Almost 200 lbs lost but feeling like it won't end

Kurplow

I've lost between 195 and 200 lbs in the last 19.5 months, and gained quite a bit of muscle since I started exercising 7.5 months ago.

I'm at about 210 lbs now, at 5'10" and 36 years old (male). I'm eating 1700-1800 calories a day, including at least 215g of protein, and almost no carbohydrate, fasting for 20+ hours most days. I'm walking 5 miles a day or so and lifting weights five days a week.

But, my body composition, according to my smart scale isn't changing much at all week-to-week, and I'm barely losing weight. The extra skin is constantly demoralizing, and I feel like this last 20-30 lbs is going to take forever.

Would appreciate any near-the-finish-line experience, advice, or motivation! Thank you.

88olds

Good going. There’s a big difference between what you needed to do when you started and your current goals. A high level of fitness combined with weight loss works on tight margins. And it does go very slowly. But that’s not bad. Because nothing much changes at goal if you want to stay there.

My experience is different from yours but might help. I started at 285 lbs. I just started by quitting alcohol and “watching what I ate.” I was in my middle 40s. Exercise was just some stationary bike and long walks. In about 18 months I lost 55 lbs. Then joined a gym and hit the cardio machines mostly and lost another 10 lbs. Then I started training with weights. I liked it. My wife liked the results. But no matter how hard I trained I couldn’t get under 215 lbs. Then I had some health issued and gained nearly 20 lbs. Then when that was out of the way I got back to exercising. I hired a personal trainer who came to the house. He would leave me on the basement floor in a pool of sweat. I got down to 212lbs. Years were passing. Then my neighbor, very active, a few years older, sat down on the couch one day and died. That shook me up. In desperation I joined Weight Watchers. WW is really just calorie counting dressed up for copyright protection. As soon as I started counting WW points I saw the problem- I was eating too much. On WW I lost down to the top of a healthy BMI range, 184 lbs. That was in 2006. I haven’t been over 186 since.

I attended WW meetings. The first thing I noticed was the revolving door. There were a lot of people coming back having lost a lot only to gain it back. Frequently with extra. I vowed not to get in that group. When I made goal weight I changed nothing except to slowly add more food. I kept my food diary going for 5 years before I could maintain without it. One of the things I’ve noticed is that to lose 100 lbs and keep it gone I’ve had to do about 5 major overhauls of my plan. You can see that whatever I learned 285 lbs to 220 lbs didn’t help much getting lower. It’s just human nature that if something works for us for awhile but then stops, we react by doubling down on what we were doing.

Some random thoughts- Lasting weight loss takes 2 things- eating in a calorie deficit and living with it. There’s a tendency to go all in on the deficit and try to beat ourselves into living with it. Not a good idea. Closing in on goal, maybe you want to focus more on how you’re living.

When I first got to the gym I was exercising hoping to lose weight as a result. Somewhere I came to think of controlling my weight was something I was doing to support my fitness goals.

If I could go back in time, I would have focused on fitness much earlier. It might have saved me from the trip to 285 lbs.

A post discussing loose skin is a red flag. I’ve been on a couple of different weight loss message boards and been to 100s of WW meetings. Seems like a lot of the time the first mention of loose skin in the last time I hear from people. I was in WW with a guy who was over 400 lbs and had lost about 100. First day he mentioned loose skin was the last time I saw him. Beware. You can ask around the boards but I think you will find that the only answer is surgery. But watch out for your own brain on this. I think our brains hate weight loss and are always focused on the negative to try to get us to quit. There actual medical issues involved in loose skin that need to be considered. But mostly our brains are just looking for something to say “Not good enough. See, you’ve gone to all this trouble and look at these lousy results.”

Keep going. The only way to fail is quit. Don’t quit. I’ve tried to share my experience and hope you find something helpful but there are some built in limitations. We are all different and living our own lives. So whatever our shared plan may be, the living with it part is unique to each of us. The only real way to learn how to live with our plan is trial and error. It is time consuming and can be frustrating. I sort of think of myself as kind of a scientist where my area of study is me doing weight loss. Try to keep an attitude of experimentation. Good luck.

SeleneMoon333

Hi, I'm female and approaching 60's; have lost 100 pounds twice before; the first time mid30's, and recently restarted road to losing 200 (I do have a clinically slow metabolism, went thru menopause in my 20s, plus I do have the horrid habit of eating my emotions).

