Have you tried complete, dramatic changes to exercise type, quantity, as well as food types? Sounds as if you have, but just suggesting.

When I reached some advanced age, as well as was 75+ lbs overweight, it was EXTREMELY difficult to change the mold. Instead of exercise for 2-3 weeks hard and see near instant results, I'd get injured, my diet would suffer due to mental setbacks, etc. Vicious cycle.

I'm not going to wave my flag and discuss where I'm at now, it is a good state, however I do consider my personal health to be a constant project. I also consider exercise as something I love to do, even in cases where I can't do it due to injury or physical limitations.

A colleague of mine and I were discussing a third colleague who constantly diets, but seemingly has zero results. The comment made was that this person has to find what works for them. And that's true. You have to find and work towards what works for you. I see that you are, and have been, but that you're also stuck at one or more negative plateaus.

As my doctor once said to me, "Well ... WORK HARDER!", "Double your exercise time, halve your food intake!" Fortunately he doesn't say that now, he says good stuff. And he also said, "And if you can figure that out and lose blah-blah pounds ... give me a call and tell me the #$%! secret!!!"

I've never been a half intake type of person. So I went to pure vegetables and water for some weeks/months and added 25% to my aerobic exercise time. I can survive (mentally) for some time eating just veggies, but I'm no vegetarian, so I accomplished what I wanted and then went back to eating healthy, but normally.

My body doesn't yo-yo, when weight comes off it seems to stay off, likely due to the fact that I continually exercise. My issues were similar in that I hit negative plateaus in weight and stay stuck there. The only thing which breaks the mold is near starvation and increasing of my workout time.

If it takes something radical, but not dangerous, then it takes that. I don't do diet drugs, and honestly eating vegetables, including those which provide protein is not some radically bad idea, it's not as if I went on a pure bean sprout diet.

And I look at working out as an open system, there are no limits. For instance, say my time for a particular aerobic exercise is normally 60 minutes and I normally achieve a certain distance mark. Well I try to get more distance and next thing I know I may extend my workout to be 61, 62, ... 65 minutes so that I get to that next distance marker and then I try to work my rate up so that I can make that distance marker back in the 60 minute time frame. That's sort of what I do these days, I have my amount of time I usually workout and I try to achieve higher goals, once I'm close to that goal, I'll go longer and always hit that goal and next try to fit it so that, that goal is achieved in my classical workout time. And sometimes I add time to my workout and leave it there forever. That's how you go from 20 minutes, to 30, to 45, to an hour ...

I think you, as well as many of us, all know this. We just have to apply the willpower to do it.

Best of luck whatever you try. Glad that you're doing what you can now.

I have constant pain due to current(?), future(?) arthritis. What can you do? At some point I'll get knee replacements. I don't plan to stop being active. In fact I believe that pain in my joints would be worse if I stopped being active.

This is a your mileage may vary kind of thing.

All I can say as a life long motorcycle rider.
I have personally witnessed a 70+ year old man ride a bull at a motorcycle run at 4 corners in Colorado.

He is a friend of Sonny Barger. I met him/the bullrider riding his chopper at 100MPH outside
of farmington New Mexico. After the partying and bull riding. He rode his chopper back to where he came from.

I was so impressed. I have stuck to riding motorcycles to stay fit since then. I get planty of sunshine. Burn carbs. 115F ride will work your cardio. I guarantee it. If you do not pass out 1st. I plan on living till 80 or more and will be riding bicycles when they take my drivers license away for what ever reason.

Strict regimented workouts were boring as hell when I was a young USMC. Almost robotic which is like a ton of bricks on my psyche. I like to not know I am working out when I am working out.

2 wheels fit that criteria. Its dangerous. I'll give you that. But. I like walking the edge in life also. It makes life interesting.

Off the computer now. Nice day outside.

According to one study by the NIH, regular physical activity extends your lifespan by up to 4.5 years:

http://www.cancer.gov/news-events/pr...LifeExpectancy

Regular physical activity was defined as 2.5 hours of moderate intensity activity per week. Moderate physical activity was defined as activities during which a person could talk but not sing. For this level of physical activity, the lifespan gain was 3.4 years. Doubling that to 5.0 hours per week raised the lifespan increase to 4.5 years. Tripling raised the lifespan only slightly more than 4.5 years:

http://www.cancer.gov/PublishedConte...h1-enlarge.jpg

Accordingly, there's clearly diminishing returns for anything over 5.0 hours per week. The cold, hard, empirically verified facts for exercise show only moderate health benefits but nothing like the extravagant claims of exercise enthusiasts. Note the article cited above gave a rather glowing endorsement for regular physical exercise, even though the data from the study showed only modest health benefits IMHO(3 to 5 years increased lifespan). In my personal experience, while the verifiable health benefits are not all that great, I generally feel much better when exercising regularly; i.e. my mental outlook is much more positive, and I would recommend regular exercise for that benefit alone.

