Why am I having so much difficulty losing weight?

[MEG2131019]

I'm female, 21 years old, about 5'7, 141 pounds on average, do not eat junk food (soda, chips, ect) and minimally eat processed foods. I do circuit training/HIIT workouts lasting 1 hour 5 days a week and jog 3 days a week. I strive for healthy food choices but not going to lie, busy lifesytle so often end up making quick poor food choices for on the go. I monitor my calories and try to shoot for about 1200 daily, never going over 1400 even on my bad days. I'm vegetarian but maintain fair protein intake. My question is, why can't I lose weight? I've hit this plateu and just can't get the scale to budge. Any tips?

[divedragon]

It looks like your commitment to exercise is consistent and therein may lay your problem.  When you're overweight, the level of effort required to burn fat is lower.  As you loose the weight, the effort to maintain that weight loss has to go up.  Part of the benefit of exercise is the amount work, so if we take simple walking, walking with 20 extra pounds takes more work than without it.  So as the weight comes off, the intensit must go up to get the same benefit.  you could try putting on a backpack, using steeper incline of a treadmill, trying to run faster during your interval. 

Another thought is the concept of muscle confusion.  Do something different ever 3-4 weeks.  If you jog, try swimming or biking.  Don't let your body get used to a form of exercise.  Change to body resistent vs weight liftling.  Anything to shake up your routine.

There has been some acendotal evidence that eating habits can also help you overcome plateus. For example, today eat 1800 calories and tomorrow eat 1200.  vary your calories from day to day.  Also, make sure you are doing resistence exercise of some type.  I just read a study where with enough protein you can actually gain muscle mass while loosing fat.  This goes against conventional wisdom, but key seems to be protein.  I wish I could find the link to the study now, but I"ll continue to look for it.

Good luck on your efforts.

[Heybales]

With only 15-20 lbs to go, reasonable deficit to see the most benefit from the exercise you are putting effort in to, and to help only fat loss, would be about 1 lb weekly, or 500 cal deficit.

But with badly underestimated HIIT - you are causing more than that on those workout days.

Down to 10 lbs left, switch to 250 cal deficit.

Less to lose, harder the fight with the body, don't add stress when you don't need to, lower the deficit.

[MishaPanda]

I guess the question for me is how to properly estimate calories burned, then? If HIIT is underestimated so much, I have a hard time figuring out what a small deficit would be for me. I can accurately track my intake, but without knowing how much I'm burning, it's going to be very hard for me to figure out a 250 deficit or even 500 deficit. 

Any advice on getting an accurate calorie burn?

[Dominique]

I wouldn't worry too much about the calories burned during HIIT: no matter how intense it is, there are only so many calories you can burn in 30 minutes, and the "afterburn" (known as EPOC) won't add that much either. Yes, if you don't log your HIIT session, Fitbit will underestimate your caloric expenditure a little bit, but what's 30 minutes in 24 hours, even adding the afterburn effect? Probably within the margin of error anyway (to give you an idea, my Fitbit One tells me I burned 2964 calories yesterday, my Charge HR 3083 calories and my Charge 3271 calories).

[Heybales]

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@MishaPanda wrote:

I guess the question for me is how to properly estimate calories burned, then? If HIIT is underestimated so much, I have a hard time figuring out what a small deficit would be for me. I can accurately track my intake, but without knowing how much I'm burning, it's going to be very hard for me to figure out a 250 deficit or even 500 deficit. 

Any advice on getting an accurate calorie burn?

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True to comment above.

The term HIIT has been fadishly misapplied to a bunch of workouts last couple years.

Everything done intense is not HIIT. Especially if there is no non-intense way of doing it.

What exactly are you doing?

Because indeed, 30 min of true HIIT running, would actually be a decent estimate, because Fitbit would pick up the fast steps, and then the slow steps walking.

But if this is the body aerobics or calesthentics that has HIIT label slapped on it - that likely wasn't going to be a good calorie burn estimate anyway, intense or not.

So how to get more accurate depends on what you are really doing.