First of all, Kurplow, CONGRATS on the magnificent weight loss. If I read you correctly, you lost 200 pounds in 20 months!?! that's amazing! However, your skin cannot bounce back that fast. In my 30s when I lost 100 pounds, I only had loose skin around my tummy afterwards, and not as much as a thin friend who had had a child who was then a toddler (I compared when we were both at the beach). Skin does bounce back, to some extent. When I started back on mfp in Nov., I had similar questions of was it worth it for me to attempt this larger loss, and found a series of posts from a woman who had posted pictures of herself over her weight loss journey, and the first few years of her maintenance. She was in her 60s iirc, had had a slower weight loss, and a few years after didn't have much loose skin...of course ymmv, and a few years in your 30s is different than in your 60s, and it also depends on genetics.

Take heart. It will end. If you are feeling deprived and stuck on a plateau, change up your plan, or your attitude, or both. It does get better. My younger sister, who is on some meds that caused weight gain has been doing ww, for a couple of years and lost ~80 and has been stuck on the last 15-25 (varies) for (I think?) much of the last year. Oth, she does look good. She says she doesn't have much loose skin except on her arms, and that she still has some fat there. But she also is concerned about getting off other blood pressure meds, and that's her main goal. Maybe reframe your goals and accomplishment around your health? Good luck and, again, congrats!

DebbsSeattle

For everyone losing weight wanting to avoid saggy skin, we will all respond differently but basic good practices for skin and body health are:

Drink plenty of water, stay hydrated, eat water rich fruits and veg.

Moisturize from the inside also with healthy fats…olive, avocado, grape seed, flax, coconut oil.

Keep the external skin as supple as possible with emollient rich moisturizers…I love organic coconut oil, shea butter and argan oil.

Collagen and elastin production requires Vitamin C from food. Get plenty of fresh citrus, melon, broccoli, kale, berries, spinach in your diet.

Protein is important period. You should eat ~1 gram per kilo of your ideal weight (even more depending on your goals and the council of your medical health team). If you weight 200 pounds but your ideal is 145 pounds (66 kg), you should eat at least 66 grams of lean proteins per day from all sources. Check your veggies, many are protein rich choices. Don’t forget legumes, nuts and plant based like tofu!

Omega-3 fatty acids are important in body, heart, skin health and collagen production. Select foods that boost your Omega-3’s like fatty salmon, cod liver oil, flax seed, mackerel, walnuts, & other whole grains to include in your weekly menus.

I am not a pills and powders gal but…consider at least an age appropriate multi-vitamin to ensure trace mineral levels are up to snuff to appropriately handle all the functions on a cellular level. Even with a daily vitamin, my iron is consistently lacking and calcium is always needing attention as women get older for proper bone health! And folic acid for those in child bearing years!

AND do not pursue unhealthy weight loss. Keep it smart, keep it healthy. Get plenty of sleep and incorporate as much physical fitness as you can each day. The 500 calorie per day deficit range still allows for 1+ pound a week reduction and gives plenty of room for a whole, balanced diet filled with nutrient rich foods. This also gives your body plenty of time to do the cellular repair it is naturally built to do. (Please read up on the benefits of time restricted eating and proper sleep regimens.) Listen to your body, it will tell you what it needs. Do not believe it when it says it wants junk food though but find a solution that works for you (late night Peanut Butter Cups cravings get killed with sugar free nut butter or almonds in this house).

These are all the same things you have read and learned about healthy weight reduction already in your life. Find your own path while incorporating as many good habits as you can while avoiding the bad habits as much as possible.

Nobody has a crystal ball, you cannot go backwards and redo weight loss correctly, so be the captain of your ship and do everything you can for the outcome you desire.

I write this with my sister being the “Don’t do this” example in my own life. She chose surgery, got rapid weight loss results, has kept the weight off for 10 years, but has saggy skin still. She cannot show bare skin anywhere from her wrists to her ankles and no money for the surgery to resolve the issue.

SeleneMoon333

Also, take measurements...the delta of the before to after is how far the skin had to stretch.

Jthanmyfitnesspal

@Kurplow : Congratulations! You must be some kind of weight-lost guru! I know nothing compared to what you know.