My opinion: dieting does not work. That is if you consider dieting a limited period in time. Dieting is focused on providing the body less than it needs. When you return to th enormal pattern the body is still aware of the previous period of shortage ... and starts to re-store the reserves.

So I think the key is to find the correct food pattern and stick with it. Forever. Which means that correct is not just correct for your body, but also acceptable for you to continue forever.

Concerning the half intake of food: I often tell people jokingly that I put as much food on my plate as I want. Everyday. [Silence] And then put half of it back. It helps. And surprisingly enough, in a very short time you are accustomed to the smaller amount. And it helps to eat multiple courses: a lot of vegetables, then the regular food (half!) and finishing with fruit.

I said before that you have to find an acceptable habit of eating. It helps me that between Friday night and Sunday afternoon I eat the food what I want, but not in large quantities. Cake, pizza, french fries. But not binging. Over time the kind of food remained the same, but the quantities were reduced.

And one important thing: never compensate in food for exercising. Energy use during exercising is overestimated, and calorie intake is underestimated. So if you eat for compensation, before or after, you are effectively increasing your energy intake.

For that matter, I stopped taking any additional calories before exercising. Opinions on the effects of fat burning vary, but this is the way I do it. Morning exercises exclusively before breakfast and before dinner at night. It feels awkward, but eventually you get used to it.

jlinkels

Over the past couple years, and quite without realizing it ... ... I have lost more than 30 pounds of weight (at age 50+) that had vexed me for at least three preceding decades.

Here are a few of the take-aways:

If you eat better, you will quite-naturally eat less. There is very little nutritional content in the "frozen food" aisle, and you will quickly find that you can make (much better things than what ...) you will ever find there, for a fraction of the price.

Take your time at the dinner table, then get a "to-go box." Dinnertime should be a social time, filled with good conversation. ("The day is done, etc.") Lo and behold, you'll discover that you're satiated, before your plate is empty. "Lunch, tomorrow!"

"The Munchies" === Cribbing: If a horse doesn't get sufficient minerals as part of his diet, he will start eating the wood of his stall! Veterinarians call this behavior, "cribbing." But the snack-food industry calls it, "the munchies." That vending machine is stuffed full of things which will do exactly one thing: they will give your body a quick supercharge of blood-sugar. In an hour or so, "the munchies" will return, and maybe they'll relieve you of another dollar.

Don't drink soft drinks. The two key ingredients in a typical cola are caffeine (a diuretic ...), and phosphoric acid. The latter will chemically bind with the calcium in your bloodstream and in your bones(!) and cause it to be excreted out of your body. It is, literally, "a drink that makes you thirsty." It also stimulates "the munchies," as above. If drunk while eating (as in every fast-food restaurant), it prevents many of the nutrients in the food from being absorbed.

Drink water. Many people are dehydrated, throughout the day.

Cookbooks are still the most widely-selling book. There is a reason ... "If you seriously want to lose weight, re-discover cooking!" Instead of zeroing-in on the freezer section, take a leisurely walk around the outside perimeter of the store (with, perhaps, a brief trip to "pasta" and "spices"). Vegetables, meats, dairy, and (okay, okay ...) ice cream. (And, okay... beer.) Then, go home, crack open a cookbook, and ... enjoy.

You'll take more time ... to eat better food ... and you will re-discover one of the most exquisitely pleasurable pasttimes that life has to offer (besides ... ahem ... "you know").

And(!): you will lose weight, too!

"Bon Appetit!"

I've skimmed through the posts since my last visit to this thread.

I've been on-and-off exercise most of my life. The longest "off-time" was when I had a house full of three kids; kids have a way of eating up your time, as well as everything else in the house. (As a little background, I was a scrawny kid until I had my tonsils out when I was eight, then I was a fat little kid until I got into working out in the 10th grade, thanks to one of the coaches at my high school. Coach Parker had about as many people skills as a porcupine, but he did good by me.)

Nothing beats regular exercise. I'm partial to free weights and a bicycle, three days a week, but whatever works for you.

But here's one thing I've learned that may be relevant: When I've been away from regular exercise for a while and want to start again, it seems to take about three months of working out regularly before it turns from being a chore to being a habit. If you can stick it out to when it changes from a chore to a habit, you'll reach a point where, if you don't work out, you'll miss it. It can take a lot of determination to reach that point, but it's worth it to do so.

When I am wrestling with a programming problem, I'll take a walk. And I might very-ordinarily walk several miles, without really thinking about it. I don't "walk several miles" in order to do that, nor particularly "for exercise." But of course, it is exercise.

