Staying Positive

khtshataylor

How does everyone stay positive when the scale has stopped moving, the inches coming off have stalled and you just feel blah? Im down 8 lbs in 60 days, Im frustrated as someone who has severe body issues. One day I am proud of my accomplishments and other days, like today, Im mad and not sure how to not feel like I feel. Anyone else have these issues or and I crazy?

avatiach

You're not crazy! You don't say how tall you are or how much you have to lose, but it sounds like you are losing half a pound a week. Don't sneeze at that!

khtshataylor

I am 5'5" and I am looking to lose 20-25 lbs. Starting weight was 178.6

Gooby91

No, you're totally not alone. I started my journey a month ago with my husband. He has lost 8 lbs. I've lost 4. We do roughly the same exact work but it just doesn't come off as easily for me aaaaand it is sometimes a little frustrating. But they say 1 lb. a week is a recommended goal so it sounds like you're definitely on track!

Don't give up, do your thing and before you know it you'll be exactly where you want to be!

pridesabtch

It's normal to want weight loss to be linear and predictable, but there are just too many factors involved for that to happen.

If I look at February my weight started at 182.2 and ended at 180.2, 2 pounds in a month, but my weight varied during that month from a low of 178.6 to a high of 185.2. There is no way I gained 3 pounds in that first week, but there was some major water retention from high sodium high carb meals. Depending on what day I would have weighed, I could have gotten a completely different picture.

Many people like to weigh daily and use apps like Happy Scale to give them a trend line. So even if you have bumps up and down (and you will), the overall trend line goes down and that is the key. How fast it goes is relative and sometimes frustrating, but stay the course and you will not regret it.

I throw my data into a spreadsheet, just because I like to track a bunch of stuff including calculated weight loss to see how close my numbers are to linear... Crazy but eh. Here was my trend line since February definitely some ups and downs.

cwolfman13

khtshataylor wrote: »

How does everyone stay positive when the scale has stopped moving, the inches coming off have stalled and you just feel blah? Im down 8 lbs in 60 days, Im frustrated as someone who has severe body issues. One day I am proud of my accomplishments and other days, like today, Im mad and not sure how to not feel like I feel. Anyone else have these issues or and I crazy?

That averages out to about 1 Lb per week which is a healthy and realistic rate of loss. You mention only wanting to lose 20-25 Lbs....it's going to be slow. You're not some morbidly obese persons who's just going to dump pounds. Much heavier people can dump weight quicker because their TDEE is higher since they're carrying around so much weight. Rapid weight loss isn't realistic outside of those parameters really.

On average, a woman who is sedentary to lightly active and not vastly overweight is going to maintain somewhere around 1700-2000 calories per day give or take...a consistent 500 calorie daily deficit should on average result in about 1 Lb per week rate of loss (this is not in a linear fashion...it is a trend). This means for a large swath of the female population, it would be very difficult to lose more than 1 Lb per week given that a low calorie target of 1200 calories per day is going to be in the neighborhood of that 1 Lb per week deficit unless, again, they are very overweight, or very active.

So this really comes down to having realistic expectations. Also and understanding that this is all a process and one needs to embrace that process. It's not just about some weight on the scale...it's about embracing the process of becoming a healthier person...eating more healthfully...becoming more physically fit and capable...and in general just living a healthier lifestyle. In my experience, when people focus on these things, losing weight and maintaining a healthy weight tend to be a nice bi-product.

Stressing over unrealistic expectations is just going to make things worse both mentally as well as physically as high stress jacks with hormones, particularly the hormone cortisol and can impede weight loss or otherwise make it harder. I don't know of anyone who doesn't want to lose their excess weight yesterday, but that's just not going to happen. It's a marathon of months and for some people years...embracing that fact can be liberating and you will be much happier going through this process.