Stuck & not losing...ideas of how to nudge those scales down please

MutterGans

Fourth week of diet, I'd started well and now those scales are stuck on 115kgs. I'm counting every calorie, sticking between 1000 to 1200cals per day and have been stuck at 115kgs for 8 days now. It should be falling off quickly at this point in my diet. I don't want to drop my calorie intake more as then I wouldn't be having a healthy diet. I'm eating incredibly healthily and getting some exercise in....how can I get my metabolism unstuck?

Fflpnari

why are you eating that little??

ninerbuff

Eating that little for you works for a short time. Then your body starts adapting to the amount of calories you take in and CONSERVES ENERGY to run normal bodily functions. The way it will do this is to lower your resting metabolic rate (where you actually burn fat as fuel). You can't outsmart your body. Find out what your TDEE is and just eat 500-700 calories less than that a day. Or at the very least, eat your BMR.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
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AnnPT77

Undereating can create physical stress, which increases certain hormones that tend to increase water retention. It's also normal in the first couple of weeks of calorie restriction to drop quite a bit of water weight (alongside some amount of fat loss), then for the next couple of weeks to include a pseudo-stall in loss (as measured by the scale, and perhaps even tape measure or clothes-fit) as water levels rebalance in the body. If you limited carb intake as part of your strategy - which is fine in itself, if it works for you - the initial water weight drop is going to tend to be even larger.

If you started an exercise program when you started calorie restriction, that too, will add water weight (for muscle repair essentially . . . but new exercise is also potentially a physical stress - a good stress, sure, but still cumulative with other life stresses such as calorie restriction, and therefore with potential to increase water retention beyond the mere inflammation/muscle repair kind of thing).

Given all of the above, I'd recommend patience as your key strategy right now. Most of us want to lose fat weight. Don't be fooled by water weight. I'd strongly suggest reading this:

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

Guess what? Stressing over a scale stall also increases cumulative life stress, can raise probability of water retention happening and sticking around.

I don't know your age or height, but if I assume you're an average woman (5'5", 165cm kind of area), and at your current weight (115kg, around 253 pounds), and around 30 years old, and sedentary (inactive job, inactive home life, no exercise - around 3-4,000 or so steps daily or equivalent), your calorie needs to maintain weight would be in the 2200+ zone. (IOW, 2200-ish calories would be your TDEE, total daily energy expenditure.) In that context, 1200 would be expected to be around 2 pounds a week loss (on average over multiple weeks - it won't be linear).

However, you're exercising (we don't know what), you may have home care/child care responsibilities, you may have a job that involves some movement (not necessarily vigorous), and you're eating down to 1000. If your eating logging is accurate, your effective deficit is well over 1000 calories, maybe up to 1500 or so. That's almost certainly underfueling; that's not "eating healthily" no matter how nutritious your foods.

There's nothing wrong with your metabolism. Metabolisms don't break (outside of conditions that would have you hospitalized, and quickly). If you under-eat, you'll create fatigue (subtle or noticeable) that slows down your activity level and some body processes (like hair growth, body temp, etc.) and robs you of calories you otherwise would have burned. (Even fidgeting can burn up to a couple of hundred calories daily, according to research, and we mostly don't notice if our spontaneous movement drops in that way.) That slowdown can result in slower than expected weight loss.

Ultra-low calories is counterproductive. I already mentioned stress-related water retention, and slowdowns of spontaneous movement.

On top of that, losing any meaningful amount of weight is inherently a long-term process, months to years of reasonably-consistent change in daily habits. That puts a priority on using sustainable methods, relatively easy-to-continue habits.

Trying to lose fast can actually be slow: Slow and steady adds up. Ultra fast loss for a bit, interspersed with compensatory over-eating when your body fights back, maybe even stopping for a while or permanently when life gets in the way of extreme dieting . . . that can be slow actual progress.

You may feel that I'm being a mean li'l ol' lady in saying this. In reality, I'm feeling like your old, concerned internet auntie who'd like to see you succeed with your weight/health goals while you're still relatively young. I stayed overweight/obese until I was 59, suffered a bunch of consequences (including an advanced-stage cancer that's more common in overweight women, among other things). That was dumb. I lost from obese to healthy weight 5+ years ago, have been at a healthy weight since. That's much better . . . but I still have physical issues I'd be unlikely to have if I'd been smarter when I was younger. Please do better than I did, hypocritical though it may be of me to urge that.

Can I suggest that you consider joining this group here, for people with 75 or more pounds to lose:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/group/133315-larger-losers

It's full of nice, helpful people at various stages in the process who can help guide you on a productive path to reaching your goals.

Best wishes for achieving your goals, sincerely!