Burning more calories than consumed, yet gained a little bit of weight.

[kayke]

Hello,

I'm a bit concerned about the fact that I have gained about a pound rather than losing 6 or 8 pounds like the fitbit has predicted for me. Here is what I am doing:

- I am logging EVERYTHING I consume, even the bad stuff. I do have a dietary scale that I weigh everything to the gram, so I make sure it's completely accurate. I did pick the 1k calorie deficiency. I have been going under target 90% of the days. This week I've had about an 8k calorie deficit. Last week it was a little more than 7k calorie deficit and so on. 

- I keep carbs low. I do have about 40-45% of fat on my macronutrients. When I do eat carbs, it's whole grains for the most part. When I do decide to snack on chips or something, I count them out to about 10 chips or less. I don't overdo it. 

I started this about a month and a half ago, so according to my fitbit I should've lost about 12 pounds at least. I think my clothes fit loser, it's hard to tell because I use a lot of legging type of pants. I can notice it a bit in my shirts (unsure though). Is it too soon to expect results?

I have been trying to increase my activity to make sure I do burn more than I eat. 

I burn around 3k calories on average with some days up to 5k. 

I average eating somewhere between 1400-2000 calories. The average I usually do is about 1600 though. 2000 happens maybe once a week. 

Am I eating too little? What could I be doing wrong? Please help me. I'm very discouraged 😞

[Dominique]

3k - 5k sounds very high for the energy expenditure of a woman. You may want to double-check the numbers with an online calculator such as this one. You can use your average step count as a proxy for your activity level.

A 1k deficit is also rather high, especially for a woman. It should theoretically result in an average loss of 2 pounds per week. It is usually recommended to lose no more than 1% of your body weight per week, so unless you weigh more than 200 pounds, you may want to go for a smaller deficit.

Stress (namely, the stress hormone: cortisol) plays a big role in weight loss (or lack thereof). The combination of a sharp caloric deficit and a sudden increase in activity level can result in a massive amount of stress, thereby hindering weight loss.

One problem in overhauling everything (diet, activity etc.) at once, especially in a major way, is it makes it very difficult to assess the impact of the changes compared to the previous baseline. Making incremental changes can be more productive. Such changes are also more likely to "stick" longer term.

[Baltoscott]

@kayke — I think you are doing the right things in terms of trying to track what you are eating.  And the amount seems reasonable.  Agree with @Dominique that you should compare Fitbit’s estimate of your calorie burn with an on-line tracker.  For the link he gave you should compare the sedentary calculation with the others just to get a sense of the differences.  When I lost 40 lbs over seven months a few years back my Fitbit calculated deficit was often between 1000-2000 calories/day, and I ‘should’ have been losing 2 or 3 pounds/week, but once I started to lose, it was usually 0.5 to 1.5lbs/week. It also seemed to take me about a month to get the weight loss started.

Think about this process as developing long term changes that you will live with for the rest of your life.  Although I tracked everything I ate for about a year and a half, I think the tracking was most important in terms of just making me a lot more mindful about what I was doing.  Accuracy of the calorie count is tricky, because database calories even for properly weighed foods are just averages and may be off by 20% or more. (Ripe fruit is sweeter and has more calories than not quite ripe food; cooking food and processing foods makes more calories available as compared to less processed versions; you will absorb ALL the calories available in 50 grams of Almond butter but only 80% of the calories in 50 grams of Almonds, even though they are the same thing).  Over time I changed a lot of things.  I drank fewer calories, I ate a LOT more unprocessed foods, I increased fiber by adding beans and whole grains to salads, ate fewer sandwiches (bread adds up), avoided ‘diet’ foods (too processed and don’t really address hunger long enough), stopped eating ‘free food’ (i.e., unplanned snacks, food at work that I didn’t bring myself).

Keeping doing what you are doing, and every couple of weeks make an adjustment or two if you aren’t seeing any changes.  Try not to change everything at once because you won’t know what actually caused the change if you do that.

[kayke]

@Dominique @Baltoscott 

thank you for your inputs!

i do try to scan everything directly from the box or bag or whatever I eat rather than looking it up. Some things I do have to look up cause they don’t exist in the fitbit database.

i don’t work out often but I do ride my bike a lot to and from school and I’ll do it to go to the store, etc etc. I’ll try to do anything to burn calories. I’m very active but not entirely from working out. I don’t really spend long periods of sitting down. Most of the day I am doing things. If there is a day I don’t have much going on, I will go on a walk. So I’m not sure if the fitbit is accurate or not but I pretty much burn 3k every day, so unless it’s not accurately calibrated, I’m not sure if the fitbit overestimates. 

One thing i did forget to mention is that I have hypothyroidism but I do take medication for it and am considered in the “normal” range. I’ve looked at the range of TSH and it’s numbers between 0.5-5.8. Mine is 1.12 with medication. Could it be since it’s on the lower end that my metabolism is a bit slower? I’m not quite sure how that works... I just know hypothyroidism affects metabolism. And if it’s the case that my metabolism is slower, does that mean I should be eating less? Do you think my increased activity could speed it up over time?

Do you think that if I am putting my body under stress with these changes, preventing me to lose weight, will my body eventually get use to it and will eventually see results if I continue? 

Thanks!!

[bikerhiker]

@kayke 

Rather than focusing on dieting and exercising while you are managing your hypothyroidism, have you thought about why you have the symptoms and how do you overcome those symptoms without relying on medication any longer?

