[Autumn Gold]

I switched up my exercise routine in the past few months because I was getting bored with the old routine. I started to do running x 3 a week, exercise videos x 3 a week and my own cardio workout (which is a mixture of different things) x 1 a week.

I burnt a total of 600-700 calories a day, 4500 a week. I ate about 1900 calories a day of good food and aimed to lose about 1.5lb a week. I’m currently 175lbs. I’ve decided to add swimming to my routine to try and target the arms - and swimming is so much fun anyway that it doesn’t feel like exercise! The only “problem” is that the swimming actually ends up burning too many calories in the two days I do it! I don’t have a car and there’s no direct bus route to the swimming pool in my area. Thus I walk, which is over two hours there and back - this burns about 900 calories. The swimming itself burns 800. I do this twice a week. If I were to continue my previous exercise on top of that obviously my deficit would be ridiculously high. So I’ve cut down on the other days. Now I do swimming x 2 and 30 minutes x 3 of workout videos. I have two rest days. My deficit for the week is about the same. I eat about 300/400 more calories on my swimming days.

Currently I feel fine with this routine - in a way I feel better - since I get more rest days and do less exercise on my workout days. Even on the days where I burn tons of calories I feel fine since A LOT of that exercise is gentle (the walking.) But nevertheless I do have a big daily deficit on those two days and I don’t want to harm my body in any way. I’ve done my weight loss the healthy way and obviously I don’t want to do anything to sabotage that.

What are people’s thoughts on this? Do you think it’s OK to continue this way if I’m feeling OK. Or should I cut out the swimming and go back to my old routine?

[amberbrown]

Wow, you are my hero! I would love to be at that level of intensity, but one day I will be

I have read that secret to weight loss is that you have to burn more then you consume, but you have to be concious of the food your body needs as fuel in order to run efficiently.

I am not sure what diet you are following, but you may want to compensate by adding in more lean protein or veggies. Otherwise you could begin getting light headed and dizziness.

Good luck and I am curious what others have to say on this topic as well.

[c_laura]

If you are feeling fine...no dizziness or joint pain, and your weightloss continues at a steady pace there is no reason to stop...you might want to consider adding more calories through protein on the big days, like a handful of nuts or a hard boiled egg.

You want to make sure you're building muscle, not breaking it down...

let us know how it's going, I'm interested in adding swimming myself as a cardio element so this is really interesting to me.