Not loosing any weight

[Ankinha]

Dear FitBit community,

I need some advice where I'm going wrong please. I'm 1.68m and currently weigh in at 68.1KG. My target is to be on 62KG. I currently exercise 3 times a week with a personal trainer plus doing short cardio sessions/pilates on the days in between. With at least 1-2 rest days per week. I've had a few "off" days food wise, but even when things are going ok I can't get below 68.1KG. I did manage to get to 67.7KG for one day and the weight crept back up. My macros are always around 40% carbs, 30% and 30% protein. I'm on the "medium" intensity plan. I'm never skipping any meals. I have 3 main meals and 3 snacks in between (normally low gi fruit with some protein or some seeds).

Where am I going wrong here? Too much fat, too much protein? Something is quite clearly not working and I'm tired of putting all that weighing/counting effort in if nothing happens.

I would really really appreciate your advice!

Thank you,

Ankinha x

[Sozu]

Hi,

Weight loss is all about calorie deficit.

I use to maintain or gain weight if I don't track my food intake.
It's very personal, and for me anyway tracking food and exercise in MyFitnessPal does work, then I am sure of being on a calorie deficit in the end of the day. I use to have some kind of snack a couple of times a week and I use to do cardio at gym 1 hour about 5 or 6 times a week, as well I bicycle between work (total of 10 km minimum), this all burns well amount of calories that is 1 kg fat (around 7000 calories) for a week of workout just tracking burned calories.

So, have you tried log your food and workouts? 

Some people also have problem with their body and having hard to burn as much calories (I've lost the name of that problem for now), but if you would have that you would as well know it if you go doctor.

But my best advice is to try track your food, make it a habit, think about your goal and why you wanna reach it. Prior time in cardio.

However don't starve yourself, instead choose great food sources, and if you wanna eat some snack then  you shall burn those calories too so you're on calorie deficit.

[Ankinha]

Hi Sozu,

I track all my food and all my excericse (I've got a polar beat), so that can't be the problem. Thank you anyway for your kind post!

Ankinha

[Sozu]

Well it's really all about calorie deficit in order to lose weight.. atleast what I learned after been active on a couple of forums where fitness been discussed a lot. If anybody tells different please prove me I'm wrong about this and I'll forward it to discuss on the forums I'm active on to see what people says then.

How long have you been doing this for? You have tracked for weeks and still not gone down in weight or how long have you been doing?

If you really are on calorie deficit you should lose weight 🙂 

However, just keep on going! Work a little harder with cardio and possible strength training.

Ask your trainer as well for tips.

[DoctorJ]

Contrary to "conventional wisdom," weight management (and loss/gain) is not all about caloric intake and calories burned. For the past 150 years or so, methodologically sound scientific research on diet and/or weight management has shown rather consistently that a low carbohydrate diet is not only the healthiest diet for most people, but also best for weight maintenance.  (For an excellent review of the scientific literature see the book "Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health" authored by the well-respected science journalist Gary Taubes and first published in 2007.)

The conventional wisdom espousing a 60% carbs, 10% proteins, and 30% fats mix for good dietary nutrition is now being recognized as the outgrowth of atrociously bad science conducted during the 1950s and 1960s. Next year, the FDA is expected to release new guidelines recommending a diet consisting of 30% carbs, 12% proteins, and 58% fats. While every individual's dietary needs do vary, this new guideline is probably fairly close to right for the vast majority of people. Among the exceptions is the person who is a very serious or professional athlete; these folks typically need a greater share of carbs in their diets.   

So, for all but the most serious of athletes, if you want to lose weight, the intelligent approach is to stop counting calories and instead to start cutting the carbs. It really is that simple. (If you are interested in losing weight quickly, you might consider trying the Atkins Diet plan.) On any sensible, carbohydrate restricted diet (e.g., the later phases of the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, most versions of the Paleo Diet), you almost surely will lose weight and your blood lipid panel will shift with HDL ("good cholesterol") levels increasing, large fluffy (beneficial) LDL levels increasing, small dense (deadly) LDL levels decreasing, and (unhealthful) triglyceride levels decreasing.  In other words, your health will improve.

