Stuck in a mysterious situation -

3foldchord

Two years ago, I started looking bloated and a tiny bit pregnant all the time, with the constant constipation. I ate better and better, it got worse and worse... finally I saw my doctor. Turns out I had a melon size fibroid tumor!

Check with your physician. Just have. Everything checked out. Just to be on the safe side.

I know how that goes, I actually had an ovarian cyst about 10 years ago. The bloating was nothing like now.
Now, if I engage my core, I can make my stomach decently flat. With the cyst, I couldn't do that. I do work on abs during my strength training days, so I don't think it's week. I can feel muscles under the layer of fat. haha.
I will try to schedule a doctor's visit sometime here in the next month and I will talk about these suggestions.

Ya, I could not get it flat even lying down, it was different, like being pregnant, always a small lump no matter what.
Hope everything checks put fine for you.

ereck44

Hi,

Did you loose 40 pounds in less than a year????? Applause, applause!!! and then another 5 pounds since then? What is your goal weight?

Yeah, if your constipated, you are going to be bloated and puffy around the stomach. Try corn to get things moving. Steamed corn with no other additives. Look at ingredients. Also watch how much salt you are eating. I added potassium tablets to my diet. I still have constipation issues, but not as bad.

Secondly, you might not be eating enough calories to compensate all the activity that you are doing. I stopped losing weight when mfp dropped my total calories to 1430. I stressed about being over goal all of the time. I changed my settings to 1760 calories and started losing again. On a heavy exercise day, I drink a lot of water and eat all but 300 or 400 of the extra calories that I earn from exercising.

Thirdly, you might want to back off the cardio to maybe twice a week, and start or increase strength training. Building muscle will help boost your metabolic rate.

Get a lot of good sleep! This is soooo important!

Lastly be proud of your achievement. You want to keep the weight off, and not yo-yo diet. Better to go slow--trust me on that.

Don't you feel so much better having lost 45 pounds?

Yes! Thank you SO much for the positive response. Thing is , I don't look like I lost 45 pounds, but I do feel much much better. I agree with the suggestions on eating more. I'm just nervous on putting on fatty-weight when I was losing so regularly. my goal is to be 150 and lean. I don't mind being this weight either, I just want to lose the fat deposits around my midsections and my arms, but you can't just target one area... I haven't gained anything back since losing it--which is what I am most proud of.
The nice thing about running... my legs look great! Haha.
Thanks again!

Ur welcome! I think that the strength training will help get you that toned appearance that you are seeking.

I have almost lost 40 pounds ( in a year and a half) and still have some body image issues. I can still see that pouch around my stomach. (It will be gone soon.) My friends tell me that I look great---so it's just that my mind hasn't wrapped itself around what I really look like. I still have another 19 or so pounds to go, and think that I should be close to it at Christmas time.( I am going to keep it off this time!)

And I too am cold all of the time. I think that it is because I lost a lot of fat ( it's insulation, you know)>

Also not sure if you have a heart monitor. If you run, are you in the fat burning zone. If you run faster, then not in fat burning zone, and it doesn't help you.

Good luck with the constipation. Corn works great, also steel cut oatmeal. Just look for foods with fiber and lots of water.

Mokey41

When I figure your BMR I get about 1600 calories which is the very least you should be eating. If you've been eating low cal for a long time you probably would gain an insignificant amount by upping your calories but once you body realizes that you aren't going to restrict so much again it will even out. Unless you've had it tested you don't know you have a slow metabolism. There are actually very very few people that have that condition. For most it's a reason to explain why the norms don't fit for them. The special snowflake syndrome.

Weigh, measure, record everything you eat. Don't guess! Feed your body the calories that it needs and quit asking a chiropractor for nutritional information.

Dsaxline

When I figure your BMR I get about 1600 calories which is the very least you should be eating. If you've been eating low cal for a long time you probably would gain an insignificant amount by upping your calories but once you body realizes that you aren't going to restrict so much again it will even out. Unless you've had it tested you don't know you have a slow metabolism. There are actually very very few people that have that condition. For most it's a reason to explain why the norms don't fit for them. The special snowflake syndrome.