I am a scientist, and I can tell you with confidence that "body composition" can only be measured accurately using DEXA at a clinic. The scales that have that feature use resistance, which is not accurate at all. Some devices and people will calculate your body comp from a formula involving your weight, height, and age. DON'T BELIEVE ANY OF THOSE METHODS!

And, I'm not sure how much it matters. You can judge your fitness by how you feel when you exercise. I have a Garmin watch that monitors my fitness level, which is pretty spot on to how I feel.

Best of luck in your continued journey!

AnnPT77

Kurplow wrote: »

I've lost between 195 and 200 lbs in the last 19.5 months, and gained quite a bit of muscle since I started exercising 7.5 months ago.

I'm at about 210 lbs now, at 5'10" and 36 years old (male). I'm eating 1700-1800 calories a day, including at least 215g of protein, and almost no carbohydrate, fasting for 20+ hours most days. I'm walking 5 miles a day or so and lifting weights five days a week.

But, my body composition, according to my smart scale isn't changing much at all week-to-week, and I'm barely losing weight. The extra skin is constantly demoralizing, and I feel like this last 20-30 lbs is going to take forever.

Would appreciate any near-the-finish-line experience, advice, or motivation! Thank you.

Congratulations on your amazing weight loss so far, and on starting a strength training program!

I completely empathize with what you're feeling. It's been a long haul, you've lost a lot of weight, and it feels like it should be total celebration time. (There's lots to celebrate, I'm betting: Feel better? Better health markers? Able to do fun things that used to be out of reach? Easier to buy clothes? etc.) It's natural to feel like we've earned that total good outcome, and easy to get discouraged in the home stretch. Please don't: There's better stuff ahead, if you keep moving along.

I'm sure you know it's sensible to slow down weight loss once we have less to lose, so yeah, unfortunately, it will take a while to lose the last 20-30 pounds, especially if you're prioritizing muscle gain (which is more likely with slow loss than fast). This would be a good time to start thinking about what your life habits will be, what you want them to be, once you reach goal weight.

It's good to practice those maintenance plans, IMO, when there's still a bit of a calorie deficit in the picture as a safety net for oopsies. IMO, what you want is to find sustainable life balance with your eating and activity routines, patterns that give you enough time and energy for other things important to you (job, family, other hobbies, socializing, etc.). IMO, we need to find habits, patterns of life, that are easy/pleasant enough to continue permanently almost on autopilot when other parts of life get complicated . . . because they will.

WRT specifics in your post:

Smart scales aren't very accurate: That's point #1.

2. Body composition doesn't change much from week to week, even under the best of circumstances.

If losing at a sensibly moderate rate, most of what we lose is fat, but not all of it. (We don't want all of it to be fat: We don't need as much of certain lean mass as we get lighter, and our bodies are smart about those choices as long as we lose slowly, get good nutrition, and exercise to remind our bodies of which tissues we do need. I'd look really bad at healthy weight if I still had obese Ann's blood volume, for an easy example: Puff-o-rama water balloon.)

Muscle gain is quite slow, even if young, male, faithfully performing a good progressive weight lifting program, getting excellent nutrition (especially but not exclusively protein), programming in appropriate rest and recovery, benefitting from favorable genetics, relatively new to strength training, and eating at a calorie surplus. A couple of pounds of muscle mass gain per month would be a really good result.

We can still gain muscle in conditions less than that ideal, but it's realistically going to be slower. Even if you achieved that "favorable conditions" result, it would be half a pound of muscle mass gain per week, which is 0.238% of your current bodyweight. Even that wouldn't reliably show up week to week, given routine daily water retention and digestive contents fluctuations, and the expected error range of a BIA scale.

That doesn't mean you should give up; it means you should do your best to trust the process, because if you do the right things - sounds like you are - you'll get results.

P.S. On this point: If you do get more reliable measures of body fat like DEXA, remember to look at pounds of lean mass, not just body fat percent. Most of us aren't that great at interpreting implications of percents. Maybe you're a pro statistician or something, and have that nailed . . . but most of us don't.

