Help!!!

MaryEllenT1980

I have been working out and watching what I eat for 3 weeks...
No weight loss at all...
Is this normal???

cmriverside

Are you keeping track of how much you're eating in general? Logging food?

If you're not losing weight for three weeks, eat less or move more or both. Losing weight requires that you intake less than your output.

vivmom2014

How much weight do you have to lose? If it's less than 20 pounds the loss can take a while, and you don't want to choose a drastic calorie goal. Slow loss beats fast loss almost every time.

SuzySunshine99

If you greatly increased your exercise over those 3 weeks, you could also be retaining water, which masks any fat loss.

But, yeah, what does "watching what I eat" mean? Are you keeping track of calories? Because even "healthy" foods can be high in calories.

MaryEllenT1980

I'm eating about 1500-1800 calories a day and working out about an hour five days a week. It is very frustrating
I need to lose about 14 pounds

Mrsrobinsoncl

Have you calculated what you should be eating? Are you tracking your food, weighing it?

tomcustombuilder

MaryEllenT1980 wrote: »

I'm eating about 1500-1800 calories a day and working out about an hour five days a week. It is very frustrating
I need to lose about 14 pounds

that may be too high if it’s 1,800 mostly and that’s if it’s really 1,800 as most people under count so it may be more.

What is your height and weight.

cwolfman13

MaryEllenT1980 wrote: »

I'm eating about 1500-1800 calories a day and working out about an hour five days a week. It is very frustrating
I need to lose about 14 pounds

1800 calories per day is going to be pretty close to maintenance for most women...maybe a slight deficit. Also, what are you doing for your workouts? The truth is that we don't really burn as many calories as we think per our perceived exertion for a workout. We are pretty efficient animals.

MaryEllenT1980

I'm doing Hiit and resistance training mainly. It's closer to 1500 calories most days
I'm 152lbs 5ft 7

Retroguy2000

That's in the healthy BMI range, so you probably don't have much to lose? I see you say 14 pounds.

This link suggests your TDEE is about 2,000, which averages in your weekly workouts to a daily TDEE estimate.

https://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/

So you probably should be losing some weight? Which suggests you're not tracking everything you ingest as well as you suggest. Opening up your diary (it's in the settings somewhere) would enable people to help you more.

Worth noting if you just started doing all this working out, you may be retaining a few pounds more water than normal.

With only a few pounds to lose, you should take measurements of your waist, and pictures, since you may be doing some recomp currently.

AnnPT77

Another thing I haven't seen mentioned: Are you adult, female, not yet in menopause? If so, some women only see a new low weight once a month at a specific point in their monthly cycle, even if they're actually losing fat at a reasonable pace. That's not the most common pattern, but it can happen, and the mechanism is hormone-related water retention. You'll learn your personal patterns if you keep good eating/exercise/weight records over 2-3 cycles.

MaryEllenT1980 wrote: »

I'm doing Hiit and resistance training mainly. It's closer to 1500 calories most days
I'm 152lbs 5ft 7

Those are not great calorie burners in the grand scheme of things, though they can be worth doing for other reasons (and they do burn some calories).

Resistance training drives heart rate up mostly via strain (loosely speaking), not through increased oxygen consumption. It's oxygen consumption that correlates with calorie burn, so people can be misled about the calorie expenditure by heart rate or perceived intensity. It's absolutely still worth doing, for a wealth of reasons.

HIIT - depending on the details - can be a reasonable calorie-burner in per-minute terms, but the duration tends to be self-limiting through intensity/fatigue, if the intensity is truly high. For people whose primary goal is weight loss, it carries a risk of being counterproductive, too - because of the intensity, one can carry fatigue into the rest of one's day, and bleed calories out of daily life activity.

The EPOC (excess post-exercise oxygen consumption, a.k.a. afterburn) is much-trumpeted for HIIT, but there's little sound evidence that the number of calories is arithmetically very important in the big picture. (It's usually expressed as a percentage, and that's a percentage of the calories burned during the exercise itself. Given that true high intensity can be duration self-limiting, the actual number of EPOC calories tends to be underwhelming.) If the HIIT includes a good bit of strength-y bodyweight/calisthenics stuff, the perceived exertion may be partly strain-ish, as with strength training.

LSD (long slow distance) or long LISS/MISS can potentially net more calorie burn if a person has the time budget for it. The total calorie burn can be pretty high (via duration/frequency despite lower per-minute calorie burn), so even a small percentage EPOC can be a bigger absolute number. Also, it tends to have less impact on daily life calorie expenditure, because it's typically less fatiguing. Frequent HIIT also has potential to compromise strength/muscle gains from resistance training, if it interferes with recovery from strength training. (Recovery is where the magic from strength training happens.)

Are you thinking I hate HIIT, maybe don't want to do it? Nah. It has it's place, and after a person has good base fitness in place, it's actually an important place. But HIIT is way over-hyped these days for my tastes. Elite athletes don't train all high intensity all the time (because it doesn't yield best fitness results to do that). It's more of a side dish or condiment in the training menu, not a main dish. I don't know why us regular duffers would want to do HIIT as our main training mode, unless a person just totally loves doing it and recognizes that there are cons as well as pros.

I'm not assuming this is true for you, but as a general observation, some people are misled into thinking HIIT or strength training (or whatever exercise mode) calorie burns are high because an activity is difficult/challenging/exhausting. Perceived intensity is a useful metric in various ways, but comparing calorie burns across disparate activities really isn't one of them.

BrightEyedAgain

So, a couple of things I notice from your posts. You say your calories range from 1500-1800 with HIIT and resistance training. Well I'm a 52F at 5'8" 149lbs, and I usually MAINTAIN right around 1500 not counting exercise. I do strength training 3X/wk with cardio (swimming/elliptical/treadmill) another 2-3X/wk. Usually about 1/2 hr of the cardio. With these workouts, MFP usually gives me about 100 calories per strength session and 120-280 calories for the cardio. I only eat back about 1/2 to 2/3 of those calories to give myself a little breathing room in case I under log something accidentally. So my maintenance range is about the 1500-1800 calories you mention. Therefore, my advice would be to lower your calories about 50-100 calories, log VERY accurately, and don't count all your exercise calories. Even with that, you're close enough to your best weight that you probably shouldn't shoot for more than 0.5 lb/wk of loss.

I'd also suggest you make sure you're getting plenty of protein. MFP's basic estimate is a lot lower than what I've found does best for me, so I shoot for at least 100g protein per day. When I get that, my body seems more willing to lose. I don't know why, but it does. Figuring out my best macro ratios can made a huge difference for me even when the calories remain the same. So you might want to experiment with that aspect of things.

Finally, are you drinking enough water? If not, your body could be holding onto fluids and that could make life harder for you. High salt foods and dehydration have messed up my scale results more than once.

Right now I'm on the high end of my maintenance range from my 144lb goal weight, and I'm trying to get it back down by staying under my 1500 daily goal and eating as few of my exercise calories as possible (without letting myself get too hungry). I've maintained this way for 18 months, so I know what works for me. Hopefully something in all this will help you as well. Good luck!

vivmom2014

OP, you've gotten good information here. I wouldn't worry too much about what your maintenance calories would be as compared to someone else... the important thing is to make sure that you're logging your food and exercise in an accurate manner. Look at the overall trend. 3 weeks feels like a long time when you've put in a lot of work, but if you've got your calories in/calories out working, the weight WILL come off. Keep going!!

MaryEllenT1980

Thank you everyone