TSH tests are used to help diagnose a condition called subclinical hypothyroidism and determine the right dosage of medication.  But keep in mind that medication itself helps manage your symptoms.  It does not cure your symptoms.  So with any planned weight loss, you need to account for the fact that your body does not function nor operate at the same levels as a normal healthy person who does not suffer from hypothyroidism and does not need to take synthetic thyroid hormone like Levothyroxine, Synthroid and the likes.  So don't rely solely of the fitbit app and any calculations for weight loss.  Most calculations and the fitbit app are based on a healthy fully function body type. 

The reason is that, ANY MEDICATION ALTERS the FUNCTION of the human body to create a therapeutic effect, in your case which is to manage your symptoms.  But during this process, certain side effects may cause challenging weight loss due to uncertain rate of your body metabolism; namely how does this affect your body's ability to burn body fat.  Because being a caloric deficit is NO guarantee that you will burn fat, because while you can exercise and eat less, all you are going to do is create a caloric deficit and then the body will tap into your glycogen reserve and only if the reserves are tapped out and things are dire that your body will use its last reserve, its own body fat to provide the energy source for your body.  The cases where the body will not likely burn fat is when stress is involved and insulin level is high.  Another case is when there is an illness and the body will reserve body fat so you have the reserve energy to fight the illness when and if the specific illness becomes center stage.  Hypothyroidism is an illness and while you are not experiencing any side effects from this illness through managing it via medication, your body is still ill.  You can not expect to be as fit as someone who is completely healthy and require no medication management.

You need to look at weight loss as a way to maintain health rather than trying to attain some physical body image.  Of the hypothyroidism people I work with including my mother and sister, I noticed that most of these people psychologically has this "humiliation" aspect.  Meaning, they never get to do what they want to do.  Like, when is it going to be my turn?  In my mother's case; her difficulty to deal with my father, where my father punts her around like a doll and she never got a chance to voice what she truly wants to do and needs to do.  Only when she cultivated some of her bravery to go and become assertive with my dad and finally got to do what she wanted to do is when she's now off the hypothyroid medication for a while and managing her weight really well.  My sister was in a similar situation where she was shy and didn't work the courage to be a on stage comedian (her dream).  For years, she suffered from this lack of courage to do what she wanted to do.  Just a few years ago, she worked up the courage to finally enroll in a comedian school and went up on stage doing what she loved.  She got booed the first few times, but I was there to lend her some moral support.  Today, she's still on thyroid medication, but she had lost quite a bit of weight which she couldn't do when she was running at the time.  Meaning, she's losing more weight just walking to work and back with less pounding than the Zumba classes and running she did in years past.

The key to weight loss success I think is more to do with dealing with your inner psychological issues and then just the right caloric deficit, exercise and wise weight training can easily shed your weight when your body is healthy.  I think our body is simply a feedback mechanism to what is happening in our inner consciousness.

Hope this helps.. 

[SL611]

Just wanted to weigh in on the hypothyroid issue as I'm hypothyroid as well.  Actually, the lower your TSH, the better your thyroid is working, generally speaking.  A high TSH means your thyroid is working SLOWER.  It's the opposite of what you would expect.  Are you having any other hypothyroid symptoms?  Some people need other tests besides TSH to determine if their thyroid function is optimal.   You might want to do some research hypothyroidism, there is a lot that it affects.

Even being on medication, hypo, in my experience, makes it more difficult to lose weight.  Not impossible, but more difficult than for other people.  Also, if your clothes are fitting better you may be losing fat even if you're not losing weight.  Google for the article "why the scale lies" to get an idea of how the scale isn't always a good measure of progress.

[Baltoscott]

---

@kayke wrote:

@Dominique @Baltoscott 

...

One thing i did forget to mention is that I have hypothyroidism but I do take medication for it and am considered in the “normal” range. I’ve looked at the range of TSH and it’s numbers between 0.5-5.8. Mine is 1.12 with medication. Could it be since it’s on the lower end that my metabolism is a bit slower? I’m not quite sure how that works... I just know hypothyroidism affects metabolism. And if it’s the case that my metabolism is slower, does that mean I should be eating less? Do you think my increased activity could speed it up over time?

Do you think that if I am putting my body under stress with these changes, preventing me to lose weight, will my body eventually get use to it and will eventually see results if I continue? 

Thanks!!

---

Just wanted to respond to these last couple of questions.  I don't have anything specific to add on the hypothyroid issue.  I've read plenty that says it slows down metabolism.  By how much?  Hard to know.  But it is what it is.  Even if you didn't have that issue, your body will still process calories differently than the averages we all use for calorie counting, so whatever fitbit calculates as your deficit may or may not be accurate.  The only way to test is to track what you eat so you know whether you are eating more or less calories than you have been in the past, do your best to track energy expended (Fitbit's estimate or calorie burn, or an on-line calculator like @Dominique linked to) and then make adjustments every couple of weeks.  Although I agree with @SL611 that scales 'lie' if you look at just one weigh-in, I think the scale is an excellent measure of your progress if you weigh in daily and pay attention not to weight on a particular day, but instead to either your moving average (see link to TrendWeight in my signature), or the weekly average that fitbit calculates in the app.  By focusing on the weekly averages or moving averages, you eliminate the daily variation that occurs because of water weight change and the time it takes to process and eliminate the food you eat each day.

And as long as you are not dramatically eating under BMR for weeks on end (i.e, not aiming to lose more than 1% of your body-weight/week), I do think you will eventually start losing weight.  (If you aim for too big of a weekly loss, your body will adapt to reduced calorie intake by down-regulating calorie burn making you fidget less and otherwise move less, expend less energy to regulate body heat etc.).  

Trust your process and keep at it @kayke.  Love that you bike commute.  That's been my primary mode of transportation and a big chunk of my daily exercise for over 50 years (since whenever I learned how to ride at 4-6 years old).