Frustrated and I don't know what to do.

tmoneyag99

I'm 47years old 5'3" 249lbs woman. Up 15 since 2020 but down 5 since November. I'm trying to be proud of what I have accomplished so far. I don't know why this weight isn't coming off.

Cleaned up eating... Check. Average day is between 1500-1700 Calories
Moving more .... Check. Ive gone from 1,300 steps max daily to an average of 7,000 steps daily. Some days as many as 10,000.


You would think that I would have lost more than 5lbs in 3 months. WTF is wrong here?!?!

My doctor wants to put me on ozempic. He doesn't understand that I don't have an appetite problem. My eating is squared away. I don't binge. I don't drink heavily. I don't smoke. We cook at home, I make sure that I don't eat more than a single serving. When I eat I eat at my table.

Snacks are always fruits and nuts IF I eat them. I drink water and not soda. I have even cut out coffee.

csplatt

What do you mean by "average day"? Do you mean most days you hit your deficit, but not all days? Can you open your diary and make it public so we can take a look at what kind of entries you are selecting?

csplatt

Ok I actually could access your diary. Here's what I'm seeing: lots of blank days where you're not tracking your food. Some generic entries (sushi, slices of pizza) that are likely inaccurate because they're not an actual measurement of what you actually ate. They're online estimates / generic entries created by other people.

I went all the way back to the beginning of January - most days are blank.

Do you ever roast vegetables with a drizzle of olive oil? Easy to measure because you can weigh it in grams on a food scale. Grill chicken or shred it in a crock pot?

tmoneyag99

Yes. What you see on today's is very similar to the normal. That breakfast... it's my daily. Lunch too.

Only really vary dinner with the family. We have a salad with ACV vinagrette. Example the butter chicken I made with coconut milk.

In December, We also completely cut out pizza Night. Friday nights were our pizza nights. DH and I would share a large pizza and I usually only had 3 slices. Even then no extras. No sodas, no chips. Once we were done the pizza got thrown out even if there was anything left.

This whole week we alternated between deconstructed egg roll in a bowl, Barbacoa Tacos (only 2 tacos per meal for me) and a serving of butter chicken.

Dinner tonight Will be spaghetti.
Whole Wheat pasta
Homemade Sauce with no sugar added.
Sauce has 1lb 93/7 ground beef
zucchini
mushrooms
shredded carrots
5 Tomatoes
black olives

Bowls used hold 2cups of water filled to the max.

csplatt

What's tricky about homemade meaty sauce is you won't really be able to accurately log how many ounces of beef YOU consumed unless you make your serving first (by itself), then make the family pot. The pasta you can weigh dry on a food scale then boil separately so it's not boiled with the family's (2 ounces dry, according to most boxes). Then you can weigh your zucchini and mushrooms and beef (instead of guessing based on how much you scoop from the family pot). When my family does spaghetti -- if I'm in a deficit -- I make my serving sauce early / separately so I can weigh what went into it. It's a hassle. But that's how I know I was actually in a deficit.

tmoneyag99

I just back into it. 1lb of meat. 3 people. DH and DS usually eat 2 servings and I eat 1 leaving 2 servings for DS the following night.

there are 1327 kCal in a pound. That's roughly 265 per serving. Tomato sauce is roughly 140/can so 28.

Increase the total by 50% for all the veggies. - a rough estimate of 439 total sauce calories. round up for 500 kcal

csplatt

This is probably what's going on with your frustration, though. There are tighter ways to be certain about exactly how much of a deficit you are or are not in.

samgettingfit25

It sounds like you've made positive changes. I would echo the recommendation for more accuracy tracking food (if possible) - ideally, weigh it with a food scale and enter your recipes. I find sometimes I overestimate, sometimes I underestimate how much of something I ate. The good thing about a food scale is you can zero it with something on it (like a plate or bowl) so you can train your eye at the same time as logging the weight of the food item. Also, there are fewer measuring cups and spoons to clean with this method.

About Ozempic... I can't say whether it's right for you and it certainly isn't popular on these forums. It doesn't just control appetite. It was developed and is FDA approved to improve blood sugar regulation and insulin sensitivity. They found appetite control and weight loss was a side affect for many users (not everyone even loses weight on the lower doses). There are other drugs approved with the same active ingredient but a higher dose prescribed specifically for weight loss like Wegovy. It can help some people in ways beyond appetite control, but like any drug, it really isn't for everyone. I would encourage asking your doctor why they suggested it, do you have PCOS, Type 2 diabetes, pre-diabetes? If that is why the doctor suggested it, you may also want to look at how many sugar/carbs you are eating, hormones, etc.

PAV8888

I have to say that I'm impressed with you in terms of all the stuff you're already doing.

I sort of keyed on your current weight because it was the one I was at when I first joined MFP. And I was doing the same thing as you in terms of movement too in terms of increasing. Had to actually reduce my deficits to make things more sustainable at the time but that's a different story!

You're doing so many things right and you're maybe only a step or two from getting even more insight on yourself so you can make the best decisions for yourself.

Knowing my old self when evaluating a meal of pasta and sauce most of the calories used to come from the pasta, not the sauce.

