Starting at relatively lower BMI

racheltpatman

Evening! As the title states, I’m not what one would consider ‘overweight,’ though I am heavier than I’ve ever been and feel quite uncomfortable and out of shape. My goals are seemingly lofty—I’d like to get back into marathon training and Spartan training shape. I felt like my purest self when I was a certain fitness level. COVID derailed my mental health and my weight maintenance. I’ve lost just about all of my muscle definition and gained about 25 pounds. I’m looking forward to starting my journey towards a steady state once again

Are there others in the same boat, starting at relatively healthy BMI looking to loose smaller portions of weight? Are there any important things I should keep in mind while gauging my progress?

Thanks and happy fitness-ing!

Lietchi

I started out with a lot to lose (I'm now down 70+ lbs and currently working on the last few lbs). But I think my current situation is similar to ypurs. When you've got relatively little to lose and you're already at or close to a normal BMI, you're better off choosing a slower rate of loss. You can't choose a super aggressive 2lbs per week, since your body doesn't have the reserves for it. You risk being very hungry, losing muscle mass... if you try to lose too fast.

With a slower rate of loss, comes the likelihood of daily weight fluctuations making it hard to spot fat loss. I recommend using Libra or Happy Scale (or another weight trend app) to track your weight trend through the daily fluctuations. Patience is definitely a virtue, even using Libra, your weight trend may still seem to go up sometimes temporarily.

Exercise can also mask fat loss (especially starting to exercise or increasing the intensity, duration or frequency) since your body will retain more water to repair your muscles. Yet again, patience is important 🙂

You might consider taking measurements and pictures of yourself, as other ways of checking your progress. Or use (non stretchy) clothes from your wardrobe: smaller clothes you want to fit into again or items you currently wear and want to see get looser.

Lastly, and perhaps even more so for someone who has previously been very fit (and is keen to get back to that): be patient in increasing your fitness level. Build frequency, duration and intensity gradually. To give yourself the time to create good habits again, and also avoid injury and burning yourself out.

Xellercin

I also started out in the healthy weight range. I had maintained a lean BMI of 19-20 for a few years until injury, illness, and meds packed on 20-30lbs and hobbled my ability to exercise.

I still can't exercise much, but I've been slowly losing the weight anyway with IF, which I really enjoy, and doing as much adapted exercise as possible.

For people witout a ton of weight to lose, the better focus than aiming for an ideal weight is to aim for an ideal lifestyle, which is very likely to get you to an ideal weight eventually. The thing is that focusing on weight loss when you're not overweight can be so frustrating and discouraging, whereas focusing on what you are actually doing day to day gives you daily accomplishments and goals that are sustainably easy to attain.

You already know what your ideal lifestyle looks like and how your body composition is when you live that way, so focus on the long term lifestyle goals and your body will get there as a natural side effect of doing what you already know works.

JBanx256

I'm at a reasonable BMI, but "heavier" than most women want to be at my height, just because I carry a wee bit more muscle than the average gal. I've just started a 10-week cut because I just wanna get peeled. So not a lot of weight to lose, and being very conservative with my deficit.

AnnPT77

I did a bigger weight loss using MFP back in 2015-16, but more recently decided to lose 10-15 vanity pounds reeeeaaalllly slowly.

If you have 25 pounds to lose, you might be able to be a bit more aggressive for a short time, but you're pretty close to the zone where my suggestion would be a 0.5 pound per week loss-rate goal, especially since you have fitness goals alongside. In fact, 0.5 pounds/week would be fine, now, too, give you more fuel for fitness.

That time will pass regardless, slow is sustainable, it'd support your fitness goals, and - as someone who was competing athletically while still obese -I think the extra pounds are not a uniformly insurmountable bar to fitness or athletic achievement while they're dropping slowly. (I can't really recommend my route of staying weight-stable overweight/obese for over a decade despite being active, though fat but kinda fit is better than fat and entirely out of shape - far better, IMO. Both healthy weight and active is the double win, for sure, though.)

A thing to know, especially with slow loss rates, is that most of us fluctuate in weight by several pounds from one day to the next, or within one day, because of things that aren't body fat. Those short-term multi-pound shifts are pretty much always about water retention shifts (body is 60%+ water) or digestive contents on their way to become waste. Fat loss is slower, shows up over a week or few even at faster (but still sensibly moderate) weight loss rates.

The implication is that if your loss rate is slow, you can be losing fat but not see it clearly on the scale for up to several weeks (particularly if you happen to be a premenopausal woman). The slow fat loss plays peek-a-boo on the scale with that faster random-ish water/waste fluctuation.

I did that recent 10-15 pound loss even slower than half a pound a week (intentionally), and there were times when even my weight trending app** thought I was gaining/maintaining for a few weeks, when I was quite confident that I was losing slowly. Sure enough, the scale eventually agreed with me. 😉

** If you don't use a weight trending app, you might like one, as long as you can put it in its proper perspective. They're not some kind of magical crystal ball, or a way to know "true weight" (I don't think we even have a true weight!). It's just a thing that uses statistical techniques to try to estimate the direction & speed of our longer-term weight changes, but doing fancy-form weighted averages of recent weigh-ins. Even they can be wrong sometimes, as I noted above, but they're a help IMO nonetheless. Examples are Happy Scale for iOS, Libra for Android, Trendweight with a free Fitbit account (don't need a device), Weightgrapher, and there are probably others.

It can be helpful to use multiple metrics to track progress: Scale weight (with or without a trending app), tape measure (with forethought about measurement points so you can repeat at the same spots more accurately), regular photos (front/side/back, same position/lighting, minimal/fitted clothing but publicly decent like bathing suit or shorts/snug tank so when you're ready to brag about your before/after, you can share the photos).

Best wishes!