Hello, I am a 27 year old female, 5'6" 162 lbs. I have been unhappy with my weight for as long as I can remember, which led to intense undereating in middle and high school and a battle to love myself which has gone better at some times than others in my adulthood thus far. A few years ago I gained stepped on the scale (which I generally try to stay away from for mental health) shortly after a breakup (thinking, I wanna get/stay in shape, i'm single now!) and I was 153 (I had sat relatively comfortably and effortlessly at 149-152 range for about 5 years). A week later I was 157. I reacted by eating nothing but fruit and raw veggies. A week later i was 161. Over the next few weeks it rose to 163 and stopped there. I have never been able to get back down since. I should mention that when this weight was put on was during a time in whcih I had started to drink more regularly/habitually (not just out on the weekends).
Now, here I am 3 years later and I still feel so uncomfortable in my body. My weight hasn't changed despite periods of heavy drinking and carb loading during my time in Italy, but also despite months on end of VERY healthy eating, rare drinking, and daily working out in grad school. My dad recently gave me a fitbit (my brother had given it to him and he wasnt interested) so i decided to try it out, even though I have had bad experiences in the past with scales and calories and obsessing. I was looking mostly to monitor heart rate, sleep, steps, and not so much calories. For the first few days I didn't enter in any food or pay much attention to calories burned.
However, I noticed that my calories burned on average is higher than I had ever imgined in my life (avg. 2400- I workout every day, bike all over campus, get 10,000 steps or close every day). So, for the last few days I have been eating as normal (which is how I ate the whole last school year too- I spent the summer in Rome with my boyfriend so definitely ate and drank more than normal, but the 20,000 steps/day seem to have kept that from affecting my weight) and then logging afterwards, just to get a sense for about where I am at. I should add that I cook everything at home, grad stipends do not allow for much eating out. I set my goal to 1 lb weight loss a week, because i wanted to get a sense for what that amount of eating would look like. At this moment, I am 800 calories UNDER my goal which is 500 calories UNDER my TDEE/estimated total calorie output for today and I am not hungry and have no interest in eating anything else tonight. Yesterday I was also about 300 under my goal of a 500 calorie deficit so i did make myself eat a snack (yesterday i ended up eating about 1700, even though my goal was 1800-1900-- it felt like a lot of food). The day before I would have been at about 1400 calories for the day (remember, goal 1900, TDEE about 2400) BUT i had a beer that was 280 calories so it brought me up to almost 1700.
I purposefully did this this way (counting afterwards/not planning around calories allowances from fitbit) to get a true snapshot of how I normally eat. I thought I was eating a normal amount or maybe even a bit too much. According to the Fitbit, though, I am eating 800-1000 calories under and feeling full. This is the same kind of diet I ate all of last year, and I was discouraged I could not lose weight despite being more active and rarely drinking. I am not so overweight that a 1000 calorie deficit is healthy (from what I have read). Is the fitbit grossly overestimating? Do I need to eat more? I also might mention that I rarely feel hungry--- I am lucky if once a day I experience that sensation. Did I screw up my metabolism as an adolescent? I have had periods of my life in which, because of job schedules, I ate well and regularly 3 meals a day and weighed less than I do now. Do I just start eating more? How do I do that? I hardly think running out and buying a pint of ice cream is going to help me feel better either. I am terrified of gaining any more weight. I do not want to obsess over each and every calorie, but if I generally need to work a few hundred more calories into my diet to make myself healthier and perhaps also help with my weight, it would be good to know.
