Input/Output Lines Up, but No Weight Being Lost

[tiaamaee]

I'm really struggling here. I've been active all my life, but have never really paid attention to what I ate. Thankfully I grew up in a pretty good home and a lot of the meals were home-cooked and somewhat healthy, so this followed me into adulthood.

I'm trying to pay much closer attention to what I am actually consuming, versus what I am burning. Based on all the numbers and deficits you can think of, I should be losing weight. But I'm not. My measurements also aren't changing. I had thought maybe muscle was taking over, but nope. I'm the exact same. 

It's been about 2 months of the following:

1500-1600 calories consumed daily

2000-2500 calories burned daily

Height: 5'4"

Weight: 157 lbs

Avg. Daily Steps: around 8,000-10,000

I'm not sure what else I can do.. I feel that I have a healthy balance of cardio/weight exercises included every week. I don't eat much processed food/empty calories. I feel like I'm doing everything right, but I'm getting zero results. Just looking for some advice on something I might be missing or not checking.

[Dominique]

Calories out estimated by your Fitbit are probably on the high side. I entered your numbers in this online calculator and it puts your TDEE at 1983. I estimated your activity level as "light" (2/5), based on your reported step count, and your age at 25.

There’s also a margin of error with calories in, and people often tend to underestimate their intake. If you haven’t seen any change in weight in two months, it means you’re eating at maintenance. Now from here, you can increase your activity level a little bit while eating the same amount of calories, or you can eat slightly less while keeping your activity the same, or you can use both levers (move slightly more, eat slightly less). If you don’t have any particular medical condition (probably the case, given your age), this should do the trick.

Given that you don’t need to lose a crazy amount of weight, you should be fine doing small incremental changes.

[tiaamaee]

I'm not sure how to gauge activity level.. I am a part-time dance teacher and full time office worker, but I regularly squeeze in workouts 2-3 times per week on top of the dancing. It works out to a 3 month daily average of 29 active minutes per day.

Is that still considered light exercise?

[SunsetRunner]

I don’t know what your BMR is but you may be in the danger zone or close to it. The only way to continue losing fat is to drop calories or burn more calories but if you are close to your danger zone than it would be wise to reverse diet for a while. This will allow your metabolism to adapt to higher calorie consumption to give you more wiggle room to cut calories for when you go back to eating in a deficit again. As Dominique said, this is now your maintenance. When dieting, it is better to eat as many calories as possible while still losing fat. If you are too low in calories you will have to reverse diet for a while which may cause some initial weight gain but will level back out given enough time.

[tiaamaee]

Can you elaborate more? I'm not sure what you mean by "danger zone" or "reverse diet". Sorry! I'm a bit new to this information.

[SunsetRunner]

Anything below your BMR is the danger zone. Your BMR is the calories your body needs just to stay alive. In a typical dieting scenario, one would reduce calories. In reverse dieting, one would increase calories.

[Daveg22152]

Hi, I have two recommendations to suggest. First, I wouldn’t go by the Fitbit calorie estimates as they are probably over-estimated, possibly even grossly overestimated. Second, if you haven’t done so already, keep a food log and be absolutely fanatical in logging everything that you consume. In doing so you may find that you’re taking in some “hidden calories”. I found that salad dressings, cooking oils, buttery spreads, and condiments are a very significant source of fats, sugars, and calories in general

Good luck!

[Baltoscott]

Hi @tiaamaee.  I agree with others that if your weight has been constant for two months you are in maintenance, not a calorie deficit — despite what Fitbit says.  When I was regularly losing a pound or so a week I was weighing or measuring most of what I ate, and logging everything I ate, and unless I was averaging a deficit of 1000 calories/day on a weekly basis, I was not losing any weight.  Said another way, when Fitbit ‘thought’ I was in a 500 calorie/day deficit I was really in maintenance.  Maybe I wasn’t recording accurately, or Fitbit gave me too much credit for my bike rides, or my BMR was just lower than average for someone my size.  The reasons don’t really matter, I just adjusted what I ate from that point to lose.  

You say you’ve been paying much closer attention to what you’ve been eating for the last two months.  That is an incredibly important step toward obtaining and maintaining a healthy weight.  We mostly gain weight when we are not paying attention, and you are developing the habit of awareness.  So now its time to evaluate.  Besides paying attention, did you change anything from what you were doing before two months ago.  Start eating breakfast when you didn’t before? Stop going to Starbucks when you did before? Stop drinking calories when you did before?  My approach was to find one crummy habit to work on at a time.  Before I lost weight I was a daily drinker.  I cut that in half by allowing myself to join in social drinking only if it was a odd numbered day.  Totally arbitrary, but easy to identify and adjust.  Another was to go from ordering pizza delivery or going out most Friday nights to planning and then making a healthier dinner — with at least half the bulk being veggies.  I made lots other adjustments over the months that followed those first two, but I wouldn’t have made any of them until I realized where the weak spots in my diet were, and I found those by regular tracking for a while.  Since it sounds like you’ve already started to do that, you probably can come up with some good ideas what to try next.