilled earlier and a steamer bag of broccoli to work tonight. I have some chicken breasts grilled up in the fridge at home. I’m going to try and walk everyday this week that I’m not weight training. Going to shoot for 3-4 pounds weight loss this week. My endocrinologist did tell me to take an extra 1/2 -50mcg of thyroid pill on Sunday’s only to bump my numbers up more. I will keep y’all posted. This is defiantly going to be me from here on out. I want to live and not die an early age from being inactive and eating wrong foods.
This is good progress, don’t lose faith. Assuming you never trained prior to Feb, it’s almost a guarantee you’ve lost more fat than 22 lbs and you’ve added some muscle. Maybe think about taking some tape measurements or caliper measurements to be able to get a better idea of fat loss progress combined with the scale.
Also - do you see the results in the mirror that you like and feel better? That’s the ultimate test. Who really cares what the scale says.
You should consider tracking your food for a week or two to get an idea of exactly how many calories you are eating. You might be eating more than you think, that’s pretty typical for most including myself.
Focus on getting adequate protein per meal and the other macronutrients will take care of themselves.
Keep trucking!
I did, I just really don’t want to feed any defeating thoughts regarding lack of progress. You make great points, but we want to feed momentum not frustration.
I understand. I come from a different perspective that OP is already feeling defeated and the best way to get past that is to be on a more efficient track. When someone isn’t happy with their progress and you tell them “No, you’re making good progress,” I tend to see that as somewhat invalidating vs. just meeting them where they are at in their goals.
I agree completely we should feed momentum and not frustration; however, I think the best way to do that is to offer guidance to increases rate of loss.
Hell yeah dude! Way to get to yes. Please keep us posted. Start a training log!
Don’t skimp on meat. Get plenty of chicken, fish, ground turkey. Maybe treat yourself to eggs, pork, beef at times. If you’re building muscle, you need protein. Even if you’re not training, just moving is a workout when you weight that much. Fill the skillet.
Maybe supplements like creatine or collagen or fish oil? They fill me up a lot and aren’t fattening.