And in the sauce most of the calories that I could painlessly shed came from the olive oil I was adding, and not the meat, especially if I used extra lean beef or turkey ground. ((The issue of dealing with draining the fat while cooking ground is a real tough one. My solution involves either not draining extra lean or using cooked "rinced after cooking" entries.))

The point being that you're close to but maybe still a step removed from knowing enough about what you're eating to enable yourself to make relatively painless but meaningful choices to reducing calories without generating too much privation.

The goal is to "by hook and by crook but as painlessly as possible" create a reasonable and sustainable deficit. It is not to eliminate evil this or evil that food if you can make it fit. But to figure out how to maximize what you can get out of your caloric budget.

One solution is the one advocated by @csplatt above: prepare your stuff separately.

Another is to keep written track of every single ingredient (including spices because even if they say they're zero Cal, they probably are not in sufficient quantities) that goes in your pot: 475g lean meat, 6g oil from the spray, 780g tomatoes, 200g tomato paste, 3g oregano, 7g lemon pepper, 11g Knorr cube, who knows what else..... and then measure the finished product: 1013g. Then you can just weigh what goes on your plate as a percentage of the finished product.

Similarly for pasta. You may have cooked 300g of pasta. Instead of eye balling your portions, just measure your total finished pasta weight after straining which will be somewhere between 600g and 750g and then you will know what percent of the original 300g of dry pasta the 207g of cooked portion you plated was.

Knowing that you can then evaluate if you would rather eat your sauce on 207g of pasta, or whether you might prefery to eat it on 200g of cooked rice, or 100g cooked rice and 500g of cauliflower rice, or just on 500g of cauliflower rice or just on 90g of bread! or on 400g of spaghetti squash or on spiral cut carrots, or beets, or zucchini or over a 250g baked "jacket" potato!!!! Or how you want to cook your sauce, in terms of the ingredients that you choose to use.

Nothing wrong with snacks. Especially nothing wrong with fruits and nuts. But, they do need to be weighed. If nothing else it will help you make awesome decisions! Do you know how much watermelon you could actually eat for very few calories? Almonds or peanuts or cashews (my favorites) not as many! Weigh the nuts and log them before you eat them.:

You're close. But a reasonable (not too small and not too large) deficit is sometimes tricky to establish.

A totally different way to go about things is to continue exactly as you have. But with a small difference.

You know your dates and how often you weight yourself. I advocate daily and using a weight trend app. But you said 3 months deficit and 5 lbs down.

So that's 90 days and 17500 Cal of effective deficit (about 3500 Cal per lb) as per your scale. So about 200 Cal of effective deficit a day. Regardless of what your "expected" deficit was.

Whatever your average intake (which you can't know unless you log every day), you could reduce it by 200 Cal more, as an example. And then you would be another 10lbs down in another 3 months everything else being equal. Far from nothing: that would be a 40lb a year pace.

I think, however, that my first suggestion is more powerful in that it can provide you with information that will allow you to make more effective and painless decisions as opposed to just "powering" through.

hawaiimaui

Check out this link from bodybuilding.com. https://shop.bodybuilding.com/blogs/tools-and-calculators/how-many-calories-should-you-eat-per-day

I put in your stats and selected “moderately active” due to your increased walking. Here’s what it came back with. Hope this helps.

podperson1

I'm talking absolute averages here, as obviously I don't know your personal details.
But a female in their 40s burns an average of 1800 calories a day. Let's take the mid-point of your calorie goal and say you're intaking 1600 a day. That's a deficit of 200 calories a day.
Again, taking an average, you need about 3500 deficit to lose 1lb. So it would take you 17.5 days at that rate, which would make it 90 days or 3 months to lose 5lbs. So pretty much exactly on the money.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with losing at a slow and steady rate, but if you want quicker results then I think sadly the options are cut your calories or add more aerobic exercise.

We have pretty similar stats, I'm in my 40s, 5ft2, and started at 240lbs. My daily calories are 1200 and if I plan it well then I can get quite a bit for that. I'm not saying you have to go that low but maybe see if you can cut another 100 off your daily and see if that gives you a boost?

tmoneyag99

@podperson1 thanks for your response. That is very helpful.

Regarding the early post from @samgettingfit25 The only thing making me a candidate for ozempic is my obesity. No diabetes. No PCOS (that I know of) No insulin resistance. No high cholesterol. Great blood pressure/heart readings.

I'm just fat. And every medical professional in the world is prescribing it. What I have seen from people who are absolutely NOT candidates (I know a woman who is ~150, 5'8" that took it) on it and based on their raves it is absolutely medically supported anorexia for those people. ie eating 1 chicken nugget and not hungry the rest of the day. I refuse to take it unless I'm legitimately a candidate.

elisa123gal

I'm not saying go on ozempic. but I do know it isn't just an appetite suppressant. It creates a biological environment for your body to shed weight. Diabetics are put on it, more because it reduces their markers...weight loss is a side benefit. My husband is on that.. he eats healthy like one would on a diet. But, for the first time in his struggling weight life.. he is losing with some element of control.

sarahblain19

From what I've read you have made some.amazing progress. I started in Wegovy and was wondering why I was only losing 500g then I started with MFP and started to log everything and I was actually eating to much so I cut down the amount I was eating. If you can scan the barcode that should help more. Just keep up at it. Also any "fat" lost could also be starting to turn into muscle. Have you started taking any measurements?

avatiach

Logging carefully seems to me to be the most powerful tool. I don’t think you have to weigh everything. You could skip weighing the vegetables—whether you eat one cup or three cups of zucchini won’t affect your weight loss.