Weigh, measure, record everything you eat. Don't guess! Feed your body the calories that it needs and quit asking a chiropractor for nutritional information.

I had a body composition test done that told me all of these numbers. My BMR is 1420. So, thanks.

LadyDeMize

Go vegan, I bet it will help. Try for 30 days and see what happens I went vegan April 3rd, 2013 and have lost 12lbs with the assistance of dietary habits being changed and increased exercise. Also, a colon cleanse would be my suggestion to get things moving again. And I also agree about assessing the enzyme situation. Have you ever tried the master cleanse? Keep up the great work!

brandiuntz

My advice is to see an endocrinologist and ask him about your thyroid levels. It isn't as if he'll tie you down and force you to take his advice, but it's entirely possible it could make a big difference.

I recommend this. Several of your symptoms point to a possible thyroid issue.

BluthLover

Ur Not pregnant correct? This sounds hormonal to me!

Dsaxline

My advice is to see an endocrinologist and ask him about your thyroid levels. It isn't as if he'll tie you down and force you to take his advice, but it's entirely possible it could make a big difference.

I recommend this. Several of your symptoms point to a possible thyroid issue.

Even with them being normal? Would it be worth having it tested again?

Dsaxline

Ur Not pregnant correct? This sounds hormonal to me!

Nope. No birth control for the possible hormone imbalance. Also. .. no sex so I'm not pregnant either.

allaboutthecake

You can get a digital kitchen scale off Amazon.com for a pretty good price. I have one that "zeros" out for me (say I have a plate set on the scale, I can 0 out the oz/gms before placing food on it.) It goes up to 15 lbs which is nice if I'm using Corningware. I also weigh my salad dressing...used to use a shot glass....I saw it was over. It took me a few weeks to get the hang of weighing food ALL the time, but in the long run its worth it and it gets easier. Now, I don't even think about it.
Congrats on your weight loss thus far!!:flowerforyou:

Mokey41

When I figure your BMR I get about 1600 calories which is the very least you should be eating. If you've been eating low cal for a long time you probably would gain an insignificant amount by upping your calories but once you body realizes that you aren't going to restrict so much again it will even out. Unless you've had it tested you don't know you have a slow metabolism. There are actually very very few people that have that condition. For most it's a reason to explain why the norms don't fit for them. The special snowflake syndrome.

Weigh, measure, record everything you eat. Don't guess! Feed your body the calories that it needs and quit asking a chiropractor for nutritional information.

I had a body composition test done that told me all of these numbers. My BMR is 1420. So, thanks.

A body composition test with calipers does not give you your BMR. Sorry.

Jmchao

My advice is to see an endocrinologist and ask him about your thyroid levels. It isn't as if he'll tie you down and force you to take his advice, but it's entirely possible it could make a big difference.

I recommend this. Several of your symptoms point to a possible thyroid issue.

Even with them being normal? Would it be worth having it tested again?

If only your TSH was done, and it was "normal" at 1.8, that's not a full picture of what is going on. Here's my story:

I went to the doctor complaining of chills that I could not get rid of. I would sleep in flannel pajamas, with a fleece jacket on, wool socks, under 3 comforters with a heating pad under my back and STILL feel cold. I would wake up long enough to make it to the bathroom, then to the couch, where I would then sleep for another 3 hours. I gained 30 pounds in 6 months. I had a then 3-year old daughter and knew I couldn't keep like that. I went to my doctor. My TSH was 2.8. Technically, that's "normal". However, she also ran my Free T3 and Free T4 and my T4 was virtually 0...and if you compared my TSH to the levels that had been drawn a couple of years earlier, they had more than doubled, which meant that while still "normal", they were trending upwards because my gland was working harder to create more T4. I was started on meds and within weeks, felt SO MUCH BETTER!!

