Really, please help. Calorie counting and going crazy. Not losing fat.

CasperNaegle

I would highly recommend you weigh everything!! It is absolutely amazing how much you can be off, even pulling a bagel out of pre-packaged and using the single serving. Weigh it and compare to the grams in the serving size.

ahoy_m8

Spliner1969 wrote: »

quiksylver296 wrote: »

Buy a food scale, use it religiously. Reevaluate after 8 weeks.

Agreed 1000%. It made a huge difference for me.

Same here

deannalfisher

at 154 you are right in the middle of normal weight range for your height - so any deficits you see will be small in nature

I ran your stats though a TDEE calculator and got maintenance calories of 2300 for your activity level - https://tdeecalculator.net/result.php?s=imperial&g=female&age=38&lbs=154&in=69&act=1.55&bf=22&f=1

you may want to focus on body recomp rather than losing weight

Alyssa_Is_LosingIt

quiksylver296 wrote: »

Buy a food scale, use it religiously. Reevaluate after 8 weeks.

Another vote for this.

You don't have much weight to lose, so you will be running a pretty small deficit to lose weight. When your deficit is that small, you need to be as accurate as possible. A digital food scale can help you do that.

kshama2001

olegirl2000 wrote: »

@nowine4me sleep? what's that? LOL. and i thought 1590 seemed low too, since I was so active and getting toned at 1800 cals last year. but that's with very aggressive goals I set using MFP app.

@Spliner1969, i will have to look more closely at my measurements.
when i think of things like grilled or steamed chicken, i consider it to be something like a palm sized portion.
i do log the red wine, as i know that's a huge calorie hog. i could drink in 1 setting more than half of my daily calorie requirement in wine. which only means, i just don't eat as much food that day. just kidding.
i do see where you are coming from, though.

just to clarify, i was logging my 1300/day calories in my fitbit app before switching to MFP.
and still having no success. any weight loss may have just been water weight.
thank you everyone.

You only want to lose @ 11 pounds, yes? With this little to lose, "very aggressive goals" may do you more harm than good once you get a food scale and start accurately logging your intake.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/dietary-restraint-and-cortisol-levels-research-review.html/

...a group of women who scored higher on dietary restraint scores showed elevated baseline cortisol levels. By itself this might not be problematic, but as often as not, these types of dieters are drawn to extreme approaches to dieting.

They throw in a lot of intense exercise, try to cut calories very hard (and this often backfires if disinhibition is high; when these folks break they break) and cortisol levels go through the roof. That often causes cortisol mediated water retention (there are other mechanisms for this, mind you, leptin actually inhibits cortisol release and as it drops on a diet, cortisol levels go up further). Weight and fat loss appear to have stopped or at least slowed significantly. This is compounded even further in female dieters due to the vagaries of their menstrual cycle where water balance is changing enormously week to week anyhow.

And invariably, this type of psychology responds to the stall by going even harder. They attempt to cut calories harder, they start doing more activity. The cycle continues and gets worse. Harder dieting means more cortisol means more water retention means more dieting. Which backfires (other problems come in the long-term with this approach but you’ll have to wait for the book to read about that).

When what they should do is take a day or two off (even one day off from training, at least in men, let’s cortisol drop significantly). Raise calories, especially from carbohydrates. This helps cortisol to drop. More than that they need to find a way to freaking chill out. Meditation, yoga, get a massage... Get in the bath, candles, a little Enya, a glass of wine, have some you-time but please just chill.

olegirl2000

@kshama2001 this was awesome insight. Everyone has offered wonderful wisdom. This wracks my brain.
It's exactly what I'm dealing with: Too much training and too little food and too little sleep. I need to boost the cortisol levels in a healthy way.

If my maintenance calories according to @deannalfisher is 2300, how in heaven's name can my an 800 cal deficit (at 1500) be any good ?

If I go down to an accurate 1700 or even 1800, would that be sufficient with properly weighing using a scale, of course?

microuch

Have your doctor check your hormone levels. If that's not it look into a ketogenic diet, read the Obesity Code and rethink the whole CICO idea.

bbell1985

OP, I'm a relatively lean person as well. I am also athletic in the sense that I train for power lifting. Weight loss is SLOW AF. Even slower than people who don't train and have those "last 5 lbs". Get a food scale, yes. But also be prepared to look in the mirror and have patience. Sometimes I'll notice I'm in a deficit not by what the scale is doing, but by how the skin looks around my arm pit (gets a little fleshy), or that my hip bones are sticking out more, or I get a little more vascular, lose .25 inch here or there...but the scale will barely be doing a thing.

successgal1

Sleep.

cerise_noir

CasperNaegle wrote: »

I would highly recommend you weigh everything!! It is absolutely amazing how much you can be off, even pulling a bagel out of pre-packaged and using the single serving. Weigh it and compare to the grams in the serving size.