And sometimes you can make a game of weighing—see how good your estimating is!

AnnPT77

tmoneyag99 wrote: »

@podperson1 thanks for your response. That is very helpful.

Regarding the early post from @samgettingfit25 The only thing making me a candidate for ozempic is my obesity. No diabetes. No PCOS (that I know of) No insulin resistance. No high cholesterol. Great blood pressure/heart readings.

I'm just fat. And every medical professional in the world is prescribing it. What I have seen from people who are absolutely NOT candidates (I know a woman who is ~150, 5'8" that took it) on it and based on their raves it is absolutely medically supported anorexia for those people. ie eating 1 chicken nugget and not hungry the rest of the day. I refuse to take it unless I'm legitimately a candidate.

It should not be necessary to take it. Many people have lost weight here without the drugs. I'm not saying it's better or more virtuous or anything like that not to use the drugs, just that they're not universally necessary. It appears, from posts here, that whatever their mechanism of action, the main way they help weight loss is by making appetite more manageable subjectively. That is not to say that they lack other benefits for some, benefits a PP pointed out.

In general, I agree with those saying that if you can tighten up logging practices, that will give you more reliable information. But I do agree with PAV and Podperson1 that if weight loss over that long a period of months is slower than you'd like, and there's an achievable faster but still sensible loss rate, the solution is probably to either reduce calorie intake, or add some non-fatiguing additional activity (intentional exercise or daily life activity, doesn't matter which).

sarahblain19 wrote: »

From what I've read you have made some.amazing progress. I started in Wegovy and was wondering why I was only losing 500g then I started with MFP and started to log everything and I was actually eating to much so I cut down the amount I was eating. If you can scan the barcode that should help more. Just keep up at it. Also any "fat" lost could also be starting to turn into muscle. Have you started taking any measurements?

That's a great insight, that tracking highlights what needs to happen calorie-wise on the food side, while the drug helps manage appetite and the response to food.

One caution: Barcodes aren't necessarily more accurate than looking up foods in MFP by typing into the search box. Nearly all the data is crowd-sourced - entered by regular MFP users - including the bar code data. It isn't a direct pipeline to accurate information from the manufacturers. Some users don't enter things accurately, bar code or not.

I appreciate it when someone is trying to be reassuring, but unfortunately muscle growth is always slow, and slower in a calorie deficit. Even in a calorie surplus, a really good added muscle mass rate would be a pound a month for women, two pounds a month for men. (Strength gain can be faster, but that's from better recruiting/using existing muscle fiber, not adding new muscle.) Sadly, no realistic speed of muscle mass gain is going to outpace what most people would consider satisfying fat loss, when it comes to scale weight.

Personally, I wish muscle gain were easier and faster, and I don't want to discourage anyone from working on it . . . but I also want people to succeed with their weight-loss goals, which includes being clear-eyed about what's going on.

samgettingfit25

Thanks for the replies @tmoneyag99 and @AnnPT77

In my original post I certainly wasn't intending that everyone should take those (or any particular) drugs. It was partially a response this part of the OP's OP:
"My doctor wants to put me on ozempic. He doesn't understand that I don't have an appetite problem. My eating is squared away. I don't binge. I don't drink heavily. I don't smoke. We cook at home, I make sure that I don't eat more than a single serving. When I eat I eat at my table."

From that quote, it sounded to me like the OP thought all GLP-1 does is reduce appetite, which isn't true for people with certain medical issues. From the OP's response, I agree it doesn't sound like it would be worth the risk of side effects for her. (Since her blood work is healthy, she has good insulin sensitivity, and no issues with appetite control). I asked about the doctor's rationale for suggesting it because some people dismiss the suggestion because of the current stigma about taking GLP-1 meds even if it might be beneficial for their medical needs.

patriciafoley1

I qualified due to type 2 diabetes to being on ozempic or whatever, but I had heard anecdotal reports of bad side effects of it (stomach paralysis, even when the drug is stopped, etc). And also anecdotal reports that when you go off the drug, you gain the weight back. Not worth it for me. I told the Phys. Asst. I would rather go with diet and exercise first. This was in October. I've gone on a 1200 cal a day diet, walk between 10K and (lately) 20K steps a day, and eat a few exercise calories back some days. I have lost about 35 lbs since then. And I'm 5.4 and 68. I keep track of calories burned and steps with a fitbit, and log the meal on MFP. So you can lose with just diet and exercise, but you might have to cut calories more. I'm also low carb. I try to stay around 50 to, on bad days, 100 grams of carbs a day, as trying to lower my blood sugar. Presently 162, so about 20 pounds more to go to be at the high end of ideal weight.