Am I eating enough? Too much?

johnwcusumano

Hey all - trying to figure out how I can jump start my weight loss again. Up until about 2 years ago, I floated between 170-175lbs (I'm 5'11" with a naturally more endomorphic body, storing weight in my butt and thighs). Since then I can't seem to get down out of the 180s. I attribute this in part to aging and metabolism (in my 30s now), and I did crossfit for a while last year where i packed on some more muscle than i usually carry.

I work out 5 days a week (a blend of dumbbell/kettlebell compound movements, and HIIT cardio). My workouts are admittedly short but I'm toasted every time.

5/7 days a week I eat super clean and monitor my cals & macros closely. Im on a 45% carb/ 30% protein / 25% fat intake. The other 2 days are not full blown cheat days but I'm just not as strict. It helps me stay committed during the week and enjoy myself. My daily calorie goal is 2150, so overall TDEE on average is 2300-2400. I rarely hit my 2150 goal; I usually come in somewhere between 1800 and 1900 cals consumed per day. I have a hard time eating more food than that. So that comes out to roughly a ~500 cal deficit.

On 3/1/20 I weighed in at 182.3. Today, I weighed in at 179.8 - which is not bad, but I've been stuck around the 179 mark for the last 4 weeks so it doesn't feel like great progress.

Maybe I need those extra cals to boost my fat loss? Or maybe I'm eating too much and not working out hard enough?

Would love to hear anyone's thoughts and advice here.

Thanks!!

mkculs13

The first place to look is at how you are measuring your food intake. Are you weighing everything and using good data about the actual caloric count of the food you eat? In the MFP database, I see such incredible ranges for the foods I have sometimes that it's hard to believe. If you are eating any pre-packaged food, you still need to weigh it if you really want to tighten up things.

In the past 4 weeks, my daily energy use has probably gone down a lot despite the regular exercise. I just don't move as much at home as I do at work. That's another thing to consider. Maybe reset your diary to "sedentary" if that could be part of it.

If you truly have a deficit of nearly 500 cals/day, you would be losing a pound a week (which seems too aggressive for how little you know have to lose). And smaller deficits make it more important to be careful about intake/output.

Just some thoughts. Good luck.

Avidkeo

Second what PP said. Also on the 2 days you aren't logging, you may well be eating way more than you thing. Calorie creep is a thing, and you may be eating enou3in those two days to keep your average calories over the week in maintenance.

Weigh and log everything for a couple of weeks, even your days off and see what's actually going on. Good luck!

AnnPT77

johnwcusumano wrote: »

Hey all - trying to figure out how I can jump start my weight loss again. Up until about 2 years ago, I floated between 170-175lbs (I'm 5'11" with a naturally more endomorphic body, storing weight in my butt and thighs). Since then I can't seem to get down out of the 180s. I attribute this in part to aging and metabolism (in my 30s now), and I did crossfit for a while last year where i packed on some more muscle than i usually carry.

I work out 5 days a week (a blend of dumbbell/kettlebell compound movements, and HIIT cardio). My workouts are admittedly short but I'm toasted every time.

5/7 days a week I eat super clean and monitor my cals & macros closely. Im on a 45% carb/ 30% protein / 25% fat intake. The other 2 days are not full blown cheat days but I'm just not as strict. It helps me stay committed during the week and enjoy myself. My daily calorie goal is 2150, so overall TDEE on average is 2300-2400. I rarely hit my 2150 goal; I usually come in somewhere between 1800 and 1900 cals consumed per day. I have a hard time eating more food than that. So that comes out to roughly a ~500 cal deficit.

On 3/1/20 I weighed in at 182.3. Today, I weighed in at 179.8 - which is not bad, but I've been stuck around the 179 mark for the last 4 weeks so it doesn't feel like great progress.

Maybe I need those extra cals to boost my fat loss? Or maybe I'm eating too much and not working out hard enough?

Would love to hear anyone's thoughts and advice here.

Thanks!!

I think those above have good ideas for you to consider.

Beyond that, I'm going to walk softly here, because I understand that what I'm writing is mostly about personal tastes and preferences. I hope you'll understand I'm not saying you're doing something wrong. I'm just wondering about alternatives and tradeoffs. All of that is very personal.

You mention doing a relatively short dumbbell/kettlebell & HIIT workout that leaves you "toasted".