3. Loose skin: Many of us (me included) look quite a bit worse part way to goal weight than we will at goal weight, and worse at goal than we will in a few months to a couple of years at healthy weight. Loose skin can keep shrinking well into maintenance. I lost less than you have, but I'm much older (60 when I reached goal), much smaller (5'5", best weight in the 120s pounds), I'd been overweight/obese almost as long as you've been alive, and I've got all that unhelpful menopausal hormone nonsense going on. After losing around 1/3 of my bodyweight, my loose skin kept shrinking at least into year 2 at a healthy weight, maybe longer - hard to say, because the rate of shrinkage does gradually slow.

Some responsible plastic surgeons won't even consider you for loose skin surgery until you've been at goal weight for a year or more, unless skin is causing health problems (like infections). Partly that's for assurance you won't just re-stretch it, but part of it is that shrinkage (and better skin health) will happen along the way.

DebbsSeattle gave you some good advice up there about what tactics will help maximize skin health and encourage skin shrinkage. Here's my similar list, and you're already doing most of them, sounds like:

* avoid fast loss (because it's a physical stress to lose fast),
* get good well-rounded nutrition (macros and micros, especially but not exclusively protein),
* get regular exercise (both cardiovascular and strength),
* manage all-source life stress,
* hydrate adequately (not crazy much, but enough),
* avoid smoking and excessive alcohol,
* avoiding tanning

4. What's your strength program? If you're lifting 5 days a week, I hope it's some kind of split. Otherwise, under-recovery may be limiting progress. I'm not the best person (by far) to give you advice on your program, but it's a major variable. (You don't have to answer this question here - it's just a thing to consider.)

5. You might take a look at the carb levels. If you're someone who does a lot better appetite-wise when low carb, that may be ideal for you. But carbs are to some extent muscle and protein sparing, plus provide good fuel for exercise intensity. I'll leave others to elaborate, not my wheelhouse - I've never low carbed because I couldn't possibly eat the boatloads of veggies and fruits I enjoy at low carbs, especially since I'm vegetarian and many of my good protein sources bring along some carbs.

(Note to low carb/keto fans: I'm not saying you can't get enough fruits/veggies eating low carb. You can. Just not as many as I personally like.)

Doing a little reading around the role of carbs in mass gain/exercise performance might provide food for thought. There may also be an issue where timing of your IF eating around workouts could help with performance, but again, that's not my wheelhouse: I don't IF, but my knowledge/experience around exercise performance suggests there can be timing strategies at the margin. Not a huge factor, probably.

6. When you say "barely losing", how much have you lost in the last month or two? How meticulous is your calorie logging/tracking? Are you eating exercise calories on top of the 1700-1800? (Again, these are things to think about, not things you need to answer here.)

An outside calculator suggests your TDEE (current daily maintenance calorie requirement) could be upwards of 3000 calories, given your age/gender/size. As a 5'5", 133 pound, 67 y/o woman, I'd lose fairly fast at an accurate 1700-1800 gross calories, though that's unusual for my demographic . . . but still.

We can afford to lose pretty fast when we have a lot to lose, but it's best to slow the bus down as goal approaches. I'm wondering whether the "barely losing" is a comparative to your previous loss rates, vs. slow for your current stage, TBH.

Once loss gets down to a pound or even half a pound a week - good plan when close to goal - it takes much longer for that to show up clearly on the scale, especially if you're not using a weight trending app. (Even my weight trending app thought I was maintaining/gaining at a point when I was losing ultra slowly (on purpose). Eventually, the loss I expected showed up.) The scale can be a lying liar that lies, sometimes.

On top of that, the stress of a long weight loss effort, or an extreme one, can bleed calorie burn out of daily life, perhaps gradually and subtly; and it can increase water retention. There's some good and relevant science info in this thread, in case you haven't already seen it:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10604863/of-refeeds-and-diet-breaks/p1

7. Unfortunately, yes, this is going to take major patience and persistence. (That's another thing that favors finding a sustainable, non-drudgery approach - ideally one that's kind of fun, even, if possible.)

The home stretch is hard, but your loss to date was hard, and you did it. Maintenance also has its challenges, so plan for how you'll do that before you get there . . . it still won't be an immediate walk in the park, but you've done so much, and you can conquer that, too, I'm sure.

This has been a way-too-stupid-long essay/rant, for which I apologize. Read into that the fact that I'd love to see you succeed, and I'm betting you can do it. Maybe come back to this thread in a couple of months or so, let us know how it's going, if you can?

Wishing you excellent long-term outcomes, and betting you can achieve them!