So apparently I'm an athlete...
The gym at work was having an open day today, and they were offering free trials of their new body composition scanner. I've wanted to try something like this for a while, to get a more accurate read-out of my body fat, muscle mass and particularly my BMR - I've suspected for a good long while that I have a very slow metabolism, and it's probably only worsened since I've been dieting.
Long story short - I'm healthier than I thought I was! The demo guy actually used the words 'athletic'. I could have fallen in shock. I was pretty much in the green zone for all my markers, except metabolism, but no surprise there. I have a lot more muscle than I thought I did, my body fat percentage is not as bad as I thought, but my metabolic rate is sloooooooow.
The muscle score particularly surprised me, as I wouldn't have thought I was building up so much muscle. You can't see it obviously under all the fat, but it's good to know it's there!
I'm just concerned about the BMR and BMR score and my metabolic age. I'm not really sure what I can do to boost my metabolism. The past month or two I've been increasing my average calorie goal by 50 a week, to try and slowly bring it up and try and figure out where maintenance is for me. I suspect part of my metabolism problem is eating too large a deficit for too damn long. Seeing that I need 1485 just to survive, not including, you know, moving around - I don't think I've been netting that for a long long time. So perhaps I need to slow creep up to maintenance, figure out where that is and stick to it for a while, to try and do some kind of reset.
It's just so helpful to have numbers and stats that are more than just height and weight. Really, the weight is the least of it: your weight at any given point is subject to so many variables - time of day, what you ate, your bowel movements, your water intake, your sodium levels, your hormonal cycle. And yet so much of our self-esteem is tied into what those little numbers say!
Long story short - I'm healthier than I thought I was! The demo guy actually used the words 'athletic'. I could have fallen in shock. I was pretty much in the green zone for all my markers, except metabolism, but no surprise there. I have a lot more muscle than I thought I did, my body fat percentage is not as bad as I thought, but my metabolic rate is sloooooooow.
The muscle score particularly surprised me, as I wouldn't have thought I was building up so much muscle. You can't see it obviously under all the fat, but it's good to know it's there!
I'm just concerned about the BMR and BMR score and my metabolic age. I'm not really sure what I can do to boost my metabolism. The past month or two I've been increasing my average calorie goal by 50 a week, to try and slowly bring it up and try and figure out where maintenance is for me. I suspect part of my metabolism problem is eating too large a deficit for too damn long. Seeing that I need 1485 just to survive, not including, you know, moving around - I don't think I've been netting that for a long long time. So perhaps I need to slow creep up to maintenance, figure out where that is and stick to it for a while, to try and do some kind of reset.
It's just so helpful to have numbers and stats that are more than just height and weight. Really, the weight is the least of it: your weight at any given point is subject to so many variables - time of day, what you ate, your bowel movements, your water intake, your sodium levels, your hormonal cycle. And yet so much of our self-esteem is tied into what those little numbers say!