Just keep active and exercising.

[Sozu]

@DoctorJ thanks for your input, I however don't understand most of what you just wrote about (maybe because my English isn't as good due it's not my normal language I speak/write).

I'll try read your text yet again and understand and do some research due I've been wondering myself if it's all about calories counting. For me yet so far in my own experience, it has been calorie counting. I use to eat loads of carbs and it doesn't do any harm for me atleast.

Diet I don't do due I dislike it, I eat whatever I feel like but still trying to find new great meals that also are healthy and not processed food. This works for me, but if it doesn't work for the topic starter, maybe they shall try your tip out 🙂 

Anyhow, wishing you goodluck @Ankinha !

[SheShe-kat]

Hi maybe I can help.  How is your sleep?  Sleep helps getting enough at least 8 hours.  Stress keeps and adds weight even when you do your best.  So limit stress.  I watch funny videos then slepp before bed.  But the BiG Winner for me was WATER!  I dropped like crazy with more water and my energy and how I feel in general has improved beyond belief.  I hate drinking water like a gallon a day.  I even feel like I will puke while doing it.  But it made such a big difference all over in my life.  That I will always have a bottle of water in my hand.  nd not just plain water. Alkaline and elecrolites water.  My doctor told me too much water can clean you out of salt that our bodies need.  Since drinking the water all my back pain and constipation issues are gone.  Oh and to get over the lack of desire to drink water.  A friend of mine and I play a texted game.  When evr anyone of us starts drinking water, we texted  SHOTZ< SHOTZ<SHOTZ< to each other.  Our Drinking game really helps with a little fun competion.  Hope this helps you.  Be Blessed.

[trainer]

Have your personal trainer take your measurements (hips, waist, chest, etc) and then keep track of how these are changing. About every 6-8 weeks do another measurement session and compare. Do you notice your pants are getting too baggy? You might be building muscle mass and losing fat mass. Muscle is more dense than fat so it takes up more space but weighs more. Once you build up muscle mass your metabolism goes up and your weight will drop. I am a personal trainer and this is what works for my clients.

[Trooper]

I agree with every one else. You have to know how many calories you are eating in order to know if you are eating too much, or too little, or just right. Think of  calories as money, and a bank account as your body. When you put a lot of money in your account, it gets bigger and bigger, like your waist line and your butt,  if you eat too many calories. But if you lose your job, you run out of money, you have to take money out of your bank account and it gets smaller and smaller. Likewise, the less food you eat, the less calories, and you get skinny. In the past, I tried to lose weight by not counting my calories. It was a disaster. Because you have to know how much a piece of chicken breast weighes. There is a difference between a 3 oz breast of chicken and an 8 ounce of piece of chicken. At the end of the day, not weighing and measuring your foods can throw your caloric numbers way off. If you need help. feel free to add me to you list of friends. Good Luck, from Trooper in Texas.

[wmchapman]

Trooper and Dr J nailed it.  

If you aren't horribly overweight the pounds are slow to peel away.  Calorie counting is good for better understanding what foods to avoid and remind you how much activity is required to even yourself out; but, you can't speed the loss process with just counting.  Think active.

If you normally climb a flight of stairs a day, do it twice.  Make it a habit to stand when you are on the phone.  Most conversations are 5-10 minutes and sitting doesn't give you additional privacy anyway.  And absolutely, positively give up on any zero to low cal soft drinks, drink water or flavored water instead (don't worry about the flavoring calorie count, it is tiny in comparison to your daily burn)  

These three little changes could make a half pound of difference per week.

Check back and let us know how it goes, we're rooting for you!

