Not losing weight. At all. :(

ambarmiller

I'm exactly in the same boat. Three years ago I relied on MFP to tell me to eat 'X' amount of calories to lose weight. Unfortunately, what I didn't know is that I was doing metabolic damage. Eating low calories can melt off fat in the short term, but in the long term you will eventually stop losing weight and it will slowly creep up on you. Right now I am only using MFP to track my macros through IIFYM/flexible dieting. Google it if you want to find out more and so now I'm slowly re-adding some junk food but making sure I hit my macros, micros and fibre. I'm now starting to lose some weight! And by increasing your calories slowly you increase you metabolic capacity which means you get a faster metabolism. So now when I want to lose weight I won't be eating 1200. I will be slowly decreasing until I get to a comfortable deficit that doesn't include starvation. Do your research. It might be metabolic damage. So instead of eating less and doing hours of cardio, do the opposite! Eat more and do HIIT for 20 minutes twice a week. It's all you need. I recommend contacting macrofit.com.au to help you recover if you think this sounds like you.

EDIT: By the way, only re-adding some junk food to keep mental health in check and to quit the binge cycle. It was definitely my downfall.

foleyshirley

We will have to agree to disagree. She is overdoing it on the cardio IMO, and not eating enough to compensate. I would keep up the weight lifting, and dial down the cardio. And start logging again.

Five to seven hours of low intensity cardio for exercise a week is not overdoing it. Not even close. At 38, she can easily handle 3x that much by this time next year if she exercises regularly and puts 100% effort into her workouts. I know she said high intensity but she is not yet in shape enough to actually do high intensity anything. What she thinks is high intensity interval training is her body getting tired at low intensity. It's called building a base, and it's hard and it sucks, but it's not high intensity.

The idea that you can somehow do too much cardio by getting off the couch for 7 hours a week is just an excuse to not exercise.

Weight lifting burns very few calories. It's good to do because it makes you look better at a given weight, but it will not accomplish weight loss. It's also a fast way to get injured if you don't know what you're doing, and if you replace cardio with weight lifting you are sabotaging weight loss goals.

She can be overdoing it if she is not eating enough. If she wants to keep it up, great. But I still think she would need to try upping her calories a bit.

Lleldiranne

I've been there. Just this year, in fact. I reset my ticker in January … and I haven't logged the weight I've gained since then (I think it would be at a gain of 2 pounds from the beginning of the year right now). I *think* I've started to break through the plateau, I've lost a couple of pounds in August, but it could still be fluctuation.

Anyway, I hope my experience helps … here's what I've done.

I took a few months off of logging. I even kind of fell of the exercise bandwagon. I think that's why I gained ~ 5 pounds from January. (It may seem like no big deal, but I'm 5 feet nuthin' so … yeah). But maybe my body needed a break, and for sure my mind did. So it's all good in the long run.

Since the beginning of August I've joined a gym and started lifting heavy. I've been lifting 4 days a week, with 1-2 days of cardio (running/walking/Just Dance game, etc) and 1 rest day a week. I estimated my TDEE by going to 5 or 6 websites, including Scooby's, and then taking an average of what they gave (they were all probably within 200-300 calories of each other anyway) and manually set my calories to 80% of that. My goal is to not eat my exercise calories, since TDEE already takes that into account (and the nice thing is that now I don't have to worry if they're overestimated or not). I've started measuring a whole lot more, although I still don't have a food scale (hey, everything is an estimate anyway, food labels are even allowed to be 5% off or something, so I figure it comes out in the end as long as I am reasonably accurate in measuring by volume … but a lot of people wouldn't agree with me there).

In the first week that I started this I GAINED a pound. In the second week, I was up another pound. But I kept with it. Starting a new lifting regimen probably caused my muscles to retain water. I made sure to drink at least 8 glasses of water. I made sure to track everything I ate, even if I knew i was going over or I would be embarrassed for my friends to see that in my diary. And then, over the last two weeks, I've lost all of that gain, and then some. Things look to be going in the right direction. And I'm already feeling better. Oh, and I also had my bf% measured, and will measure again this week … it may be a better indicator.

TL;DR
Consider taking a break from being so strict in logging and exercise. Consider TDEE -20% method with heavy lifting and less cardio. After the break, stick with it even if you don't see results right away.

Hope that helps!

Emglyfolk

REALLY? "5'8" tall and weigh 130 pounds & BMR is 21"....... what are you worried about? Is this a joke? How thin do you want to be?
I was same height and weight in my 20's and was bone thin. My goal now is 150 and I've lost 2 inches of height over the years...

ktsimons

REALLY? "5'8" tall and weigh 130 pounds & BMR is 21"....... what are you worried about? Is this a joke? How thin do you want to be?
I was same height and weight in my 20's and was bone thin. My goal now is 150 and I've lost 2 inches of height over the years...

just sayn'