No weight loss :(

[toadflaxbex]

So I have been tracking calories since 25th January, I lost 8KG up until beginning of April and then I stuck. I have been up and down 1kg here and there and I dont understand why.

I have been sticking to a 1000 calorie deficit, I use myfitnesspal to track (I am very precise on tracking, I work my food out in the morning and adjust it once I've weighed the food out)  I'm as sedentary on both MFP and FitBit. I let the fitbit send over my exercise cals. I don't eat all of those I eat around half. My weight started to go down when I introduced lots of water. I now drink 3litres a day. Alas went to be weighed today and I'm smack bang where I was 4 weeks ago.

It is so disheartening. I have so much to lose and it's just not shifting. I've tried eating all my exercise cals, 3/4s of them and when I do that my weight increases. So now I've gone back to eating half or under and I'm stuck now again. What can I possibly change? I am set to eat 1300 and then let the exercise come over which is normally an extra 1000. I on average eat 1800 a day, sometimes less.

[Dominique]

Well, it’s not true there’s no weight loss: you’ve lost 8 kg in 9 weeks, that’s almost 2 pounds per week. Maybe the 1000 calories deficit is not realistic for your size and activity level (difficult to say without knowing more about you). While hydration is important, there’s no need to go crazy about it (again, difficult to say if 3 liters is over board or not without knowing much about you). Whatever you choose to eat and drink, it helps if you can keep things relatively constant for long enough. Otherwise you can have wide fluctuations in water weight (or top of which comes your hormonal cycle) that can hide changes in "real" weight. Keep in mind calories burned reported by your Fitbit is an estimate, there’s a significant margin of error. Also use body measurements, like your waist circumference: it can often tell you more than the number on the scale.

You said you have a lot to lose. How long did it take you to gain it?  I’d guess quite some time, and it probably wasn’t fully linear. Something to keep in mind now you want to reverse the process. The faster you’re trying to lose, the more likely it is you will hit a plateau at some point.

[toadflaxbex]

Thank you for replying. I started at 133kg in Jan, got to 125kg by March and I’m still 125kg today, female 163cm. I just don’t understand where I’m going wrong. Waist measurement also has remained the same since April. That was the second measurement.

It’s took about 4 years to put the weight on from around 99kg. I’ve always struggled with my weight 9 years ago I was 28stone. I went down to 15st. I then had my second baby and I put 34kg back on over 4 years.

the calories Fitbit send over I won’t eat because like you say it’s eatimated. I do know however I’m active looking after two children doing school runs after school clubs etc I walk a lot, but not at a fast pace. The calories given by MFP for sedentary is 1300, I then eat around 3-400 and leave the rest of the cAlories. I tried eating them all or some and nothing is helped. I just don’t know what else I can try to push start this weight loss again.

[Daves_Not_Here]

Hi @toadflaxbex -- welcome - you are experiencing a widely reported frustration here -- initial weight loss followed by a seemingly unbreakable stall.  In a lot of cases, people do this in spite of hours of exercise per day.

Here's a really helpful video  posted by either @Baltoscott or @Dominique that addresses your very issue.

My suggestion is to shake it up and experiment with changing your macro-nutrient ratios -- maybe try plant-based whole foods, or low-carb.

[Esya]

To me not all calories are the same. A calorie of vegetable or a calorie of bread will be processed differently by your body, leading to different results (and this differs per person depending on intolerances you might or might not have). So you might be eating the right amount of calories on paper, but in practise it is not working.

In my opinion you have two options: to eat less of what you are eating (but you can only do this to a limit and does not yield results for everyone) or to try changing around your food as suggested by @Daves_Not_Here. Having been around the boards for a while, I find that people who struggled with this mostly report better results when cutting down on white carbs (bread, white pasta, white rice).

[Baltoscott]

Hi @toadflaxbex.  Congrats on your early success this year.  You are clearly doing something right!  Some random thoughts of what might be contributing to your stall ...

The Christine Salus video @Daves_Not_Here linked to in his post is definitely worth a look, especially if you are thinking about cutting your calories to a really low level to start losing again.  

Adding a bit of strength training might help in signaling your hormones as to what to do with the calories you are eating (losing weight is fine, but losing fat is much better).  If you find you are often hungry you might look to adding more more veggies to your meals.  

Your calorie counting may be less accurate than you think, and now that you are smaller that will matter more than it did in January.  You are raising kids and preparing meals for them.  Remember that their food is not your food.  Eat during your planned times.  Don’t snack with the kids.

Finally, how often to your weigh yourself?  A lot of people seem shy of the scale and avoid weighing in after a binge night, or just do it weekly or whatever.  I suggest weighing daily, first thing in the morning and then measuring progress by the change in weekly averages calculated by fitbit - or better, linking you account to TrendWeight (link in my signature) which reports your weight change based on a moving average of your last 20 weigh-ins or so.  When I was losing weight last year, my TrendWeight dropped about 6 lbs/month from Feb. to June, but in any given month I could find a daily reading at the beginning that was about a pound of another 30 days later.  If I only relied on those two points in time, I would have concluded that I was making no or very little progress over the month rather than that I had lost 6 lbs.

[Daves_Not_Here]

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@Esya wrote:

To me not all calories are the same. A calorie of vegetable or a calorie of bread will be processed differently by your body, leading to different results (and this differs per person depending on intolerances you might or might not have). So you might be eating the right amount of calories on paper, but in practise it is not working.

---

@Esya -- I've been interested in this question and it's probably worth its own thread:  how do we respond to eating a given amount of calories of different macro-nutrient ratios?  For example, imagine you were to eat 2,000 calories per day of 100% protein.  Compare that to eating 100% low Glycemic Index carbs, versus high GI carbs, versus fat.  After 30 days, would you be the same or different in terms of weight, fat percentage, blood profile, metabolism, appetite, etc.?  I believe the answer is you get different results based on different macro profiles.

[Esya]

@Daves_Not_Here-- I am not sure if studies are done and it is very hard to do these kind of studies correctly with a meaningful outcome. But I would totally expect different results as well.

[Daves_Not_Here]

@Esya - We agree.  I believe such studies would be difficult to perform in such a manner that the various combatants in the religious and political war that is the nutrition debate would accept results that contradict their passionately held conclusions.  The Nutrition Science Initiative was an attempt to rigorously establish irrefutable evidence, but my sense is that it became embroiled in controversy and internal conflict and may now be defunct.  Awesome messaging on their website, though.

But, my attitude is that we don't need to wait for a hidebound and obviously corrupt healthcare and nutrition establishment to arrive at an honest consensus before we take effective action to improve our lives.  It seems rational that different macro-nutrient ratios will yield different outcomes.  We don't need peer-reviewed double-blind studies to give us permission to hold and act on that idea by experimenting with different ratios to determine what works best for us on an individual basis.

(by the way, Esya, while I feel strongly about this, I hope it doesn't come across like I'm trying to lecture you because I'm not -- my comments are for the benefit / entertainment of others reading)