Long-time MyFitnessPal tracker

n5fxxd6dfk

I’ve been watching my calories for several years but now am 56, 5’4”and 142 lbs. I’d like to lose 7 lbs. I can’t seem to get below 140 eatin 1200 calories a day.
I recently went down to 900 calories a day plus 30 minutes on the treadmill plus weights. In one week, I only lost one pound.

AnnPT77

It should not be necessary to take calories that low in order to lose weight. A statistically average woman of your demographic details would be expected to lose weight slowly at 1200 calories with a sedentary lifestyle - just the normal home chores and such, minimal or no exercise.

The guess would be losing about half a pound a week, for an average woman in your demographic, if sedentary. From my experience, that half pound weekly would take a few weeks to show up in a person's bodyweight trend line, because it would be masked by bigger routine water retention fluctuations day to day, but it should show up eventually.

How long had you been logging consistently at around your current weight, eating 1200 daily on average, and not seeing the expected weight loss?

It's possible to be statistically unusual, in other words require fewer calories than the average demographically-similar person. But needing to eat 900 in order to lose would be quite unusual. I'm not going to try to evaluate the pound you've lost that week, because a week simply isn't long enough to get a clear picture what's going on.

If the time horizon were longer with a pound a week average loss over 4-6 weeks, at 900 calories, that would be arithmetically inconsistent with zero loss at 1200, so that makes me confused. If a pound a week loss at 900, we'd expect around half a pound a week at 1200 or just an inconsequential amount less than half a pound.

As context, I was around your age when I started using MFP (59) and in menopause already at that point. I'm also about your height, 5'5" in my case, and did weigh the same as your current weight at one point in the process - currently around your goal weight, roughly. I've also had a multi-month time period where I intentionally lost fat very slowly - slower than half a pound a week - to lose a few pounds that had crept on in maintenance, but not wanting to make a major cut. I know how that looks on the bodyweight scale. Sometimes it's invisible for weeks, then there's a sudden drop. 🤷‍♀️

Half a pound a week fat loss would take at least 4 weeks to be sure, maybe more. For many of us, impatience and discouragement kick in before 4 weeks . . . but losing half a pound a week on average means losing 26 pounds in a year, nothing to sneeze at.

Best wishes!