Frustrated

joeyjojo46

Greetings! I am a 41 year old female, working full time, busy mom. My weight has fluctuated about 40 lbs over the past 10 years. I’ve worked hard to lose it and gained it all back. I love working out, but struggle with fitting it in, and I’m making it a priority. I also love eating healthy but fall victim to sugar addiction leading to binging.
I’ve been eating clean and under my calorie goals for 12 days. I’ve been working out 4 X a week. Every day I step on the scale and wait for that reward. (Yes, I look for the other rewards like feeling great and energetic and healthy but we all want the number proof right?) The scale went down two, then back up two, then up two more. Grrrrr!! I’m also intermittent fasting and feeling like all my efforts aren’t working. Any feedback or encouragement welcome

ElizabethKalmbach

I mean, weight is just a number and nobody gives that out when they introduce themselves unless they're at the DMV or doctor's office. How weird would it be if we all announced our weight every time we saw one another?

Go on how you look and feel and be patient. I suspect that part of the reason you keep gaining and losing the same 40 lbs is that you keep trying to move it off of you too fast, and then your lifestyle changes become too much to sustain, and it all comes back.

Make small, sustainable changes. If you want the weight to stay gone, you have to be able to maintain the behaviors and choices that got it off, so rather than doing anything extreme, look for little adjustments you can easily make to your daily life and choices and not be upset about doing them forever.

If it takes a year to get all the weight off, you'll have a year's worth of habits behind you helping you keep it off.

That said, it can take a month of calorie restriction for me to really see the scale move in a meaningful way. Use a trending app to keep track of long term changes, because your daily/hourly weight is going to move up and down in a 2-4 pound range over the course of the day as you eat and drink and breathe and go to the bathroom.

NovusDies

joeyjojo46 wrote: »

Greetings! I am a 41 year old female, working full time, busy mom. My weight has fluctuated about 40 lbs over the past 10 years. I’ve worked hard to lose it and gained it all back. I love working out, but struggle with fitting it in, and I’m making it a priority. I also love eating healthy but fall victim to sugar addiction leading to binging.
I’ve been eating clean and under my calorie goals for 12 days. I’ve been working out 4 X a week. Every day I step on the scale and wait for that reward. (Yes, I look for the other rewards like feeling great and energetic and healthy but we all want the number proof right?) The scale went down two, then back up two, then up two more. Grrrrr!! I’m also intermittent fasting and feeling like all my efforts aren’t working. Any feedback or encouragement welcome

Read this:

https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations/

I view my food scale as more important than the bathroom scale. Making sure that I am in a deficit means the bathroom scale will always eventually pay up. Sometimes I have to wait nearly 3 weeks. One time I had to wait 7 weeks.

tinkerbellang83

Patience... 12 days isn't enough time to be expecting massive changes on the scale (especially on a daily basis).

Bodyweight fluctuates constantly (see the link @NovusDies posted) and if you've just gotten back into your workout routine then you are likely retaining some water from that.

Neither eating healthy/clean nor working out guarantees weight management. Calorie control is the key. If you keep regaining because you can't keep your workout routine up, consider focusing more on the food side of things, exercise is great for your health, but it's not necessarily the best way to tackle weight loss, because when you're busy working and parenting, it's probably one of the first things to be dropped from your schedule.

You can however probably look at ways to increase your NEAT even when you're busy with life!
https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10610953/neat-improvement-strategies-to-improve-weight-loss/p1

quiksylver296

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1080242/a-guide-to-get-you-started-on-your-path-to-sexypants/p1

joeyjojo46

Excellent article! Needed it!! Thanks

caramoun10

I’m also frustrated! I’m on day 81, and lost only 7lbs. 🤷‍♀️l workout 5x/ wk cross train, swim, bodypump, yoga and other; eat healthy, avg~450 cal. under; I’ve lost inches and fat, built muscle (which I know weighs more than fat) but shouldn’t the weight start coming off? Any suggestions?

manuelcaregiving

Yeah you must be patient . I am also about 40 lbs over what I should be . I work full time and a mother of 4 young kids . I am slowly loading but love surgar and not giving it up completely but still loading about a lb a week it is possible . Feel free to add me if you want some support on here