[Ankinha]

I drink plenty of water and have a "diet drink" maybe once a month, if even. I also eat pretty clean. But my sleep isn't great at the moment. I tried reading about half an hour before I go to sleep and find that helps. But you're right, stress really isn't great. Also the amount of exercise made my body a bit restless but I found some really good magnesium spray that helped! I've taken my own measurements and have gone down a little bit.

Thanks for all your comments. I will persevere and see how I'll be getting on. Will post another comment in about 2 weeks time. Have a great week everybody.

[Heybales]

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@Ankinha wrote:

Dear FitBit community,

I need some advice where I'm going wrong please. I'm 1.68m and currently weigh in at 68.1KG. My target is to be on 62KG. I currently exercise 3 times a week with a personal trainer plus doing short cardio sessions/pilates on the days in between. With at least 1-2 rest days per week. I've had a few "off" days food wise, but even when things are going ok I can't get below 68.1KG. I did manage to get to 67.7KG for one day and the weight crept back up. My macros are always around 40% carbs, 30% and 30% protein. I'm on the "medium" intensity plan. I'm never skipping any meals. I have 3 main meals and 3 snacks in between (normally low gi fruit with some protein or some seeds).

Where am I going wrong here? Too much fat, too much protein? Something is quite clearly not working and I'm tired of putting all that weighing/counting effort in if nothing happens.

I would really really appreciate your advice!

Thank you,

Ankinha x

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How much deficit are you attempting to stress your body out with only 6 KG weight to go?

Reasonable so that the body isn't stresed would be 250 cal deficit.

And with the accurate food logging you say you are doing - should be very easy to hit that daily.

Reach your goal - don't miss it as much as possible - doesn't help as you've shown - bigger deficit is not better.

And since trying to eat less than you burn - what device are you using and what are the workouts exactly?

Some devices are not good calorie burn estimates for some workouts. You could have may more deficit than you think really stressing the body out - or be really inflating the calorie burn and have little to no deficit in place.

[Ankinha]

Hi Heybales.

Thanks for your reply. I use a polarbeat heart strap and run it with an app called iCardio. My home workouts are low impact cardio with a bit of weights where I burn around 200 calories. With my personal trainer I do a lot of body weight/weight stuff bit with a big cardio component in it, eg I keep the polar setting on cardio for the entire workout and burn around 350 calories.

For my day to day calorie tracking I'm wearing a Fitbit one.

So you think I should have a smaller calorie deficit?

Sent from my iPhone

[Heybales]

For that little left to lose - for sure.

The problem is when the deficit is smaller - the margin for error goes down - so you need best possible accuracy on both sides of the equation.

Food weighed and labels confirmed accurate and servings size math done.

Exercise accuracy too.

So to that point.

HRM based calorie burns are inflated for resistance training.

The formula that ties HR to calorie burn is only valid for steady-state aerobic, same HR for 2-4 minutes.

It's totally based on the HR increasing to provide more oxygen for the burning of fuel for the effort.

Lifting is anaerobic (different reasons for increased HR) and HR all over the place. So no oxygen even needed. And HR is higher than needed for big chunks of time. Slowly decreasing, but the whole time higher than would otherwise be needed for say standing around during the rest, or walking slowly.

The farther you get away from SS aerobic - the more inflated the calorie burn.

Lifting with sets and rests of 2-4 min and heavy for you weight should be manually logged as Weights.

Circuit training with rests 1 min or less and higher reps is closer to cardio, but still logged as Circuit training.

Body weight is calisthenics in the database.

If you have activity records in the diary already, you might be able to go back and correct them even now using same start/duration time, but letting Fitbit estimate calorie burn for the appropriate stuff.

Then see what the average daily burn is compared to what it was.

[Ankinha]

Hi Heybales,

thanks for your post. I'm doing an hour of training with my trainer 2-3 times a week. How should I log that, e. g. should I try and time the cardio section and the weight section seperatly? I've got a setting in my PolarBeat that is called Weights. Should I try that?

