That's not what I wanted to happen...

I usually try not to be a coward when it comes to Facing Up to Reality.
So, I dug out my bioimpedance scales this morning and, after inserting a fresh battery, stepped on them. The last time I had done so was when I had recondensed by about five kilograms, which brought me for the first time below the limit up from where all that thing would give me was an "error" reading.
Back then, my body fat percentage was 52 per cent, which meant that there were, in total, 55.6 kilos of fat on me.
Since then, my weight has gone down by another 25 kilograms, which I had hoped had brought down the amount of fat, too.
Today's reading: body fat percentage 54 per cent of total weight.
Worse than before.
Which means that I still carry around some 43 kilos of blubber.
Which in turn means that only twelve of those kilograms I was so glad to have recondensed were actually, you know, fat.
And thirteen were something else, which means either water weight or lean tissue, i.e. muscle.

No wonder I'm plateauing. And perpetually exhausted, too.

What this means is that what I have been doing is not working.
I had thought that keeping my protein intake at about thirty per cent of total calories would suffice to prevent loss of lean tissue even without exercise.
Boy was I wrong.

So what to do?

Rebuild that lean tissue, logically.
Which might mean gaining weight before losing any more of it.

At my goal weight, a body fat percentage of, say, twenty would amount to about thirteen kilograms of fat that I would not mind keeping on my body.
Thirteen. Not forty-three.
The other thirty kilograms are what has to go.
Except I am only fifteen kilograms above goal weight, which in turn means I would have to regain fifteen kilograms of lean body mass if I don't want to end up with a BMI below twenty.

So, what I need to do is build muscle without gaining fat.

And without spending inordinate amounts of time on it. I have a life outside of weight loss, after all. A very busy one.

Back to the library for information and back to the drawing board.


Julia