Can anyone advise us please?

My wife is a healthy 55 year old woman. She started weight lifting with me in October 2013. When she started she was 89 kgs and she is 1.60 m tall. She had never done any weight lifting before, but with my help, she made good progress. She can now squat 135 kgs and bench press 55 kgs.

She got her weight down to 74 kgs and she has been stuck on this for months now. We weigh all our food and she eats at least 600 calories less than her calculated needs (I use Fitness Assistant software). She has very noisy and painfull knees and both shoulders can get incredibly sore.

We have tried Reverse Pyramids, sets of 10, 8, 5, 3, she has tried sets of 20 but in spite of her lifts going up, her bodyweight and Skinfold stays where it is.

She needs two things : -

1. Something to help her shoulders and knees. I hear that Deca Durabolin is good but for men and not women. I really don't fancy my wife with a beard or moustache and a hairy chest!

2. She needs something to help her to lose this excess fat. She wants to get down to around 65 kgs, but as things are, this isn't happening. She can't eat any less or she will starve to death.

Has anyone got any advice or help that they can offer?

did u re calculate the caloric deficit after the weigh loss or keep it the same

The program calculates it every day, so yes.

I don't see any mention of cardio?

She's a keen gardener, she bakes bread, she does housework, and she's always on the go. We don't take that into account. We only calculate her BMR and exercise from weights.

In reality, she burns a lot more calories than we put into the program. She gets very tired. We thought it might be hypothyroidism, so she had a blood work up, but doc says her thyroid is OK.

Tell doc to send you a copy of bloodwork. After my health problems the past few years, and docs telling me my BW is fine then actually seeing them, I have zero faith in any doc

When I train 40+ women the first thing I tell them is to get a full spectrum hormone test. At your wife's age she'll only increase to the limit of her hormones. Women's endo is pretty complex so I wouldn't start self medicating AAS on your wife without first understanding where she's at (blood work). Even then, matching the Test/E2 so her hormones won't be all over the map may be tricky. Post her blood work there are a number of female members that could chime in.

My wife put her blood test results "somewhere safe" so that they wouldn't get lost. A great recipe for getting them lost! They are!

She made an appointment with our Dr for Friday. Results take about a week. She will ask him about hormones. She has one other symptom, (might be important). As soon as she eats anything she breaks out in a sweat.

I'll get back when we get some results from Dr. I don't think it's going to help much by giving the results because everything is in Dutch.