I've deleted all my old activity records and just kept the iCardio one, so I can't manually adjust them anymore. Unfortunately I had a horrible binge day yesterday (a planned picnic that somehow spirraled out of control) so today I'm having an Almased day....

Thank you,

Ankinha

[Heybales]

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@Ankinha wrote:

Hi Heybales,

thanks for your post. I'm doing an hour of training with my trainer 2-3 times a week. How should I log that, e. g. should I try and time the cardio section and the weight section seperatly? I've got a setting in my PolarBeat that is called Weights. Should I try that?

I've deleted all my old activity records and just kept the iCardio one, so I can't manually adjust them anymore. Unfortunately I had a horrible binge day yesterday (a planned picnic that somehow spirraled out of control) so today I'm having an Almased day....

Thank you,

Ankinha

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Per Polar's FAQ - that setting is merely to help you figure out when the rest is enough between sets - it doesn't change the inherent inability to calculate calories for lifting from HR.

If you have a change in your workout from one type to another, for sure good to end and start another record.

For the cardio, you can review months down the road and see if actual improvements - there should be right?

For the weights you then know the start and duration time to post a more accurate manual workout.

Now - if talking just say 15 min of resistance and it's not even that heavy but just plain vigorous, out of a 60 min session, out of a 24 hrs day - don't stress about it.

That's probably less than 3% of the total daily burn, and potential inaccuracy only 1%.

But if 45 min lifting session - ya, that matters usually.

If it happens to match for you pretty close - go buy lottery tickets.

And then increase the intensity of the lifting.

[Ankinha]

Good morning Heybales and thanks for your post. One last question (as I'm slightly confused now). When I for example track my cardio workout this morning shall I just use the exercise mode on my FitBit rather than logging it manually? My cardio results on tracking through my FitBit One are always super similar to what the PolarBeat comes up with. I am not logging things like my 15 minute walk to walk, as I think FitBit get's that one automatically. Bottom line: I think I'll compare FitBit exercise log with PolarBeat for my pura cardio sessions and will log manually for my one hour personal training session. Correct?

Also, I have set my new calorie goal to a -250 deficit. Ready to rock!

Ankinha

[tanarra]

I had the same issues. Was stalled for over 3 months. My nutritionist and PCP told me to increase my protein and calories. A week after doing that I started losing again. I also changes my exercise routine. Did different things and added more weight training. That helped a lot too. Best of luck to u

[Heybales]

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@Ankinha wrote:

Good morning Heybales and thanks for your post. One last question (as I'm slightly confused now). When I for example track my cardio workout this morning shall I just use the exercise mode on my FitBit rather than logging it manually? My cardio results on tracking through my FitBit One are always super similar to what the PolarBeat comes up with. I am not logging things like my 15 minute walk to walk, as I think FitBit get's that one automatically. Bottom line: I think I'll compare FitBit exercise log with PolarBeat for my pura cardio sessions and will log manually for my one hour personal training session. Correct?

Also, I have set my new calorie goal to a -250 deficit. Ready to rock!

Ankinha

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Cardio - just use the Fitbit since you have HR device.

If you discover the distance is off by decent amount, do test to correct your stride length stat.

As the steps/distance is used for your daily non-exercise calorie burn mostly.

So an exercise pace on the treadmill should read lower on Fitbit than reality, which just means that when the devices is used for the vast majority of your steps for rest of the day - it's more accurate.

Training session sounds good for the non-cardio stuff.

Reasonable deficit like that, be prepared for your performance to take off - trainer will likely be setting new goals - and you'll see more body transformation taking place.

[Mieke7786]

Hello, I understand that building musscle inproves your metabolism. However, I'm 66% disabled and am not able to exercise. And the medication I need to take also have an effect on my weihgt. What am to do now? I'm getting desperad 😢😢😢