Help/advice/reassurance needed

aljo98

I am a keen cyclist buy lost my mojo a bit. I started using MFP to help balance weight loss while still having enough energy to train. I set up goals to lose 1.5lbs per week.
I started at 189lbs...trying to get down to 169 to 174 ish.
Week 1 I lost 6lbs. I felt this wasn't healthy.
Week 2 I lost 3lbs. Made sure I wasn't going under by as much
Week 3 I lost 1lb. Felt same as Week 2.

I know weightless in wk 1 was unhealthy. I'm now worried I've cut calories and not losing. I've heard of a plateaus...but I thought it was a simple sum of calories in vs calories out!

I'm I now destined for a life of 1400 cal per day...worried i'll put weight on if I eat normally.

Is last few weeks affecting my metabolism in some way which is unhealthy in the long run?

Ps as well as training on bike 3 days a week I'm doing daily conditioning to build some core strength. All exercises logged.

Sometime I'll eat even if not hungry to make sure my deficit isn't too big.

I know this may have been covered in previous posts...I've had a look and found some interesting advice...but any more gratefully recieved.

I was hoping to shift eight in about 10 weeks...also stopped drinking alcohol (not the I had too much previously.

Thanks

cmriverside

With only 15-20 pounds to lose, you can't really expect to lose 1.5 pounds per week.

More like a half pound per week, so set your Goals accordingly. 1400 is low, but it may work, you don't really give us much context. Eat more on exercise days:
https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1080242/a-guide-to-get-you-started-on-your-path-to-sexypants/p1

AnnPT77

What Riverside said.

But more directly to your question, you haven't wrecked your metabolism. Not even close.

For most people, week 1 generally shows a big scale drop, and a fair chunk of that is water weight and lower average digestive contents on the way to becoming waste, because we ate less. There's also a bit of fat loss, assuming reasonably accurate logging, but the water/waste change is bigger.

Over subsequent weeks, there'll typically be some rebalancing of water retention: Water weight goes back up a bit, masks fat loss on the scale. It can look like a stall. It may be a scale weight stall, but it's not a fat loss stall.

That's very likely what you're seeing now.

You need to average at least 4-6 weeks' loss on a given regimen to know something closer to its actual fat loss impact. If you're female, adult, not in menopause, calculate that average using bodyweight at the same relative point in 2 or more monthly cycles, because hormonal water retention shifts can be very distorting for some women.

So yeah, reduce your loss rate target a little, for best odds of continuing long term good health. (Yes, that will make it take even longer for fat loss to stop playing peek-a-boo on the scale with water weight fluctuations.)

Then, stick with that program, and hang in there for 4-6 weeks to see what's happening.

Best wishes!

aljo98

Hey thanks for comments the links are very helpful. Sorry I didn't put enough.context in...was trying to keep it brief.
I'm a 49yo male who just wants to get up the hills faster and trying to lose a bit of weight in a healthy/safe way. I'll keep plodding on but change goals to 1lb weight loss a week. (And not worry too much about all the Christmas meals...its a bit awkward taking scales to a work meal out...
Thanks for the comments 🙂

spiriteagle99

As a male, you shouldn't be eating less than 1500 calories a day. If you restrict too much, your body will start using muscle tissue for energy, which is counter-productive to getting stronger and faster on the bike.

Xellercin

What the scale does from week to week gives almost no indication of what's happening in your body in terms of fat loss.

It's only the pattern of weight over longer periods of time that can actually show you how much fat you are losing as opposed to just fluctuations on the scale.

Like others have said, I would recommend you target 0.5lbs/week loss, stick with the plan for 6 weeks, record your weight daily, and see how the graph trends over 6 weeks.

Then adjust from there if you are losing *on average* too quickly, too slowly, or not at all.

It takes time to get appropriate data. The data from a single week of consistent eating are utterly meaningless.

Retroguy2000

As Ann explained, you haven't wrecked your metabolism.

If you are worried about that, you could have a refeed break for a few days or a week soon, where you go back to maintenance. It's good for you mentally and physically. And coincidentally in your case this lines up with Thanksgiving and Xmas. So keep being diligent with the diet until then, and enjoy your diet break.

