Ok..I got great advice last time, plese help again.
I am gonna be 40 next month. Im 5'5 and weigh 220. August 16, 09 I quit smoking.I was smokin about 30 cigs a day. About a week later I started gong to the gym. I have gone from only being able to do 5 min on the elliptical to 45 min. Anyway, I have a sparkpeople page. It askes your height weight goel weight and all that good stuff. It also has a nutrition and fitness tracker. So anyway, my goal is to be 200 by December 31st. Acording to the site, I need less than 1680 calories a day and I need to burn 322 calories per workout to hit my goal. I have lost 8 lbs but its taken since August. I work out 6-7 days a week. The machines that I am using say I burn about 700-900 calories. My workouts are only cardio..The treadmil, bike and elliptical. My eating consists of pretty much the proper amounts of protein, carbs, fat, calories, and so on. And no more then 1680 calories a day. Since Im not losing weight as fast as I would like, I started running on the treadmill. I guess because of the smoking I cant run more than 2 min or so without taking a walk rest. I got some advice to run 60 sec and then walk 60 sec. I did this for about a week for about 30-40 min each time. My legs and calves have been sore since, but not bad. Last night I went to work out, did my 5 min warm up walk then turned up the speed to run and I had to stop and go back to walking. My knees where hurting so bad. Actually. its not even my knees, its beside my knee cap and down about an inch or so on the inner part of my leg.. both legs. I contined walking at a fairly good pace for 35 min but the entire time I was somewhat uncomfortable because it hurt. My question is does anyone know what the pain might be..a muscle? a joint? a tendon? Also do I need to stay out of the gym for a day or so? Also, any ideas on why my weight loss is so slow? What can I do to speed things up?

Anyway, do I take

I believe that injury is called a shin splint, i could be wrong though.

Hi Jenny.

Ok, so I'm going to cut right to the chase:
This is possible, if you are 100% on plan for the next 8 weeks, but I think you need to be completely realistic. Are you going to be able to get through the holidays - Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years without a single treat or party or drink or anything?

I"m not saying you should give up, and I don't think the upcoming holidays are a reason to walk way from a weight loss plan, but I think there needs to be an element of realism here. If you set yourself too strict a goal and the holidays come around and you splurge one day and it stalls your weight loss, will you feel like a failure and give up? Or will you wind up using the holidays as a reason to give up completely and binge?

Honestly, starting about Thanksgiving, I change my goals from losing to maintaining. I NEVER plan to lose weight over the holidays because I know it's not going to happen for me. I have too many social obligations and too much family in town to be able to be 100% compliant with a restrictive diet.

Again, I'm not saying you should give up, but I am saying please take a long hard look at your life and be totally realistic about your ability to walk away from every holiday treat and to stick to a 1600 calorie diet even on Thanksgiving day and Christmas day and so forth.

Ok, moving on from there, I will say that you can still plan around social events, parties, etc. And building the healthy habits and so forth will really help after the first of the year, because you won't be diving into some kind of "New Year's Resolution" diet and totally shocking your system

Next:
The machines are full of hooey. The only way to know really what you're burning is to get a heart rate monitor and program it with your statistics and let it monitor your heart rate throughout your workout. Or even more accurate, get something like a bodybugg. The machines are just estimating/averaging and in my experience they tend to estimate extremely high. I know why they are set that way - because it encourages people to see that many calories burned, and so they keep going. But they're truly very rarely accurate.

These could be shin splints; fairly common in people who are just starting running. It is either from bad form, or bad shoes - or both. I would encourage you NOT to run if you have shin splints - minor shin splints can rapidly become stress fractures and more if you keep running despite the pain.

There are plenty of non-impact cardio exercises you can do instead of running ... even brisk walkin is good.

I have a few other thoughts: If you want to really maximize fat loss and minimize muscle loss, you MUST add weight lifting or body resistance work to your workouts. Dieting and cardio alone will shed pounds, but it will cause you to lose muscle as well as fat and eventually you'll wind up with a skinny flabby look (what we call "skinny-fat"). You would try to add in a very simple body resistance or weight lifting routine 2x - 3x a week . Then do cardio on the off days or after your weight lifting. There's a really good thread in the exercise area by Steve called "The Conceptual Side of Weight Lifting". I really strongly sugest you read that and try to incorporate the kind of workouts he describes. I think you'll see a difference not just in fat loss, but in your body shape. You might find that even though the weight isn't coming off as fast as you'd like right now, by adding weight lifting, you'll reshape your body so that it looks thinner and more "fit" or "toned".

Also I would say you should NOT be working out 7 days a week. In general overtraining isn't an issue for most people, but when you're still getting into a workout routine and you're out of shape to begin with, you can overdo things pretty easily. 5-6 days a week is good. Give your body one day a week to rest and recover. You'll find your workouts are easier and more efficient if you give your body a recovery day.

If you must workout 7 days a week, then make one day a lighter day where you focus on something like yoga, stretching, and light cardio, rather than pushing yourself all out. And definitely give yourself a full 48 hours between weight lifting sessions.

Hope that helps some!

Thanks Karacooks--you gave me great advice last time as well. I dont really know how to get around this site...can you tell me how to find the thread you suggested I read???

Here's the main link to the site: Nutrition, Health & Fitness, Weight Loss, Diet - Weight Loss Forum

You can see all the various forums listed. You'll notice one called Weight Loss Through Exercise - there's a lot of good information in that entire forum. (That's here: Weight Loss Through Exercise - Weight Loss Forum) The thread I mentioned is one of the sticky threads at the top of that forum.

But you really shoudl click on each of the forums - the site is full of good information if you just click around and look.