Suggestions on how to keep the weight off ?

AsandaZulu

I’ve been training consistently 3 days a week, 2 days of pilates. i’ve tried several diets, calorie deficit and IF but can’t keep the weight off. It’s been months. i can’t try OMAD as i’m currently breastfeeding. any thoughts?

yirara

Everything just comes down to the amount of calories you consume. Too many calories and you'll gain weight. The type of diet doesn't matter here but consistency over time. A long time and not just a few days. But as you're nursing there are things to consider to keep your milk supply going. I think some people eat at maintenance and the calorie deficit gets created by the milk.

tomcustombuilder

The key to keeping the weight off is once you’ve lost it realizing that you can’t go back to your old eating habits.

Fatloss is a product of a consistent WEEKLY calorie deficit over time. No special diet required.

AnnPT77

Exercise alone won't do it, though exercise is great for a body. (Exercise triggers weight loss when the added calories burned from the exercise cause a calorie deficit, and not otherwise.)

I stayed overweight/obese for around a dozen years training hard 6 days most weeks. Then I lost 50 pounds without materially increasing exercise, and after that have maintained a healthy weight for 8 years doing about the same exercise.

What was the difference? Eating. A few hundred calories daily equalized the calories I burned through exercise, while I stayed fat. A few more hundred calories down from that level, I lost weight at a good clip. At some calorie level in between those two intake levels, I stay at healthy weight. It's that simple, and that hard.

Trendy weight-loss methods (IF, OMAD, low carb, low fat, whatever, whatever) only matter if they help a person hit the right calorie level more easily. The same is true for calorie counting: It's a straightforward way to hit the right calorie level, but it has pros and cons, and it's not the only way to succeed. But any successful method of loss (or maintenance) relies on getting the calorie level right.

Here's the thing about a calorie deficit: We don't know we're in a calorie deficit because MFP, some calorie calculator, or even a fitness tracker says we are. We know we're in a calorie deficit when our body and our scale tell us we are, looking at our weight trend over 4-6 weeks (whole menstrual cycles for those who have them).

It's those 4-6 week averages that tell the story: Lose over 4-6 weeks, we're in a calorie deficit. Gain over 4-6 weeks, we're in a calorie surplus. Hold more or less steady for 4-6 weeks, and we're maintaining.

In any of those scenarios, the scale weight from one day to the next will be up and down, sometimes even from one week to the next. That's just not enough time to see a reasonable average. Our bodies can be 50-70% water. That water fluctuates by multiple pounds/kilos daily for multiple reasons. Those fluctuations are part of how a healthy body stays healthy, so a sensible person doesn't want to mess with that, but simply understand it. On top of that, digestive contents (i.e., waste on the way to the exit) can vary by multiple pounds/kilos daily, too.

By contrast, even fast fat loss (2 pounds a week) is only around 4.6 ounces per day. (Kilo a week: Around 143g daily.) That's going to play peek-a-boo on the bodyweight scale with the multi-pound or multi-kilo water/waste fluctuations for a long time.

Occasionally (because reasons) it can take more than 4-6 weeks (or more than one menstrual cycle) to see the trend accurately. But in most cases, that'll do.

To complicate matters, our calorie needs aren't a fixed thing. Human bodies are dynamic, i.e., calories in affects calories out. Eat too little, and calorie burn decreases. (Think of that as subtle or obvious fatigue, so moving less, but it's more complicated in reality.) Eat too little for a long time, and the body adopts conservation methods that can lower calorie needs below expected needs for a long time, maybe permanently. The key thing is still calories, though. There's a sweet spot where we can achieve our goals in the least difficult way.

In particular, in your case as a post-partum woman who's still breastfeeding, your calorie needs may vary over time more than the average person's. It might take more than 6 weeks or one menstrual cycle. In the immediate post-partum time period, for a few weeks or so, maybe some months, there's healing going on. That requires extra calories. Once the healing is pretty well complete, your calorie needs would be expected to drop a bit again. Your milk supply may vary for various reasons. That varies your calorie needs. And so forth. This is likely to make finding maintenance calories a bit more difficult.

Most successful maintainers here seem to set a maintenance weight range of a few pounds. One way to think of that is to pick limits a bit outside of normal daily fluctuations. If I figure my daily weight is going to be +/- 2.5 pounds from random water/waste fluctuations, I'd maybe set a 6-pound range. If I get to the upper bound and stay there a few days, time to cut back a little. If I get to the low bound and stay there a few days, maybe time to eat a little more. And so forth. In your scenario, for now you may need a bigger range, and a gentler eat less/eat more increment, in order to preserve milk supply.

Give yourself some grace, and some room for weight fluctuation. Things should settle down more and get more predictable as the baby grows and you're no longer breast feeding.

Best wishes!