weight and hrt

[jillian]

I am currently 193
4 months ago I was 220
Ive been on hrt for 3 weeks, but it is unsupervised

My question is, will the hrt help me lose weight. I already do cardio an hour a day and eat a very limited diet. I do however get hungry and crave foods, nothing crazy, just like a chicken quesadilla, but I am so concerned with losing weight that every pound I go up is like a masssive depressive issue.

I dont necessarily want to be a skinnie minnie, I wouldnt mind being extremely curvy, I just want to look  as feminine as possible.

So all medical suggestions aside, should I go through the struggle of limiting my diet extremely so I can get to 160ish, or should I just continue being active and roll with it confident that hrt will help me become the size a woman who is comparatively active as me?

[pretty]

HRT will cause you to lose muscle weight but it will certainly not help (probably will hurt) with fat loss.

If you want to lose weight you have to focus on that issue aside from HRT and that stuff.

Also, as someone who went from 210 to 130, I would not look at it as "limiting your diet extremely," that sounds kinda like a yoyo dieting mentality to me. You just need to find out how many calories a day you are eating now and subtract 500, and cut out all simple/refined carbs/junky foods and minimize the sugar. Being active helps but being active does not really cause weight loss if the diet is not in order.

[Ann Onymous]

HRT is not a magic weight loss regimen.  Metabolism had little to do with HRT in and of itself. 

In fact, when I saw a real slowing of my metabolism was post-SRS.  Weight crept up on me in my mid-30's (roughly a decade post) and I finally said 'ENOUGH' when I was going to have to go beyond a size 12 in my early-mid 40's. 

Cardio and resistance routines will help with weight loss, but it also required changes in what I ate and drank...I've dropped about 10 pounds over the past three weeks but have a ways to go to get back to the level I held when I was in a position to have played softball for a D1-AA school and when I competed in another sport at a professional level.  Until my mid-30's, I tended to be between roughly 119-125lbs at a height of 5'11"...I would be content now around 140.

[Joelene9]

HRT will cause you to lose muscle weight but it will certainly not help (probably will hurt) with fat loss.

If you want to lose weight you have to focus on that issue aside from HRT and that stuff.

Also, as someone who went from 210 to 130, I would not look at it as "limiting your diet extremely," that sounds kinda like a yoyo dieting mentality to me. You just need to find out how many calories a day you are eating now and subtract 500, and cut out all simple/refined carbs/junky foods and minimize the sugar. Being active helps but being active does not really cause weight loss if the diet is not in order.

I agree.  I been on HRT for 7 1/2 months now.  I have gained a lot of weight the past 3 months.  Just limiting the portion size a wee bit will help a lot better than a crash diet, I been there before.  Reducing the portion size is hard in this supersized society.  My problem now is all of the events I went to and will be going to this summer.  These events have a lot of food involved.  Tomorrow's club picnic will be the last until next month.  I will strive in trying to get the weight down so I can show some curves.  The HRT didn't help in this as well.  I notice that certain foods I didn't care for before, I like now. 
  Stay away from foods that have added sugar or even artificial sweeteners in it.  The fruit juices and energy drinks are just as guilty as soda pop, buy fruit instead.  Make you own tea, unsweetened, by bag or instant.  Stay away from the bottled teas.  It was found lately that artificial sweeteners actually increase your appetite and the sweet sensation actually triggers the carb to fat processes!    Avoid the food in packaging that has the word "Lite" or similar adjectives to it, this dietary flimflam has been a pet peeve with Consumer Reports for over two decades now.  Read the labels and be surprised to find some interesting junk you should not ingest.  All of my meals are from scratch, except for the unsweetened cereals.  I boil enough pasta, for instance, for one serving and I put the leftover full batch of sauce in small 1 serving tubs and put them in the freezer.   A lot of my garden produce is involved. 
  Natural fats are better than most of the vegetable fats if you lower the content of them in your food.  I used them on my most successful diet, I just used the less quantity to actually cut the fat in my system.  I lost 50 pounds there and kept it off for a year until I fell off of the wagon with the combo of a cancer scare and my GID. 
  Be patient with any kind of diet, especially now with the changes you are going through and those other changes later! 
  Joelene

[Tammy Hope]

HRT is not a magic weight loss regimen.  Metabolism had little to do with HRT in and of itself. 

In fact, when I saw a real slowing of my metabolism was post-SRS.  Weight crept up on me in my mid-30's (roughly a decade post) and I finally said 'ENOUGH' when I was going to have to go beyond a size 12 in my early-mid 40's. 

Cardio and resistance routines will help with weight loss, but it also required changes in what I ate and drank...I've dropped about 10 pounds over the past three weeks but have a ways to go to get back to the level I held when I was in a position to have played softball for a D1-AA school and when I competed in another sport at a professional level.  Until my mid-30's, I tended to be between roughly 119-125lbs at a height of 5'11"...I would be content now around 140.

"content" with 140 and not averse to 125? at 5'11"

GAH I can never get where my goal should be. i'm just a little under that (depending on how accurate my measurements are) and i know I'm obese by any standard, but i have been told that something as high as 180 is a perfectly reasonable goal and i'd look fairly slender at that weight - but in my hear i keep thinking it would be cool to at least break 160 and here you are 20 pounds lighter (or at least think it is a weight you can live with)

It's confusing.

(of course, i'd actually have to be losing before i could get TOO busted up about it)

[Ann Onymous]

"content" with 140 and not averse to 125? at 5'11"

GAH I can never get where my goal should be. i'm just a little under that (depending on how accurate my measurements are) and i know I'm obese by any standard, but i have been told that something as high as 180 is a perfectly reasonable goal and i'd look fairly slender at that weight - but in my hear i keep thinking it would be cool to at least break 160 and here you are 20 pounds lighter (or at least think it is a weight you can live with)

It's confusing.

(of course, i'd actually have to be losing before i could get TOO busted up about it)

keep in mind that I never had what would be considered a typical male muscular structure.  I always had what is more closely aligned with a women's athletic build...even today, I still get asked on a regular basis whether I played ball in either high school or college (in part because people tend to underestimate my age by a good decade or so and thus place my time in school in an era where a lot of athletic scholarships existed for women).  Basically if you were to have looked at some of the middle infielders in the college softball world series, you would have a rough idea of what my build was (and to an extent, still is).  There was a time in my 20's where I was a juniors size 3 or 5 depending on the store...

That had a lot to do with why I rarely exceeded 125lbs even into my 30's.  I never spent much time trying to eat right and I never had a true exercise regimen even when competing in the sport I did.  It was simply the weight at which my body was comfortable with. 

When I put numbers out there, it is based on where I was and know that I could potentially still be with some effort...I did not mean to infer that they were realistic goals for everyone.  In fact, the range I have been in much of my life would likely be unhealthy for a number of people on these boards...