Is it harder to loose weight if you are within a healthy BMI

Stasha83

Hello everyone

I just wondered if your BMI effects how easy it is to loose weight?

I am 5ft8, 26yrs old and currently weigh 147lbs, giving me a BMI of 22.3. I have only been dieting for a week and a half so I realise it is very early days but this morning I was a pound heavier than when I started which I can't understand as I am staying below my daily calorie allowance and burning between 700-800 calories per day in the gym. I can't understand why I am heavier? I thought if anything I would be a pound lighter?!

Could the reason be because I am already within a healthy BMI range? My goal is to reach 140lbs by 5 July and then maintain at that weight but I don't see how I will achieve that if I am getting heathier rather than lighter?

Any help or suggestions would be really appreciated as I really do want to meet my goal and feel a bit lost!

Many thanks in advance :flowerforyou:

bikinimission

My stats are pretty much the same as this and I have found that although I lost 3lbs this week my favourite jeans are getting tighter around my thighs could this be down to 15 days of the 30 day shred? Will they start to shrink or am I going to make them bigger if I keep on squatting and lunging? I'm quite confused!

happy_jax

Really interesting question!!! Sorry...I don't have a clue about the answer, but am very intrigued as to what others would say as my stats are kind of similar to yours (5.9" and 150lbs..if I have those conversions right! haha) and I am also finding progress very slow.

All I can say is I also went up in my first week - and then didn't drop for three weeks - but now am seeing a gradual weekly drop. Only a little at a time, but all in the right direction. It's probably a lot slower than someone with lots to lose, but it's certainly still possible so don't give up hope!!! :happy:

hdelamore

I think it could be that you're putting your body into starvation mode
because you weigh 147lb you'll be advised to eat 1200 calories,
if you're undereating this and burning 700 odd calories
you're only consuming 500
and your body will contain your fat instead of burning it off
i'd eat a few more calories

but also, it is harder i started at 154, im now 142 and the last 2lbs will NOT BUDGE. x

scotty_81

I don't think it's the BMI. I was in the healthy range. Started at about 23 and am now 20.4 and haven't had a
problem with shedding the pounds so far. I did plateau when I was aiming to lose half a pound a week but when I dropped it to a pound a week that is what I lost. Made sure I ate my exercise calories though.

I also had the tight jeans around the thighs when I first started cycling. It's the muscle building under the fat. It will go.

Dom_m

Like you said, the BMI will have some impact (imagine loosing weight if your BMI was 17, compared to 50, it would be much harder, right?)

But what you're experiencing is probably different. If I remember correctly from the assorted wisdom of Banks (SHBoss) if you begin working out after a long period of not working out, your body needs to (in a sense) "switch on" the muscles that were essentially not doing much before. This means strands of muscle that were just dead weight before are now demanding energy and getting active, and I think this can include increased water retention around those muscles.

Obviously I'm not expert on this, I'm basically repeating hear-say, but I trust the source, and the upshot is that its very common for people to put on a small amount of weight in the first week or two of exercising if they haven't been exercising recently, even if their diet is spot on. Give it a bit more time (6-8 weeks) and if you're exercising moderately and achieving pretty constant moderate caloric deficits, it would be very unlikely that you don't lose weight.

Keep reading and doing your own health and nutrition research though. There's a lot to learn and it can be really interesting and rewarding to understand your own body. Good luck.

Stasha83

Thank you very much for all the replies. I guess slow progress is better than no progress?!

hdelamore - just to clarify, I do eat most my exercise calroies, so for example my base is 1,200 but my exercise calories take my allowance up to between 1,900 - 2,000 and on those days I aim to consume 1,400 - 1,500. To be honest I don't think I could eat anymore as I just don't get hungry, the 3 meals I have fill me up for the day.

allywallis86

could it be that you are building muscle at the gym and therefore not losing? This happened to me at one time but after the 2nd week the weight came off. Good luck.

SHBoss1673

Well first, throw BMI out, it's best used for high BMI numbers, and even then it's a flawed statistic, really only relevant when used for large groups of people, ultimately you don't want to use weight as a measurement either since weight is arbitrary and will fluctuate based on water, waste, and lean tissue.

Realistically for someone who is in the healthy range there are only a few things you can (and should) use to judge success.

1) how you feel. Based on how you feel, you can set goals for either some kind of physical activity or just overall ability to perform.

2) how you look. Being able to look in the mirror naked and accept how you look is important. While it's important to be able to see things you want to improve, don't beat yourself up. Sometimes taking a picture every month and looking objectively for changes is a huge help

3) Waist to hip ratio. A decent measurement for how healthy your abdominal fat levels are, women should be under .90 (preferably about .7 to .85

4) the biggie, the grand daddy of all healthy measurements is Body fat %. Of course women have a different scale than men, a great number for women is between 16% and 20%, you get there, and you should NOT be trying to lose more fat. Actively at that point you should be at maintenance calories, and if you want to continue improving yourself, focus on either functional strength, or muscle definition/size. (Both are relatively advanced topics that I can go over with you on a person level if you like, but I won't get into it here).

To answer the OP's question directly, I doubt seriously that your BF % is much above 23 or 24 with a BMI of 22, but sometimes (thus the flaw in the calculation) it's higher than that. And that being the case, your calorie deficit should be VERY small. Your body just doesn't have the extra body fat to be able to compensate for a large (bigger than say 250 calories a day from maintenance) deficit. Also it's vital, at this stage, to be accurate with your exercise calories, and make sure they aren't causing you to go outside your deficit levels, this will REALLY screw up your body's internal chemistry.

Expect a difficult time losing weight, and really, it should not be a measurement at all for you. I would recommend going to a place that offers either a hydrostatic test for BF or a bod pod test, (or DEXA/MRI if you can afford it, but those are serious stuff, costing serious $$$), once you have an accurate BF % test (if you have a REALLY experienced person who can use calipers, that's ok too, but more often than not, the person using the calipers will make a small error in measuring which can translate into large errors in the BF %) you can then start formulating a plan to lower it (if you need to) or changing definition, changing functional strength, or changing muscle size.

anyway, feel free to PM me if you have questions, hope this helps.

-Banks

rybo

My opinion for a person who is already at or near a "normal" weight and just wants to lose a few more pounds, is to only cut back your calories a little bit. See how that goes. I was in that situation. Figured I could go to the 2 lb a week deficit, lose it quick & be done. WRONG. I struggled, didn't lose anything. Kept bumping up my calories to a confortable level and the weight came off nicely. I was exercising and eating them back the whole time.

one last thing to add. BMI is useless in my opinion.

edelq

My opinion for a person who is already at or near a "normal" weight and just wants to lose a few more pounds, is to only cut back your calories a little bit. See how that goes. I was in that situation. Figured I could go to the 2 lb a week deficit, lose it quick & be done. WRONG. I struggled, didn't lose anything. Kept bumping up my calories to a confortable level and the weight came off nicely. I was exercising and eating them back the whole time.

one last thing to add. BMI is useless in my opinion.

I might have to try this,, I'm losing nothing maybe I should bump up the calories,, but I do make sure I get at least the 1200, including eating back exercise cals,,

Dom_m

BTW, 1lb is probably within the margin of error. Water retention, what you ate that day, what you did that day, the time of day, the air pressure, random stiffness in the scale... all sorts of things can effect weigh-ins. You could easily maintain the same body weight but get a slight under reading the first time, and a slight over reading the second time, then think you've put on weight.

The easiest thing for you to actually track progress is probably to get a tape measure and make sure you measure the same spot at the same time of day each time you do it.