Relatively intense workouts like that are the most fun for some people, and take a minimum of time, but they usually aren't the sweet spot for calorie burn. (The commentary about EPOC/afterburn is usually overplayed: 14% EPOC (or thereabouts) for an intense but short workout may be arithmetically not a much larger number than 7% EPOC from a steady-state workout that's somewhat longer. The cross-over point where the total burn from MISS + its EPOC exceeds HIIT + its EPOC can be a surprisingly small difference in timespan. Obviously, it matters what the HIIT activity (exercise modality) is, so you'd have to do the math, and see what you think.)

So, if you have the time, and can do some more moderate intensity activity for a longer time period, you might actually be able to harvest a bit more calorie burn, as a total burn number. The trick is that if you really enjoy the dumbbell/kettlebell/HIIT a lot, but don't enjoy the more moderate activity (though lots of options there), then that might not be worthwhile for you. It's pretty magical to have a workout that you enjoy enough that you want to do it.

The other thing with HIIT in particular is that, as you've observed, it can really take it out of you.

For example, if I do a classic Tabata rowing machine set (warm up, 8 x (20 seconds max effort, 10 seconds easier effort, cool down), I'm pretty much done for the day, exercise-wise. It's great for pushing VO2max, and it's time efficient, but if I tried to do it every day, I'd be dragging (and I wouldn't maximize overall fitness, which is a whole other discussion). It's fatiguing, maybe even enough so that it would bleed activity calories out of my daily life calorie burn (more sitting, less energetic in chores/activities, and that sort of thing), so I wouldn't really effectively realize as many total calories as I might think, when I look at true TDEE. YMMV, of course.

Another question I'd ask is whether you're eating back those exercise calories, and if so, how you're estimating them. If you are eating them back, and you're relying on a heart rate monitor or fitness tracker for your estimates, there's a very good chance that the activity calories are over-estimated, possibly materially so. HRM-based devices are fairly reasonable for estimating moderate steady-state cardio, but pretty poor at estimating strength training or interval training (especially high intensity intervals). It would be fairly likely to over-estimate. If a device doesn't know one's actual max heart rate, it can be even further off (they usually use age estimates, unless you know your tested max and have a device that will let you input it; age estimates are not super accurate for quite a few people).

Finally, about your TDEE: Did you estimate that from your own eating and gain/loss experience, or get it from a "calculator" (MFP, or a TDEE calculator or that sort of thing)? I hope you're realizing that the so-called calculators are just giving you an estimate, basically spitting out a mean value from demographically similar people. That's close enough for most people, but can be high or low for some (and quite high or low for a rare few): That's the nature of statistical estimates. Your own weight gain/loss rate at a given calorie level - i.e., actual experiential data - is the best way to estimate your TDEE. (Even fitness trackers can be off, for pretty much the same reason as discussed in the paragraph above. They give you a more personalized estimate, but it's still based on research on study populations. It's in no way an actual measurement of personal burn.)

With respect to the part I bolded in the quote: If you had a certain experience a couple of years ago, and current experience differs now to the point that what used to have you losing weight no longer does so, then it's very, very unlikely that the reason is "metabolism" or aging . . . especially if you added muscle mass in the mean time.

If you run a TDEE calculator for your stats at two different ages, you'll see that the research suggests a truly tiny decline in calorie burn related to aging, per year, for statistically typical people. It's going to vary with body size and age range you're looking at, but it tends to be single digits or low double digits of calorie burn daily, per year.

For example, I've looked at my estimated BMR (the "metabolism" part, i.e., before activity) at age 20, vs. the BMR estimate for my actual age (64). The difference in BMR (basal metabolic rate) is around one daily serving of peanut butter, 200-ish calories for 44 years difference in age. That's pretty minor, IMO.

Moreover, you mention adding muscle. If I tell the "calculator" same-height/weight 20 year old me and 64 year old me have the same body fat percent (same muscle mass), the estimated BMR difference between age 20 and 64 is zero. You got a little older, but added some muscle as you did so. Odds of a big "metabolic" decline are really small, in that scenario, IMO.

So, if you're having a different experience vs. a few short years ago, I'd look for another source. If you've been in a calorie deficit for a long time, there could be some adaptive thermogenesis; you could have some changes in daily life (non-exercise) activity that you haven't really fully accounted for; you could have some estimating issues (in exercise estimates, TDEE/NEAT estimate, or food-intake estimates). There are a lot of possibilities. "Metabolism" or aging aren't high probabilities as explanation, IMO.

Hope none of this strikes you as critical, because it isn't intended that way, at all. I'm just a li'l ol' granny type who likes to see people succeed at their goals, chattin' at you with good intentions.

Wishing you the best!