Whatever sort of physical exercise you do, it should be enjoyable for you. "That it is 'exercise'" ought to be a pleasant side-effect.

Be careful that your "chosen form of exercise" is not what your body would call trauma. For instance, there's an "IronMan triathlon" that's run in my town, which involves a level of swimming plus biking plus running that is ... trauma. Yes, you can "condition" your body to take that kind of punishment, but you will eventually pay the lasting price for subjecting your body to a treatment that it was never designed to withstand. You don't need to "work that hard," to exercise.

sundialsvcs speaks truth. And it can be extended not just to the type of exercise, but to one's attitude towards exercise.

I used to have co-worker who was an avid runner and advocated healthy exercise as one strategy (of many possible strategies) for dealing with excessive stress. He also taught a stress management course. He told a story that has always stuck in my mind.

He was running with friend in Philadelphia's Fairmont Park (the largest contiguous city park in world, by the way). When they completed the run, his friend looked at his watch, stamped his feet, and shouted, "*&^*$~%&^! Two seconds off my personal best!"

My buddy looked out at the class and said, "Now, just how was that going to reduce his stress in any way?"

Yes, I would say they are missing the point not because it's bad to have an emotional outburst, but because they were running with a group and they selfishly spouted out about their abilities.

It's perfectly fine for anyone to have an emotional outburst at hitting or just missing a goal. Having a temper tantrum always about it, is definitely bad.

Makes me think about the fact that I'm not a road race person, however have gone on a few recently because I've gotten to know some coworkers who are in their 20s who are interested in running, and since they know I do that a lot, they talk to me about it, and eventually I chose to go on some 5K races with them. They are way younger than me and have the potential to run circles around me, but I also have been running for years. The bottom line is running as a group means that you pace it for the slowest runners, because they need to be able to stay with the group. There is the "C'mon! Pick up your feet! Keep going!" But there's also a part where you don't force a pace so that half the people end up needing to drop out of the group.

If you're running with a group, it's never about personal best unless you happen to be a new runner and the personal best happens to be the pace the group raises you into. And then it's just a quick, Homer Simpson "Whoo-Hoo!"

It wasn't a group; it was just the two friends trotting through the park.

My buddy's larger point was not that one should not have an emotions or emotional outbursts; it was that too much competitiveness, even (perhaps especially) if one is competing with oneself, takes its own kind of toll.

I can bench my own weight, but I don't use free weights to prove that I can bench more and more and more. I use them because they work for me. I'm an introverted kind of guy, and free weights (and, I guess, bicycling too) are an introverted kind of exercise.

I wonder if the person making the outburst realized the possibly implied criticism: If I hadn't been weighed down with your slow self I would have a new PR.

I guess you need to do what works for you. For me, measuring what I did and competing with myself is a necessary component to doing the exercise.

I generally dislike exercise. Even the situations where exercise can be fun aren't as much fun as some other use of the same time and are made less appealing by the pain that follows. If I could be in good long term shape without exercise, I would never exercise. If exercise had positive short term impact on the way I feel, I could do it more easily. But since exercise is generally not fun and makes me feel much worse short term, but I believe it helps long term, it takes quite a bit of extra motivation to make myself do it. A LOT of measuring and competing against myself has to be part of that or I would simply exercise much less.

I dont believe. I meet couples that live in mountains, and that do regularly "sport" since ages. They live at the bottom of the mountains, go walk there daily and time to time swimming in lake. They are 85 years old, all work and they likely go to 95 or 100 years old (like all of them there).

You can extend it by 10 to 20 years, or even more.

At the start of 2014 I decided to get fit. A number of reasons, getting old and I have been overweight for a long time. A couple of particular issues – one was attempts to ride a bike. I found that the uphill stretches were almost impossible as I could not balance myself on the pedals while going slowly. I was 51 at the time so I would like to think there is a lot of life left

I started off swimming and walking then introduced cycling and running. I also started using free weights to get a bit more upper body strength. I played around with food and, I agree, sensible eating is the way to go – one of my major weaknesses is chocolates/biscuits, if I can lay off these I am fine. The sacrifice is that I now get up 1 hour earlier to get my exercise done.

My annual health check in February revealed the loss of 10kg and my blood test was, in the words of my GP, “perfect” (previously I was within range on a number of readings but only just). So yes, regular cardio makes a difference. A bit of time and patience required though.

Something else I have concentrated on over the last few years can basically be explained by the old line “bend you knees not your back”. I have been trying to use muscles to move around rather than using my arms to steady myself/push myself up and literally bending my knees when I need to pick something off the floor or tie my shoe laces.

I guess we all get lazy at some point. It is difficult to keep in shape but regular exercise and a bit of discipline does help.

I know of people whose hypertension and diabetes have disappeared with weight loss and exercise. So, yeah it's important.