So, if your doctor is simply going off of TSH, that's not enough. Ask to SEE your lab values and ask to make sure ALL TSH tests were completed. It's very possible that the TSH is "normal", but other stuff is not.

fleecysheets

Hi, congrats on your weight loss progress so far. I suggest you look up BioLayne's video log on "metabolic damage" on youtube. VERRYYY insightful for a lot of women. This person did his PhD in protein synthesis and is a well known competitor (Layne Norton), and I am confident this will help you on your progress.

Our body seeks to be at homeostasis. Any extra than what your body requires for your body to function will be stored as fat. However, when you put the body under a lot of stress by not fuelling it properly with food for the amount of exercise you are doing, it puts stress on body and it wants to retain as many calories as possible (all of this is explained in his video). Therefore, it will take a lot more work to burn off fat under these stressful conditions than when you are eating to fuel this process. You have a certain number of "cards" you can play to challenge your body (ie. upping cardio or decreasing food intake). When you play all these cards at once it makes it near impossible to lose the weight and you damage your metabolism so much that when you stop doing these exercises or increase food intake you will gain a bunch of weight back until your body finds a metabolic balance.
Like someone else said, it is very important to log your calories (more importantly, your macronutrients). When your body knows that it is getting a reliable source of fuel (ie. it knows it will get approximately x number of grams of carbs, x g fat, x g protein) it is far more likely to use up some of these calories during exercise, and build muscle with a reliable protein source. The extra weight you are gaining is probably from the fact that you're not used to eating as much as you normally are and your body has to adjust its metabolism to reach homeostasis by overcompensating fat storage and then balancing out once homeostasis is met.

When I first stated counting macros I struggled to eat 1,100 calories a day just because all the fibre and protein i needed (I don't eat meat) were not sufficient before I started so I would get full quickly and I would stay up late to stuff myself with 500-600 calories at night so that I could finish them. Now that I have been counting for almost 2 months, my metabolism has sped up and I am hungry a lot. I have also lost 4 pounds (I'm trying to do it very slowly). When I begin to plateau, I will slowly start adding more cardio into my workout to shock my body anytime I plateau.

I hope this helps.

ChaseAlder

Could you be pregnant? I know this seems like an obvious/silly question, but hey, it's worth asking.

ChaseAlder

Could you be pregnant? I know this seems like an obvious/silly question, but hey, it's worth asking.

Oops, sorry, just noticed someone above me already asked!

ereck44

When I figure your BMR I get about 1600 calories which is the very least you should be eating. If you've been eating low cal for a long time you probably would gain an insignificant amount by upping your calories but once you body realizes that you aren't going to restrict so much again it will even out. Unless you've had it tested you don't know you have a slow metabolism. There are actually very very few people that have that condition. For most it's a reason to explain why the norms don't fit for them. The special snowflake syndrome.

Weigh, measure, record everything you eat. Don't guess! Feed your body the calories that it needs and quit asking a chiropractor for nutritional information.

I agree. At 1430 calories I couldn't, lose at all. Tried for a month, then increased to 1760, then started losing again. You might be at a plateau, which is your body's way of protecting itself.

Try increasing you calories at least for a month and see if that makes a difference. Good luck! :-)

PikaKnight

Go vegan, I bet it will help. Try for 30 days and see what happens I went vegan April 3rd, 2013 and have lost 12lbs with the assistance of dietary habits being changed and increased exercise. Also, a colon cleanse would be my suggestion to get things moving again. And I also agree about assessing the enzyme situation. Have you ever tried the master cleanse? Keep up the great work!

Wow...this is such bad advice. Please don't listen to this. first of all, your body cleanses itself. If it doesn't, go see the doctor NOW. Also, unless you "want" to go vegan to try it, that's cool. But assuming that going vegan is some kind of miracle/automatic weight loss plan is just wrong. There are overweight vegans too.

PepperWorm

- Is that the burn your HRM claims you burn? If you go by MFP totals, you may be burning a whole lot less.

- Log accurately, all the time, always. Do you have a food scale? If not, invest in one and MEASURE YOUR FOOD.

I have IBS. I get similar symptoms. I take a fiber supplement with water once a day. Careful of some though...they can make you SUPER constipated if you aren't careful.