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smith61867927
smith61867927 Posts: 1 Member
in Introduce Yourself

Hi,

My name is Heather and I’m 58. I started MFP 3 weeks ago in an effort to take off 10 pds that I had regained. I’m not a newbie to weight loss and consider myself pretty well informed about the do’ and don’t. I measure my food with an electric scale and log every bite. I weight train 4 day a week followed by cardio, on the other two days I do abs and cardio with 1 day of rest. The weight started to come off, down 4 pounds and now it’s going up. I eat 1350 base and about 1/3 to 1/2 of my exercise calories. What am I doing wrong?

I also consume between 110 - 150 grams of protein daily


thanks for reading and any insights :)

Heather

Replies

  • Fursian
    Fursian Posts: 632 Member

    Hi Heather, that all sounds good, to me. The only thing I can think of that it might be is if the exercise is new, it's brought along with it some water retention.

    I'd opt for hanging tight for a few more weeks, and keep doing what you've been doing.

  • MichelleGleason3672
    MichelleGleason3672 Posts: 2 Member

    Hi Heather! You may be gaining dense muscle mass as you lose fat… muscle burns even more fat, so don't be disheartened. You're doing EVERYTHING! It will show on your body before the scale. I used a measuring tape instead of a scale, using every measurement i could so I'd lose inches at a time!

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 37,225 Community Helper

    Hello and welcome to the Community side of MFP!

    I agree with the post suggesting it's about water retention - high odds. It's normal to lose a few pounds quickly - 4 pounds in a couple weeks is quick - and to have part of that be lost water retention, then in the next weeks the water rebalances and the scale stalls or goes up. (Oddly, the opposite is also common, stall up front then a sudden drop: People vary.)

    I think hanging in there with this routine is the best plan, for now. At minimum, once you have at least 4-6 weeks of results data to average - whole menstrual cycles if you still have those - you'll get the information you need to personalize your calorie goal based on results. That's really powerful information to have, IME.

    Water weight is some weird stuff. I don't know if you're in menopause yet at 58, but if not hormonal cycles can result in big water-weight fluctuations, as can peri-menopause. New exercise is also a common source of multi-pound water retention, and it's not clear from your post when you started on this heavy an exercise load. (BTW, overdoing exercise can be counter-productive for weight loss, so if all of that is new, I'd suggest you give that some thought.) There are a bunch of other things that can increase water retention, too: Stress, minor injury/infection/illness, allergies kicking in, and more. Water fluctuations can differ at different phases of life for other reasons, too, so your past dieting experience may not be definitive when it comes to this.

    Sadly, there is negligible muscle mass gain in 3 weeks, especially if any of these apply: Not a youth, in a calorie deficit, new to strength training (early gains are from better recruiting/utilizing existing muscle). As an older woman myself, how I wish it were otherwise! A pound a month of muscle mass gain would be a good result for a woman, and that would be when young, with favorable genetics, eating in a calorie surplus, and more. In general, no satisfying rate of fat loss will be hidden on the scale by any realistic amount of muscle-mass gain in the short run.

    Coincidentally, I started here at about your age (59), but with lots more weight to lose (about 50 pounds). That took just under a year, and I've been in maintenance at a healthy weight for 9+ years since, after being overweight to obese most of my adult life. Losing weight IME can be a bumpy ride in terms of ups and downs on the scale, but if the many-multi-week trend is downward, we're on the right track. A big deal IMO is finding new habits we can continue long term to stay at a healthy weight, and it sounds like you're doing well with that.

    Besides that - and none of this is an accusation, BTW - common issues are overestimating exercise calories, not logging every bite/lick/taste/condiment/drink/cheat meal/oopsie or picking lowball entries, over-reacting quickly to the water weight weirdness, differing from the generic average calorie goals the apps/trackers start us out with, over-exercising to the point of fatigue that bleeds calorie burn out of the rest of the day, and more. Those may not apply to you at all, but they're common roadblocks I've seen threads discuss in my nearly 10 years here.

    I think you can break through this, but persistence and patience will be good helpers.

    Best wishes!

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