Why is it so hard sometimes

mommabearbrandy4

I haven't been logging, bad I know, but I have lost 14 pounds in 3 weeks. I have no idea how, but im not complaining. I don't understand how at times the weight just sheds off, and at others it's like fighting tooth and nail!

AnnPT77

One thing I'd say: Keep in mind that when most of us want to lose weight, what we really want to lose is fat. Our bodies have things that have weight, besides our fat.

Most significant: A human body can be up to 60% water, maybe more in some cases. That's a biiiig chunk of weight!

Water retention shifts can be several pounds from one day to the next, up or down. They're part of how a healthy body stays healthy, so we don't want to interfere with or try to micromanage that: Better just to understand it.

Also, food in our digestive tract on the way to the toilet has weight, too. If I drink a pint of soda, coffee, tea - even one with zero calories - I gain a pound immediately from that water content. An apple that weighs 150 grams or so (third of a pound) in my hand weighs the same in my stomach until all that fiber and such passes through my system.

On the flip side, even a pretty aggressively fast fat loss rate of two pounds a week averages about 4.6 ounces of weight per day, just a bit over a quarter pound.

The inescapable result is that water and waste fluctuations of several pounds daily are going to play peek-a-boo on the bodyweight scale with that much more gradual rate of fat loss. That's if calorie intake, activity and eating patterns are reasonably consistent day to day. If there's more variability in those, it can be even more up and down looking, even when fat loss is actually going OK.

I'm betting that kind of thing is behind feeling like sometimes weight sheds fast, and other times it's frustratingly slow going.

If you'd like to understand that better, the thread below - especially the article linked in the first post - is really informative, and possibly reassuring:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10683010/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-fluctuations

You're doing a smart thing in looking at it over the whole 3 weeks. It's the multi-week trend of bodyweight that helps us see whether we're gradually losing fat. I'd say 4-6 weeks to get a reasonable trend-line, or if you're a person who has menstrual cycles, it makes sense to compare bodyweight at the same relative point in at least two different cycles (because hormonal water weight shifts potentially can be dramatic).

In general, most successful weight loss efforts - in terms of daily or weekly weigh-ins, say - will look like a bumpy track of ups and downs, but with an overall downward slope. It's kind of like the smaller rises/falls you might experience when walking down a big but uneven-ground hill.

Here's what a small time-chunk of my initial weight loss looked like, toward the end of the loss process - the circles at the ends of the vertical lines are individual daily weigh-ins:

Here's what the whole thing looks like if I zoom out to see just the long-term trend:

Those little bump-lets in the first chart pretty much disappear in the second one. Kinda crazy, huh?

Fourteen pounds in 3 weeks - over 4 and a half pounds per week - if that trend continues - would actually be very fast, maybe too fast for best health unless a person is well over 400 pounds to start.

However, 3 weeks absolutely is too soon to tell. Many people will drop a big chunk of water weight in the first week or two on a new routine, then water retention will rebalance over the subsequent weeks - looking like a stall on the scale, maybe even. If the first couple of weeks look really odd compared to what follows, I'd even say to ignore those odd start-up weeks, and go for another couple weeks on that routine to get a better average once the initial roller-coaster settles down a bit.

You're doing great, for now. Don't make the process any harder than you need to. Losing any meaningful total amount of weight is a long term process, and choosing a sustainable path makes it easier to get all the way to goal. On top of that, I think weight management isn't a project with an end date: Most people find maintaining harder than the initial loss. That puts a premium on finding new habits that can continue almost on autopilot to not only reach goal weight, but stay there long term. Weight management is a forever endeavor, at least for people like me with a tendency to overweight/obesity. I'm saying that from the perspective of 9+ years maintaining myself.

I'm cheering for you to succeed: IME, the quality of life improvement that results is more than worth the effort it takes to get there. Best wishes!

LiveOnceBeHappy

I thought I'd do it (again) without logging, but then I wasn't consistent. Now I'm back to logging. Yesterday was my first day back! I did 173 lbs to 118 lbs and then went back to 145 lbs. Logging is the only way for me, unfortunately! As the previous response said, the progress is not linear. I learned that the last time. You just have to keep plodding through. That's the tough part: staying consistent with choices and tracking.