At a loss of what I’m doing wrong!

lisamerrison

I lost 3.5 stone over a period of about 2.5 years. I am doing strength training at the gym. Minimum of 4 times a week. Sometimes 5 or 6 times a week. On weekdays I do a program of 30 minutes. Weekend I do an hour. I’ve been doing this since September last year. I am eating healthy and have been sticking to around 1400 calories a day although occasionally I have a test and I go over. The last 4 weeks I’ve been a bit demotivated so haven’t been logging. I put on 6lbs over Xmas and I’ve only left 1lb of it and I need to still lose another stone.

What am I doing wrong?

Oldmo1960

Maybe try at least 30min cardio at fat burn heart rate after workout. Try to give your muscles at least one day to rest & heal. Log & try to read a motivating book at least 15min a day. Never give up, motivation rises & falls just like the stock market. Stay in for the long haul & reap the rewards!

Lietchi

Can you give more info about yourself? Height, weight, age, activity level (besides exercise)?

And what does your strength training look like precisely?

And how accurate is your logging: weighing everything, entering your recipes, choosing food database entries carefully? If you open your diary, we might spot some things that could help.

yirara

Do lose again. If you've lost 1lbs then you're eating fairly close to maintenance. You know how to lose and log. So do try to find the motivation to log again. And keep in mind that water weight can mess with the scale: ramp up exercise: hello water weight!

AnnPT77

I'm with lietchi: We need more information in order to better help.

1400 calories is pretty low, unless one is very petite, IMO . . . but perhaps you are petite.

For me, if I slack off logging, portion creep is more likely to happen, and I'm therefore less likely to achieve my weight-management goals. That's not necessarily true for absolutely everyone, but I'm betting it's common, especially when one is getting dispirited about the whole process, maybe feeling a little WTH-ish about it.

Do you eat back your exercise calories on top of the 1400, and if so, how do you estimate them? Strength training calories are especially easy to over-estimate, unfortunately: Heart rate monitor estimates, especially, can be quite inaccurate (though some of the newer fitness trackers are now smart enough to use estimating algorithms not tied to heart rate).

"Eating healthy" doesn't directly affect weight loss (though it may have indirect effects via appetite/cravings or energy level). Exercise doesn't directly cause weight loss (it burns calories, which need to be factored into the process, of course). It's calorie balance that matters directly.

Losing 3.5 stone (about 49 pounds) is an excellent result. Losing slowly is fine, can be a great strategy, too - sustainable, energy sustaining. Losing 49 pounds over 3.5 years is a loss rate in the vicinity of 1.6 pounds loss per month, which is quite a slow loss overall, if it was steady vs. a "lose then maintain" strategy.

If your current logging habits - well, up until the last 4 weeks - and the 1400 calorie goal were the path to steadily losing slowly, adding up to the 3.5 stone . . . you may simply be reaching the point where tighter logging is going to be your best tool to lose the last few pounds.

But we need more information, to get a better idea. I'd like to help, if I can.

Best wishes!

AnnPT77

Oldmo1960 wrote: »

Maybe try at least 30min cardio at fat burn heart rate after workout. Try to give your muscles at least one day to rest & heal. Log & try to read a motivating book at least 15min a day. Never give up, motivation rises & falls just like the stock market. Stay in for the long haul & reap the rewards!

Exercise is a fine thing, but weight loss is about the balance between calories eaten and spent. Recovery is also a good thing, but we don't know whether OP is working the same muscle groups every day, or alternating what's done to keep recovery days in between significantly stressing the same body systems: that makes a difference. If OP were new to exercise, it might be too much to work out every day, but she's been active - it sounds like - since at least last September, so a sensible daily schedule might be OK. (Details matter, when it comes to what's "sensible".)

The main comment I want to make, though, is that "the fat burn zone" is irrelevant. What matters is (1) calorie balance (one needs an overall calorie deficit on average over a day or few in order to lose weight), and (2) intensity management.

Unfueled exercise in any zone, that isn't over-fatiguing, absolutely can make a net contribution to a calorie deficit (though it's often not the easiest way to achieve that deficit). (Too much intensity or volume for one's current fitness level tends to cause fatigue, bleed calorie burn out of everyday life, loosely through resting more and doing less in daily life.)