Keep on working out though.

AnnPT77

aljo98 wrote: »

Hey thanks for comments the links are very helpful. Sorry I didn't put enough.context in...was trying to keep it brief.
I'm a 49yo male who just wants to get up the hills faster and trying to lose a bit of weight in a healthy/safe way. I'll keep plodding on but change goals to 1lb weight loss a week. (And not worry too much about all the Christmas meals...its a bit awkward taking scales to a work meal out...
Thanks for the comments 🙂

OK, slow loss is your friend. Since you have athletic goals, that's doubly true: Under-fueling (significantly) will trigger performance degradation. You don't want that. (Yes, there could be muscle loss, but performance degradation of other types is likely even sooner.)

1400 calories can't be what MFP gave you as a goal, unless your profile incorrect is set to female, because it won't give a man less than 1500 calories. What goal does MFP give you (ideally for half a pound a week - really!)? Eat that, plus carefully-estimated exercise, for 4-6 weeks, and see where you end up. Then, adjust intake based on results.

I'm fearful that you're believing multiple diet myths. That's not some kind of disrespectful accusation, because those myths are commonly trumpeted: Many people have internalized them. I'm talking about the "metabolic damage" idea, "worried I'll put on weight if I eat normally", inclination (before this post) to worry about Christmas meals, etc.

First, I strongly, strongly suggest you read this as background:

https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations/

That will help you through the psychological side of slow fat loss, I predict.

As a general thing, our body weight is a an outcome of our habits over long periods of time, on average, and cumulatively. One day or one meal is a drop in the ocean, in that context. What we do on the majority of our days will determine the majority of our outcomes.

To the bolded specifically: If your Christmas meals are actually just a meal here and there (quite rare, in context of your year), they don't much matter. (During weight loss, I did estimate mine, but more in the interests of slightly more accurate averaged historical intake/bodyweight data, not as a "must hit goal" thing.)

You can average your intake over a few days to a week if you want to: No difference, long run. You can eat your exercise calories on the day of the exercise, or later: No difference, long run. Think: On average, over fairly small timespans. (It's still true that it's on average/cumulative in the very long haul, but during weight loss, most folks want to see moderately-consistent progress, so moderate timespan averages are relevant.)

One day of overeating likely will cause a big scale jump the next day. That's normal. (The article linked above will explain more.) Just go back to your regular healthy routine. Over a few days to maybe up to a couple of weeks, that higher blip will drop off, and you'll be fine - not much impact on your longer run weight loss. (Note to other readers: For a woman with monthly cycles, it could be confusing until the next cycle. The basics are the same, though: Only the roller-coaster pace on the scale differs.)

You would need to eat roughly 3500 calories over your maintenance calories on one day to gain a pound of fat that day . . . and you probably wouldn't gain that whole pound for some fairly complicated technical reasons, if it's a rare thing. There's no need to dramatize this. Again: It's about what you eat (and how you move) on average, over time. Habits are the powerful thing, not rare exceptions.

If you're interested in a more technical look at the "metabolic damage" issue, and what we might really see during/after weight loss, this is a good read (read the first few posts at the start by the person who started the thread):

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1077746/starvation-mode-adaptive-thermogenesis-and-weight-loss/p1

(That's optional reading, based on interest. Read the one linked previously about fluctuations. Please.)

Set yourself up with an easy-to-follow sustainable routine with a sensibly moderate calorie deficit, keep your energy level up and your health strong (good overall nutrition would be a plus on that front), learn some new habits that make it easy to stick with your healthy routine almost on autopilot (so that maintaining your weight loss is easy, too.) That'll work great.

You're getting advice here from folks - including me - who've lost weight, are active, have sustained weight loss long term. It's sort of boring, compared to the clickbait ("lose 20 pounds by Christmas", "I destroyed my metabolism by dieting, need magic diet plan X to survive", blah blah blah). But it works.

RLRECH618

I literally have the same story. lets motivate each other!