Stalled weight loss, how long is too long?
4bugsmama
Posts: 2,871 Member
So I'm a daily weigher and for 7 consecutive days I have weighed exactly the same. I keep my calorie count around the same daily, burn around 800 calories a day and don't eat any of those calories back. I have started doing HIIT, around a week and a half ago so I'm not sure if I'm gaining muscle or if it is a diet issue. Any insight would be helpful.
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Replies
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New exercise routines can lead to temporary water weight gain as your muscles retain water to help with recovery.
Seven days without weight loss is pretty normal, so I wouldn't change anything at this point.6 -
6-8 weeks is too long. You are likely retaining water from the new workouts and it is masking your fat loss. It will even out eventually. MFP is designed for you to eat back at least a portion of your exercise calories or else you are under-fueling.4
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Probably water weight from new exercise.
If you haven't changed the batteries in your scale lately, that's worth considering: Some of the electronic ones seem to play games like "stable weight", sometimes, as they start to fade.
Sadly, seven days isn't long enough to gain any noticeable amount of muscle, especially if female, in a calorie deficit, and doing something other than heavy weight training. (It can be enough time to begin being stronger from neuromuscular adaptation, which is about better recruiting and using existing muscle tissue, not building new muscle tissue; and it can be enough time to see some appearance improvement, mostly a bit of fullness in the muscles from the water weight involved in muscle repair.)
Hang in there: The scale will start dropping soon!4 -
So I'm a daily weigher and for 7 consecutive days I have weighed exactly the same. I keep my calorie count around the same daily, burn around 800 calories a day and don't eat any of those calories back. I have started doing HIIT, around a week and a half ago so I'm not sure if I'm gaining muscle or if it is a diet issue. Any insight would be helpful.
If the scales haven't moved after 6 weeks then it's time to look at things.
Why aren't you eating back your exercise cals?1 -
Thank you all for your knowledge and words of encouragement!
@AnnPT77 I will change the batteries tonight on the scale for tomorrow's weight
I also took measurements on the 20th so I will reevaluate those and see if I've dropped any inches anywhere
@try2again I will look into eating back some of my calories, do you know how many (like %) I should consume?
@janejellyroll I will keep things as they are, pushing for better stamina with my workouts1 -
TavistockToad wrote: »So I'm a daily weigher and for 7 consecutive days I have weighed exactly the same. I keep my calorie count around the same daily, burn around 800 calories a day and don't eat any of those calories back. I have started doing HIIT, around a week and a half ago so I'm not sure if I'm gaining muscle or if it is a diet issue. Any insight would be helpful.
If the scales haven't moved after 6 weeks then it's time to look at things.
Why aren't you eating back your exercise cals?
I haven't been eating them back because I just thought it was best not to. I figured that if I just ate what MFP suggested as intake then that was all I should eat. Maybe I was mistaken?
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TavistockToad wrote: »So I'm a daily weigher and for 7 consecutive days I have weighed exactly the same. I keep my calorie count around the same daily, burn around 800 calories a day and don't eat any of those calories back. I have started doing HIIT, around a week and a half ago so I'm not sure if I'm gaining muscle or if it is a diet issue. Any insight would be helpful.
If the scales haven't moved after 6 weeks then it's time to look at things.
Why aren't you eating back your exercise cals?
I haven't been eating them back because I just thought it was best not to. I figured that if I just ate what MFP suggested as intake then that was all I should eat. Maybe I was mistaken?
Very much so. MFP works by giving you a deficit before exercise, so you should be eating them back.
What are you doing to burn 800 cals per workout?3 -
TavistockToad wrote: »So I'm a daily weigher and for 7 consecutive days I have weighed exactly the same. I keep my calorie count around the same daily, burn around 800 calories a day and don't eat any of those calories back. I have started doing HIIT, around a week and a half ago so I'm not sure if I'm gaining muscle or if it is a diet issue. Any insight would be helpful.
If the scales haven't moved after 6 weeks then it's time to look at things.
Why aren't you eating back your exercise cals?
I haven't been eating them back because I just thought it was best not to. I figured that if I just ate what MFP suggested as intake then that was all I should eat. Maybe I was mistaken?
MFP was designed with the intention that you'd eat back calories burnt through intentional exercise.3 -
@TavistockToad @janejellyroll My daily calorie burn is from things like a daily 3 mile walk and I'm also doing Transform20 daily, which is the bulk of my calorie burn. I am pretty naive about nutrition things, I guess. It is also hard for me to know where to find honest, valid information to gain more knowledge on these things; that's why I turned here - for those who have some suggestions and input to offer
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@4bugsmama Your progress ticker indicates that you have 0 pounds to go.
If your goal is to lose weight, you should adjust your myfitnesspal profile to show your present weight, goal weight, and weight loss goal in terms of mass loss per week. I suggest that your mass loss goal per week be no more than 1% of your present weight.1 -
TavistockToad wrote: »So I'm a daily weigher and for 7 consecutive days I have weighed exactly the same. I keep my calorie count around the same daily, burn around 800 calories a day and don't eat any of those calories back. I have started doing HIIT, around a week and a half ago so I'm not sure if I'm gaining muscle or if it is a diet issue. Any insight would be helpful.
If the scales haven't moved after 6 weeks then it's time to look at things.
Why aren't you eating back your exercise cals?
I haven't been eating them back because I just thought it was best not to. I figured that if I just ate what MFP suggested as intake then that was all I should eat. Maybe I was mistaken?