All the "fat burning zone" is, is an approximation of which is our preferred fuel source during the actual exercise itself. That's a thing that matters to endurance athletes (so they don't run out of quick energy part way through a long run/bike/etc.), but doesn't really directly matter for weight loss. Immediate-moment fuel source tends to vary with exercise intensity, but for weight management arithmetic, it's the total calorie burn that matters, not the immediate fuel source.

If we're in a deficit, we'll make up the calorie shortage from stored body fat sooner or later. If it happens during sleep, or it happens during exercise - that doesn't really matter. There's nothing special about which zone the exercise is in, from that standpoint.

HoneyBadger302

Like @AnnPT77 if I'm not logging consistently, it is very easy for portion creep to happen (and typically, it's in a form of liquid and/or sauce type calories more-so than the big things like meat or even carbs. It's scary how much those things can add up to. I was creeping to the heaviest I've been in the past 5+ years just before Christmas, started tracking and weighing/measuring everything again just before the new year. I'm down 9 pounds since then, and I would say 75% of that was liquid/sauce type calories.

Other than that, I enjoy lifting/strength training a LOT more than any cardio, and while I fit in some cardio, I focus more on ST - I don't find that it hurts my calorie allotment over cardio type exercise, but I do lift heavy (for me) and use free weights and mix in balance work to engage the full range of muscles.

Overall though, as long as I'm exercising, my calorie allotment stays about the same - in fact, I have turned off the exercise calories added to my allotment feature, and eat about the same amount every day at a set calorie limit I've determined over time.

To give you an example: I'm 5'7", 43, currently ~148 pounds, looking to get to 128-132ish (depends on muscle bulk by that time and seeing where I'm at, that's just based on where I was in my early 30's). I have a manual labor job for 90-120 minutes in the mornings 5 days a week, desk job for the normal 40 hours, and then my workouts 5x/week (2x35 and 3x50 minutes of set/rep lifting with rest plus 10 minutes stretching). Weekends are generally one pretty chill day (maybe) and one active day (hiking, spirited motorcycle riding, etc).

I am losing steadily with a 1786/day calorie limit (7 days a week).

Bridgie3

I think exercise is good, but for weight loss it's overrated; the main calorie spend a day is on your metabolism, it's depressing how few calories you actually use on exercise, and as you get thinner and smaller and more efficient, that just shrinks more and more.

I have 3 suggestions.
1. have you re-evaluated your calorie needs based on your new, lower weight?
2. are you using the MFP exercise logging system? It's very... generous. Perhaps just say you're medium active, and don't log exercise calories
3. is there portion slippage. Some of the foods on MFP are quite wrong, being user provided, you have to go into the nutrition section of the foods in your favourites, and check the values of everything against the back of the packet. I've seen calories recorded as kilojoules, for instance. That's a x 4 under-representation of the calories.

lisamerrison

Thanks for your comments. For those that wanted more details. I am 5’4”. 185lbs. For clarity. The 3 years I spoke of with weight loss wasn’t consistent there were periods of maintenance as well.

My gym workouts vary but tend to be mainly. Lunges, squats, chest press 6kg dumbbells , chest fly 6kg, bicep curls 5kg, tricep extensions 10.5kg, bent over one arm rows 8kg, crunches with 5kg plate, Russian twists with 3kg ball, mountain climbers. 12 minutes interval training on treadmill or 12 minutes on rowing machine. I used to walk daily in the autumn but haven’t been since January at least because of the dark nights. I plan on starting that again. Problem is also time. I spend 45-60 minutes in the gym. On Friday I had a day’s annual leave so I walked to the gym and back which was an hour round trip but I don’t have the time to do that with working full time as well.
I’ll start logging food again and see how it goes

kshama2001

Glad you are planning on logging again. With less than 20 pounds to lose, accuracy is very helpful.

I made a new dinner yesterday and didn't pre-log it. Normally I have 400-500 calories for dinner. I just finished logging and saw dinner was 624 calories. I would have skipped the roll and butter and saved over 100 calories had I known how "expensive" the rest of the meal was.

lisamerrison

I’ve made my diary open to public. I’ll try to log food so any advice welcome

AnnPT77

lisamerrison wrote: »

Thanks for your comments. For those that wanted more details. I am 5’4”. 185lbs. For clarity. The 3 years I spoke of with weight loss wasn’t consistent there were periods of maintenance as well.