This. Recently, I logged a St Viateur bagel. In the database, a sesame seed bagel was listed as 60 or so grams, but when I weighed the bagel, it was closer to 80g... big difference.

Psychgrrl

olegirl2000 wrote: »

@kshama2001 this was awesome insight. Everyone has offered wonderful wisdom. This wracks my brain.
It's exactly what I'm dealing with: Too much training and too little food and too little sleep. I need to boost the cortisol levels in a healthy way.

If my maintenance calories according to @deannalfisher is 2300, how in heaven's name can my an 800 cal deficit (at 1500) be any good ?

If I go down to an accurate 1700 or even 1800, would that be sufficient with properly weighing using a scale, of course?

From reading everything, my guess would be you don't actually have an 800 calorie deficit. Weighing your food (including oils/butters for cooking) makes a huge difference. I've never had an egg be at the calorie amount for one egg. They're always equivalent to 1.2 eggs or 1.5 eggs or even 2.1 eggs (double yolk). A piece of cheese is 1.1 or 1.2 pieces, a piece of bread the same at 1.2-1.3 and don't get me started on the freakin' chicken tenders! All those little decimals really add up.

With less than 25 pounds to lose, you should be aiming for .5 pounds per week. With your activity level, a larger deficit could cause the loss of more lean mass than you'd want and then there's the effects (over time) on your skin and hair ...). If your TDEE is 2300, I'd shoot for around 2000 daily. I am in the camp of "whoever eats the most and still loses weight wins." But see how your energy is and where your macros are. What you want is health--why eat in a manner that won't get you where you want to go?

callsitlikeiseeit

you are not weighing and logging your food correctly.

a cheese danish for 106 calories? sign me up for those, please ...

Spliner1969

olegirl2000 wrote: »

@Spliner1969, i will have to look more closely at my measurements.
when i think of things like grilled or steamed chicken, i consider it to be something like a palm sized portion.
i do log the red wine, as i know that's a huge calorie hog. i could drink in 1 setting more than half of my daily calorie requirement in wine. which only means, i just don't eat as much food that day. just kidding.
i do see where you are coming from, though.

When I add your stats to my iifym app, I get around 1730 calories at sedentary per day for maintenance. Obviously you aren't sedentary, you're exercising regularly so you'd need to calculate those calorie as best you can and add those in. When I was losing my weight with MFP, I set myself at sedentary maintenance, then subtracted 500 per day for a 1 lb per week loss. Then I allowed an app paired with a HRM that I trust to add back calories when I exercised, and I ate back a minimum of half of those calories up to about 80% of them max. I managed to average a 2lb per week loss sometimes more sometimes less but overall it was pretty steady. But I weighed everything I could to be as accurate as possible.

Even when we made recipes at home, we'd weigh all the ingredients, put them in the recipe builder. Weigh the finished recipe and divide it by the number of servings to get an exact calorie count. It sounds tedious and it is, but once you get used to it, it becomes second nature. Also you can repeat the recipes exactly the next time and use the same ingredients and you won't have re-enter it unless you change something.

To get an idea of how many calories you should be eating on a 7 day basis, I suggest iifym.com's calculator. I use it so that on rest days I don't have to eat less. What it does is allow you to enter your stats, as well as your exercise each week (be sure to be honest on intensity level), then it divides the total by 7 and gives you a calorie goal per day. Then it helps you set your macros by calculating those for you. You then manually enter the percentages (or grams if you have a paid MFP subscription) in MFP and the calorie goal then don't add in your exercise calories. You eat the same every day and you're golden.

The catch with this method is that you have to be precise in your exercise. Do the same every week (more is ok, but less will impact your loss rate) for exercise, same intensity, same length of time, and you then can stick to the goal it sets for you, eat what you want, as long as you stay within your calorie goals. If you look at my diary (it's not public but you added me so you should be able to view it) you'll see my calorie goal rarely changes and is set somewhere around 2700 calories a day because I average around 4900-5000 calories of exercise a week. My sedentary TDEE without exercise is around 2000 calories/day based on my height/weight/age/gender. I never really used MFP's wizard/calculations because I felt it was shorting me on protein goals.

3bambi3

microuch wrote: »

Have your doctor check your hormone levels. If that's not it look into a ketogenic diet, read the Obesity Code and rethink the whole CICO idea.

Keto isn't necessary for weight loss. Eating fewer calories (CI) than you expend (CO) is the way that everyone who has ever lost weight has done it. There is no need to 'rethink the whole CICO idea' because CICO isn't an idea or way of eating. It's an energy balance equation.

miarose24

Maybe focus on destressing. I put on weight recently while increasing my exercise levels. I went from 141 to 154 over the past year, but I think a lot of it is overdoing it and stress. So my goal is to still exercise at the gym, strength train and cardio but do more relaxing walks, yoga, baths and drinking tea. I am too hard on myself, constantly worrying which results in more stress. So just take it one day at a time? My diet needs massive improvement, which is why I probably have gained weight too.