Why can't I lose weight?

tishie1

tomcustombuilder wrote: »

Height and weight?

5 ft 6 and 168 pounds

tishie1

AnnPT77 wrote: »

OP, you were losing pretty slowly on average in the first place, averaging around 1/3 pound per week. That's not a bad thing at all.

But - since you haven't given us the relevant info to really assess sensibly - it seems like one very plausible explanation is that you're now eating maintenance calories, if the stall has been for a month or more.

Normally, when someone says they've stalled, I'd ask whether they were losing at a good rate and stopped losing suddenly, or if instead their loss gradually tapered off.

If sudden change, without an equally sudden change in eating or activity (either exercise or daily life stuff), the somewhat more likely explanation is increased water retention. The reason may not be obvious, and yes in some scenarios it can last for weeks.

On the other hand, if loss tapers off gradually then stalls, the odds go up that the explanation is that the person has found their maintenance calories. (Real world experience trumps any calorie calculator when it comes to defining maintenance calories.)

That's why I'm saying what I am. You can lose more. How to do that? You'd need to give us more details, but right now I'd be shooting in the dark.

I was losing steadily for about 9 months. Then, I had a consultation with a supposedly excellent dietician who told me weight doesn't matter at all and to eat whatever I felt like all the time. I gained 5 pounds in 6 weeks. Then, I quit consulting her and went back to trying to lose weight. I lost the 5 pounds gained due to the dietician, but couldn't lose anything after that. I eat around 1650 calories a day and workout out 3 times a week, with 1 hrs walk a day.

kshama2001

There are mistakes that people commonly make that cause them to not lose weight that we might be able to spot if you change your Diary Sharing settings to Public. In the app, go to Settings > Diary Setting > Diary Sharing > and check Public. Desktop: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/diary_settings

ninerbuff

The body likes homeostasis and to try to get below that will usually mean being on a tighter diet. Usually lower body fat levels are harder to achieve when the body starts to sense it getting under certain percentages. It can be done, but there has to be a good plan in place as well as consistency and discipline.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 35+ years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

AnnPT77

tishie1 wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

OP, you were losing pretty slowly on average in the first place, averaging around 1/3 pound per week. That's not a bad thing at all.

But - since you haven't given us the relevant info to really assess sensibly - it seems like one very plausible explanation is that you're now eating maintenance calories, if the stall has been for a month or more.

Normally, when someone says they've stalled, I'd ask whether they were losing at a good rate and stopped losing suddenly, or if instead their loss gradually tapered off.

If sudden change, without an equally sudden change in eating or activity (either exercise or daily life stuff), the somewhat more likely explanation is increased water retention. The reason may not be obvious, and yes in some scenarios it can last for weeks.

On the other hand, if loss tapers off gradually then stalls, the odds go up that the explanation is that the person has found their maintenance calories. (Real world experience trumps any calorie calculator when it comes to defining maintenance calories.)

That's why I'm saying what I am. You can lose more. How to do that? You'd need to give us more details, but right now I'd be shooting in the dark.

I was losing steadily for about 9 months. Then, I had a consultation with a supposedly excellent dietician who told me weight doesn't matter at all and to eat whatever I felt like all the time. I gained 5 pounds in 6 weeks. Then, I quit consulting her and went back to trying to lose weight. I lost the 5 pounds gained due to the dietician, but couldn't lose anything after that. I eat around 1650 calories a day and workout out 3 times a week, with 1 hrs walk a day.

@tishie1, how long has it been since your 5 pound gain and reloss, i.e., how long has your weight loss stalled at your current weight?

With a weight loss rate as slow as you'd been experiencing, it's very possible for water weight weirdness to mask fat loss on the scale for multiple weeks, a month or potentially more, depending on other factors that might increase water retention. Some of those possible factors have been mentioned on the thread, I think, but you can learn about other possible ones in this article:

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

Some water retention rebalancing could be triggered by that gain and re-loss.

If it's been less than 4-6 weeks (or so) that you've been stalled at your current weight, one valid option would be to wait it out, frustrating as that sounds, and see if the scale starts dropping again.

My estimate of your effective average daily calorie deficit, when you lost 13 pounds in 9 months, would be about 181 calories. (I disagree with a PP about the math.)

I'll show my work, which is a rough estimate. With about 4 weeks in a month, 9 months is about 36 weeks. 13 pounds loss in 36 weeks is about 0.36 pounds per week (13 divided by 36). 0.36 pounds loss would imply a weekly average calorie deficit of about 1264 calories (0.36 times roughly 3500 calories in a pound of fat - 3500 being a more common estimate IMU than PP's 3700). That would be a deficit of 1264 per week, divided by 7 days in a week, or 181 calories of daily deficit on average, approximately. Just to be clear, I'm rounding the numbers I type here, but calculating with the full decimal places.

I don't know your age, but if you're 30, a TDEE calculator** would estimate that the average woman your size would have a TDEE of about 1800-some calories if sedentary, or maybe 2100-2200 with the 3 workouts and daily walking. Your loss experience at 1650 + 181 implies a maintenance TDEE of 1831, which doesn't seem so far out of the realm of possibility. We're each individuals, not each statistically average. (MFP estimates my calorie needs several hundred calories off from my real-life experience over 8 years of logging and weight management experience. That's extreme, but not impossible.)

** I used this one:

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

I agree with PP that you would've lost about 100 calories of TDEE from smaller body size (at your starting weight vs. current weight), all other things being equal. That's kind of just an error margin around the estimates from your past weight loss, not something precise.

It's even possible that you've found your maintenance calories at 1650, though that would be a somewhat statistically rare possibility, too. If you think that could be the case, the right strategy would be to cut calorie goal a little more, add some exercise duration/frequency/intensity, or increase daily life activity. Other MFP-ers share their ideas for that last thing in this thread:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10610953/neat-improvement-strategies-to-improve-weight-loss/p1

So, depending on your intuitions about what's happening, you could hang in there for a few weeks, or you could shift your calorie balance. I think those are the realistic options.

Best wishes!