Worked my *kitten* off all week and feels like nothing in return

Aoife_Eile

I'm sure everyone's gone through this in their first few weeks, but the scales this morning felt like a kick in the bum. After a week of hard work, daily walks, calorie counting and cutting out junk I only lost half a pound. I'm probably just being impatient, but I was really hoping to see better results today

Lietchi

Patience is a virtue on your weight-loss journey 😉 our scale weight is influenced by so much more than just our bodyfat. Water retention from added exercise, water weight fluctuations related to a menstrual cycle, fluctuations in the amount of food waste in our system, fluctuations in sodium and carb intake, water weight fluctuations from stress, ...

Also: if you're weighing weekly, you might have actually weighed less at some point this week, and today might coincidentally be a higher day.
Personally, I weigh daily and enter the weigh-ins into a weight trending app (Libra in my case, for Android, for Apple there is Happyscale) to look at the long-term trend beyond the fluctuations.
Weighing daily isn't for everyone (some people find it difficult to see the up and down fluctuations) but it's something to consider.

I'd also say: if you're making things so hard on yourself that seeing progress on the scale is the only thing to keep you going, slow down a little. Aim for a smaller calorie deficit, slow down the changes you're trying to implement in your life,... What you need most of all for weight loss is consistency, and consistency is easier when you're not suffering 🙂 (I'm not saying this is your case, not enough info for that, but we do see this often in newbies here)

snowflake954

Great response above by @Lietchi. I'd just ask how much you need to lose? If it's 30 lbs or less, 1/2 lb a week is just where it should be. I'd also ask if you're making new habits? The trick to weight loss and keeping it off, is to do things you can keep up forever--they become habits.
Do an exercise you like and try new things. Eat food you like, just make sure you're within your calorie goal. Another important point is patience. This will take time. Read the Success threads when you get discouraged.

Aoife_Eile

Thanks guys, and you're definitely right, patience is a virtue! I think I was just feeling a bit down on myself the last couple of days and I needed this as some kind of a "win". Thinking back I'm focusing on the positives:

• It was a minus, not a plus!
• I kept to all my goals during the week
• I started doing tricep dips which I'm improving more and more on every day

I've 18lb to lose so am probably right about where I should be, I think I was just too hard on myself which I should work on.

tiptoethruthetulips

I am sure if you had gained half a pound it wouldn't be 'only', you'd feel like it was a lot, so why doesn't it feel like the same in reverse. Celebrate your losses, every single one of them.

yirara

Hey, you're doing well! 1/2 pound with only 18lbs to lose is very good! Plus you're doing new exercises? then you're probably experiencing water weight gain from muscle repair. So you might in fact have lost more body fat than what you see on the scale. So keep at it. Try to relax. And remember: it's not a race. Thus try to make it as easy for you as possible. Weight loss doesn't need to be hard

Xellercin

A half pound in a week is actually a very good rate of loss. Also, what the scale does in a given week is meaningless. When I was losing, I would often have the scale not budge for weeks on end and then suddenly drop.

Did that mean that some weeks my diet wasn't working and then some weeks it was? No, of course not, it just means that some weeks the results are obscured on the scale and some weeks they aren't.

Remember, the scale doesn't measure your body fat, it measures everything, and fat isn't the only thing that changes.

You don't need the scale to tell you that you are sticking to your diet properly, if you are, you know it, and the results will come.

cwolfman13

You need patience and you need to keep your expectations realistic. Losing weight is a slow process and a week is a drop in the bucket. Throughout this whole thing you're going to have weeks with bigger losses, no losses, smaller losses, and gains. That's the way it works in reality because weight isn't just fat and body weight can fluctuate. You are comprised of roughly 55-65% water and that will always be in flux all on it's own but can also be exasperated by exercise, stress, more or less carbohydrates, sodium, etc...not to mention just regular old hormones. You will also always have varying degrees of inherent waste in your system from consuming food and beverage...this shows up on a scale.

Weight loss and weight management in general is a trend over time...like I said, a week is a drop in the bucket...this is most definitely a marathon kind of thing and you need to wrap your head around it. It looks like this plotted on a graph over time...for everyone...





Also, there are a lot of benefits to regular exercise...it isn't just for weight loss...in fact, it's not even usually a major player in weight loss...but it has numerous health benefits and should be looked at something that should be done into perpetuity and sustainable, not just killing yourself with to lose weight.

88olds

Don’t let your brain wreck you. Never use the word only and lost in the same sentence. No matter where you are in the process that .5 lb was between you and goal weight. It had to go. Now it’s gone.

AnnPT77

Aoife_Eile wrote: »

Thanks guys, and you're definitely right, patience is a virtue! I think I was just feeling a bit down on myself the last couple of days and I needed this as some kind of a "win". Thinking back I'm focusing on the positives:

• It was a minus, not a plus!
• I kept to all my goals during the week
• I started doing tricep dips which I'm improving more and more on every day

I've 18lb to lose so am probably right about where I should be, I think I was just too hard on myself which I should work on.

Positives are good, and also consider thinking in terms of process (habit) goals, rather than loss rate goals.

If you're logging, and working to make it accurate, that's a process goal.
If you're (making things up, that are optional but maybe useful, pick your own) working on eating more veggies, or drinking enough water, or hitting your protein goal every day, etc., those are process goals.
If you have an exercise plan (sensible one, little bit of challenge, not exhausting!), executing that plan is a process goal.

And so forth.

Why? We have control over the process. We don't - as Wolfman's very realistic charts illustrate - have control over when the results of that process will come. But if the estimates are right, and the process is right, results will come.