Hit first real plateau sooo close to goal - advice?

pestopoli

Advice from anyone? It looks like I've hit my first plateau - stalled for the second or third week in a row, and actually gained a bit back this week.I am sooo close to my goal weight I don't know whether to just keep doing what I'm doing, or to change things up a bit, and if the latter, how

The deets: I'm 5'3", 115, 25 yo. GW 110. I work out at least 30 minutes a day, but many days an hour. According to the scooby tdee calc, Maintenance is around 1935, and -20%TDEE is around 1500. Here on MFP, I add in estimated exercise calories, so I have my baseline calorie intake at 1300. almost everyday this gets raised to 1500 or 1700 through exercise. Most days, I come in under goal, especially if it's 1700 - feel very stuffed at around 1500-1600. On Saturday, cheat meaI day, I come in around maintenance or a bit over. Sunday, busy chore day, I usually come in around 1000 (.

My biggest worry is that I don't have an accurate estimate - at all - of how many calories I actually expend exercising. I use the treadmill and elliptical counters since I can't afford an HRM right now. For cycling, MFP tells me I burn 140 calories on my 7 mile bike ride into work, but that seems hilariously wrong. And I most weight train in a gym with a trainer, which is..how do you even? I just estimate on those workouts, between 100 - 200 per 30 minutes depending on what we did.

Should I:

1) Keep up what I'm doing and wait it out
2) Quit logging exercise calories and eat 1500 everyday, no matter what, even if I exercise less that week?
3) Keep logging exercise, and eat up to 1700 on those days, and 1300 on no workout days, even though I intrinsically distrust my exercise calculations?
3) Decrease the amount of food I eat overall - I realize 110 is quite small, it's a bit of a white whale for me, being 10 pounds over what I weighed in college.

pestopoli

Bump

longtimeterp

i will say comparing the values on my HRM to the machines and MFP, my HRM was always 15%-25% lower. ANd HRMS can be off by 10% too, so you are looking at possibly as high as double the correct exercise calories. As a rule, before i had my HRM, i would take whatever value i got and subtract 25% off to be safe when factoring eating them back. i also still quick add around 75-100 cals a day every day to account for inaccuracies in not weighing portions and such.

you might want to try 16:8 intermittent fasting for the last few stubborn pounds of fat. ive only been at that for a week and have finally broken a 3 mo. plateau and feel like i am going in a positive direction again.

bwogilvie

Seconding what longtimeterp said about the accuracy of HRMs. A couple studies have showed that they significantly overestimate calories burned, especially in women (up to 28% in one study). Here are the references:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21178923
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15292754

If you've been making progress so far with what you're doing, and you haven't changed anything, my advice is to just wait it out. If you've changed anything, then analyze the change. If you're exercising more, and eating back more calories, that suggests that your estimates for calories burned are too high. If you've swapped in a new food for an old one, maybe the new one has an inaccurate label. But if it's the same old same old, just try waiting it out.

pestopoli

Thanks, both of y'all Good advice on waiting it out - that seems to make the most sense when I think about it. For now, I'm going to take a couple of week to watch food calorie accuracy more carefully, and reduce my estimations on exercise calories.