My gym workouts vary but tend to be mainly. Lunges, squats, chest press 6kg dumbbells , chest fly 6kg, bicep curls 5kg, tricep extensions 10.5kg, bent over one arm rows 8kg, crunches with 5kg plate, Russian twists with 3kg ball, mountain climbers. 12 minutes interval training on treadmill or 12 minutes on rowing machine. I used to walk daily in the autumn but haven’t been since January at least because of the dark nights. I plan on starting that again. Problem is also time. I spend 45-60 minutes in the gym. On Friday I had a day’s annual leave so I walked to the gym and back which was an hour round trip but I don’t have the time to do that with working full time as well.
I’ll start logging food again and see how it goes

Coincidentally, you're now about the same size I was when I started losing weight, then joined MFP in 2015. (I was 5'5", 183 pounds, and age 59 at the time.) I lost a lot of weight at 1400-1600 plus all carefully-estimated exercise calories, but I'm statistically odd, so I can't really generalize from my experience to yours, though . . . plus I suspect we're of quite different overall body configuration, which can matter, too.

Nothing major jumped out to me in your food logging over these last few days since you've restarted, other than wondering if Saturday is incomplete. There's some minor stuff (I would weigh my apple, for example, but those aren't super calorie dense). I'm not the best among the diary reviewers, though, especially when it comes to eating patterns quite different from mine. (That's not a criticism of your eating, it's just that I more quickly recognize calorie level issues with foods that are familiar from my own eating.)

I'd tend to trust the Fitbit calorie adjustment unless I had a reason not to. These next few paragraphs are sort of caveats to that, in case it may help you think about it. Generally, I think it's a good idea to eat back a fair fraction of carefully -estimated exercise calories (the risk is subtle fatigue therefore reduced calorie burn, loosely).

I don't know whether the current Fitbit models use heart rate to estimate strength training calories. If your Fitbit doesn't know that you're strength training, it may over-estimate strength training, regardless. (Some devices can be told or will auto-detect exercise types; I don't know what yours does.) Heart rate also tends to be a sub-par way to estimate intervals (loosely, because heart rate recovery lags behind work intensity, during the easy parts of the intervals).

Just as a generality, standard rep/set strength training doesn't burn many calories (absolutely worth doing, though), but if you're doing fast-paced circuits (higher reps, lower weight), that might burn a little more. (I'm not recommending you do circuits: I think slower pace with heavier weight is more beneficial on balance. Calorie burn isn't the only thing that matters!)

If you're doing the same strength exercises each day, I'd encourage you to mix it up so you have a full day between useful stresses on the same muscle groups - recovery is where the magic happens. That has nothing to do with weight loss rate, though. Also, the lower protein days may not be maximizing the benefits you get from the strength training, but that's not about weight loss primarily either.

Interval training is good to have in the mix fitness-wise, and if you enjoy it that's also important, but if going for calorie burn, steady state is usually the sweet spot (steady at a challenging intensity you can sustain for the whole time without excess fatigue persisting more than a brief few minutes after the workout).

I don't know whether your rowing machine work is intervals, too, or steady state. If it's a Concept 2 machine, you can take the calories per hour from the memory display, along with the duration, and get a weight adjusted calorie estimate for that machine rowing at this URL, if you want to reality-test against something other than Fitbit for that: https://www.concept2.com/indoor-rowers/training/calculators/calorie-calculator.

At a pretty good pace (2:20s per 500m split, maybe 105-120W), someone your weight would get around 140ish calories in 12 minutes of Concept 2 rowing. If slower pace, fewer, of course.

At this stage, I think committing to careful logging for a month (full menstrual cycle if relevant) is your best bet, as a diagnostic. Tactics that worked when we have more to lose can be less effective as we get close to goal, and having calorie numbers as accurate as you can get them could help you evaluate.

Hang in there, I'm confident you can find a way to losing those last pounds!

lisamerrison

Thanks for your comprehensive reply. I’ve had a bit of a motivation meltdown in the last couple of weeks however I am back on it as of yesterday in answer to some of your questions. Rowing is consistent. I have two gym training routines so I do mix up the exercises. Now the nice weather is here I’m going to try and add a bit of walking outside into my day as well. Going to get back to tracking food on here again as well. Thank you for your support