Yes, you are mistaken. The calorie allowance MFP gives you does not include purposeful exercise, only your normal day-to-day activities as part of your activity level. By skipping exercise calories, you may be increasing your calorie deficit to potentially harmful levels.
That being said, many calorie burns in the MFP database tend to be somewhat inflated. Many prefer to start by just eating back half and then adjust according to their actual results over 4-6 weeks.0 -
@TavistockToad @janejellyroll My daily calorie burn is from things like a daily 3 mile walk and I'm also doing Transform20 daily, which is the bulk of my calorie burn. I am pretty naive about nutrition things, I guess. It is also hard for me to know where to find honest, valid information to gain more knowledge on these things; that's why I turned here - for those who have some suggestions and input to offer
What is transform20?
Walking 3 miles is only a couple of hundred calories unless you're very overweight. What are your stats?1 -
@JeromeBarry1 I guess I need to update my ticker - I have about 5 pounds to reach my goal, which would be roughly 1 pound a week
@try2again that explains a lot, I have been hungry throughout the day at times and just chalked it up to the adjustments to from my previous grazing habits. I will look at consuming half of the calories, which can be quite a bit!
@TavistockToad transform20 is a Beachbody 6-week HIIT exercise plan. My stats are 5'6", 140.2 lbs.1 -
@JeromeBarry1 I guess I need to update my ticker - I have about 5 pounds to reach my goal, which would be roughly 1 pound a week
@try2again that explains a lot, I have been hungry throughout the day at times and just chalked it up to the adjustments to from my previous grazing habits. I will look at consuming half of the calories, which can be quite a bit!
@TavistockToad transform20 is a Beachbody 6-week HIIT exercise plan. My stats are 5'6", 140.2 lbs.
I would suggest you log 1/3 of your calorie burn and eat them back2 -
@TavistockToad my calories burned is calculated from my Fitbit, I don't enter any exercise on here at all. Does that change the amount of calories that I eat, in essence, is my Fitbit a true account of the calories I burn?0
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@TavistockToad my calories burned is calculated from my Fitbit, I don't enter any exercise on here at all. Does that change the amount of calories that I eat, in essence, is my Fitbit a true account of the calories I burn?
If you don't know how accurate your fitbit is then you'll need to wait 6 weeks to see if you're losing weight on your current calories2 -
OP, a couple of things. With your stats and only 5 lbs to lose, you should have your weekly weight loss goal set to lose .5 lb/week. At that rate, any loss can be easily masked by water weight fluctuations in the short term. So keep that in mind.
Also with so little to lose, accurate logging is crucial. Accurate quantities (best and most easily achieved with the use of a food scale), choosing correct database entries, and being religiously consistent are important.
As to your fitbit, some find them to be spot-on, some not so much. I would still go with the 50%, assuming accurate food logging practices, until I had reason to think otherwise.1 -
@TavistockToad my calories burned is calculated from my Fitbit, I don't enter any exercise on here at all. Does that change the amount of calories that I eat, in essence, is my Fitbit a true account of the calories I burn?
If you have had your Fitbit for a while, and have history from it, plus scale-weight history and food log, you can use that data to figure out your current approximate TDEE, and decide whether the Fitbit is close for you, or not.
First, calculate your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) from your own log data over a period of a few weeks (if you're premenopausal, use a whole menstrual cycle; maybe use the weeks before you started HIIT, since that's new and confounding factor). Take the total amount of weight lost over those weeks, multiply that by 3500 (approximate number of calories in a pound). To that, add the total number of gross calories eaten over those same weeks (MFP phone app will have weekly totals in the Nutrition area). That sum is your total calorie expenditure over the time period. Divide that sum by the number of days in the time period to get a pretty reasonable estimate of your TDEE.
So: (Pounds lost x 3500) + Gross Calories Eaten) / days in time period = TDEE estimate
It's still an estimate, but it will be as accurate as your logging; and based on your own data, so avoids the potential statistical anomalies from a "TDEE Calculator". It will be a tiny bit overstated (because you weighed more at the start of the time period), but that effect is fairly small in the overall picture, if you use a few weeks.
You can compare that estimated personal TDEE you calculated to the daily calorie burn Fitbit estimated (yes, estimated, not measured) for you over the same time period. If Fitbit lets you look at an average of X number of days, and you can use the same time period, that would be the proper perfect comparison. Otherwise, if you have individual days from Fitbit, you could average those. What I'm getting at is that the daily Fitbit number will be up and down, and the TDEE estimate from above will be an average over a period of time. Even if there's not a perfect match, it should give you a decent idea of whether it will be close enough to be useful.
I hope that makes sense. If not, ask.
These kinds of calculations are a very useful, especially as one gets closer to maintenance . . . and they really provide a payoff for bothering with logging accuracy along the way.
Devices like Fitbit make calorie estimates by doing calculations based on limited inputs (your age, weight, etc.; and measurements like arm movement, heart rate, etc.), and then using statistics from large research studies to estimate. Consequently, they'll be pretty close for a lot of people (the people close to the averages in the statistics), further off for a few, and way off for very, very few (the ones way out at the tails of the bell curves, sort of).
I'm one of the "far off" people: My Garmin very significantly underestimates my calorie burn, as i estimate it based on about 4 years of weight loss/maintenance and food/weight logging.
Best wishes!
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5'6" and current weight of 140 is a pretty healthy place to be. Well within recommended BMI.1
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