Weight stuck

hamscarlett497

It's been a few days since my weight is stuck...I've been doing a lot of exercising and eating very little and healthy. Is this normal? Everyday I'm scared it will increase. Anyone having the same trouble?

cmriverside

If you eat too little your body does go into high-stress, sort of a panic mode caused by high cortisol.

Eat your normal amount, stop the over-exercising and trust the process. You are flirting with an eating disorder in that post.

skellyc74

Read the success stories posts. There is lots of really great information there. It is normal for your weight to go up and down. You need to eat in a slight calorie deficit to lose weight steadily you do not need to starve yourself or over exercise.

spiriteagle99

Weight fluctuations are normal. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, sometimes it stays the same for a while. Water retention due to exercise or heat, hormones, constipation, lack of sleep, etc. can affect your weight. If you are consistently eating at a deficit (a big if!) then you will lose weight. Be patient. Unless the plateau lasts for more than a month, there isn't a problem. Even then, it usually means that you are eating more than you think you are.

csplatt

Keep in mind that weight going up doesn’t always mean fat has gone up. Lots of things in our body have “weight” and it fluctuates. I only weigh myself every 2 weeks or so. Helps me focus on habits and not numbers.

kshama2001

hamscarlett497 wrote: »

It's been a few days since my weight is stuck...I've been doing a lot of exercising and eating very little and healthy. Is this normal? Everyday I'm scared it will increase. Anyone having the same trouble?

How many pounds do you want to lose total and to what did you set your weekly weight loss goal?



Sounds like you are on track to have water weight gain due to cortisol increase from stressing yourself too much:

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/dietary-restraint-and-cortisol-levels-research-review.html/

...a group of women who scored higher on dietary restraint scores showed elevated baseline cortisol levels. By itself this might not be problematic, but as often as not, these types of dieters are drawn to extreme approaches to dieting.

They throw in a lot of intense exercise, try to cut calories very hard (and this often backfires if disinhibition is high; when these folks break they break) and cortisol levels go through the roof. That often causes cortisol mediated water retention (there are other mechanisms for this, mind you, leptin actually inhibits cortisol release and as it drops on a diet, cortisol levels go up further). Weight and fat loss appear to have stopped or at least slowed significantly. This is compounded even further in female dieters due to the vagaries of their menstrual cycle where water balance is changing enormously week to week anyhow.

And invariably, this type of psychology responds to the stall by going even harder. They attempt to cut calories harder, they start doing more activity. The cycle continues and gets worse. Harder dieting means more cortisol means more water retention means more dieting. Which backfires (other problems come in the long-term with this approach but you’ll have to wait for the book to read about that).

When what they should do is take a day or two off (even one day off from training, at least in men, lets cortisol drop significantly). Raise calories, especially from carbohydrates. This helps cortisol to drop. More than that they need to find a way to freaking chill out. Meditation, yoga, get a massage... Get in the bath, candles, a little Enya, a glass of wine, have some you-time but please just chill.

mikefm101

In April I spent 3 weeks locked on 194 lbs +/- 1lb.

Three weeks. Absolutely frustrating.

Stayed focused and on calorie plan and weight finally started coming off again. 183 lbs this morning. I haven’t seen that since 2001.

Don’t starve yourself. It doesn’t work.

Mike

AnnPT77

hamscarlett497 wrote: »

It's been a few days since my weight is stuck...I've been doing a lot of exercising and eating very little and healthy. Is this normal? Everyday I'm scared it will increase. Anyone having the same trouble?

"Eating very little and healthy" isn't possible, because eating very little isn't healthy, in and of itself.

People have given you good advice above. Eat for a sensibly moderate weight loss rate, expect ups and downs, keep it sustainable, and be patient. That will work.

sijomial

If losing weight is part of an overall desire to be more healthy you wouldn't be "eating very little and doing lots of exercise".

Make a fresh start because you are heading down the wrong path.

Xellercin

You're never going to lose weight every day.

I steadily, predictably lost weight over a few years and sometimes the scale would stall for well over a month even though the rate of loss *on average* every month stayed exactly the same.

So it might look like I would lose a lot one month and then nothing the next, but my eating was the same throughout, and the average rate of loss over time was obvious.

I also found there was actually a 2 week lag in terms of my eating and the scale. So if I overate at Christmas, the scale didn't rise until mid January.

What the scale does on the day-to-day is irrelevant. If you fixate on it in the short term, you will get frustrated and are more likely to give up.

You have to be consistent and look at results over more of a 6-12 week timeline.

kshama2001

I recommend using a weight trend app like Happy Scale (iPhone) or Libra (Android).

I lost almost 40 pounds last year (at age 54) and some weeks and even months it felt like I wasn't making any progress, but the report feature on Happy Scale showed that was not true.

cwolfman13

hamscarlett497 wrote: »

It's been a few days since my weight is stuck...I've been doing a lot of exercising and eating very little and healthy. Is this normal? Everyday I'm scared it will increase. Anyone having the same trouble?

Losing weight isn't a daily thing...it is often not even a weekly thing. Losing weight is something that has to be looked at as a trend over time because individual data points are going to be all over the place due to normal biological bodyweight fluctuations. Your bodyweight isn't static and the scale doesn't just weigh fat...it weighs your entire body and it's total contents as well as anything you're wearing. Your body is comprised of roughly 55-65% water with the average being in the neighborhood of 60% and that's always going to fluctuate. You will also always have varying degrees of inherent waste in your system and digestive content.



I'd also say eating very little (whatever that means) and doing an incessant amount of exercise is pretty much a recipe for disaster. Losing weight is slow and takes time...you aren't doing yourself any favors by starving your body of nutrients and energy and then doubling down with a bunch of exercise. Quite the opposite really...you're over stressing your body causing cortisol hormones to go through the roof and in the longer run you're at higher risk of hair loss, loss of menstrual cycle, brittle nails, and a whole host of other things shutting down that your body deems "non-essential" in order to conserve energy (calories).