Middle age is a bear! I swear!

cherdesigner

Greetings,

I started this app on May30th. I set my weight loss to 1 pound per week. I went from 143lb to 140lb. I stopped at 140lb and my body refuses to lose any more weight; my goal is 134lb. This makes me angry because, most days, I don’t go over my calories. I even weight lift. Maybe I should walk more. I am a 45 year old lady. Back in 2017 I did this calorie counting thing and had huge success. In 2017 I got down to 130lb. Now it’s a huge struggle and ordeal just to lose one stinking pound. Back in my 20s I used to be in the low 120s, lol. As far as gaining weight? That became so easy once I hit 45. With not much effort I got up to 147lb and probably would have continued to gain weight if I would have let myself. I was 143lbs when starting this app. Middle age, such a bear.
Maybe I need to be more patient. Maybe weight lifting is making me gain but I do smaller weights and my clothes fit the same so…

Lietchi

We need a clearer time-line here:

• 3 lbs lost in what period?
• No further change since when?
• How long have you been doing weights?

Other info that would be relevant: height, how many calories consumed, are you weighing everything you eat and checking that you are using accurate food database entries?

cherdesigner

From May 30th till June 13th I lost 3lbs. I haven’t lost Anything this last two weeks. I started using MyFitnessPal on May 30th. I have been weight lifting since April 1st. I am 5’5” and 45 years old.

I have a food scale and I have been trying my hardest to measure and weigh everything I eat. I even track the “bad” days I go over. I only have two “bad” days a week where I go over 400 calories over. I get 1536 calories a day where I’m aloud to eat. I think it’s perimenopause.

Lietchi

So 3 lbs in 2 weeks and then 2 weeks with no losses? (You're weighing weekly, not daily?)

It seems very normal to me - weight loss isn't linear, it has ups and downs. When you go more than a month without any loss, then you can start to troubleshoot about changing your strategy, but IMHO it's too early for that.

Perimenopause could play a role, yes, but perhaps not the way you think: the main reason that weight-loss isn't linear is because of water weight fluctuations and one of the causes of water weight fluctuations is hormonal fluctuations.

It's just water, but it can mask fat loss on the scale, requiring a bit more patience to see progress.

AnnPT77

In addition to what Lietchi said, with which I agree, I'd underscore that the calorie goal MFP gives us is just an estimate, basically the average of people in a similar demographic category based on the information we put in our MFP profile. Most people are close to average, but some can be noticeably or even in rare cases surprisingly far off. (MFP's pre-exercise calorie estimate for me is off by literally hundreds of calories daily, as compared to nearly 10 years so far of logging eating and scale weight. That's rare to be that far off, but it can happen.)

Whether we're close to average or not can change over our lifespan, too.

However, as Lietchi said, temporary scale stalls are a common thing, and they aren't necessarily halts in fat loss. Water retention changes and varied amounts of waste in the digestive tract can have multi-pound impacts on scale weight. I agree with her that 2 weeks is probably too short to make it reasonable to make some radical change. Maybe give it a bit more time?

BTW, perimenopause is a phase where water retention shifts can be more unpredictable, too.

If you're weighing weekly as Lietchi is assuming . . . well, there were times during loss when if I had weighed weekly rather than daily, I would've caught random high days, missed the low day(s) that week, and thought I was stalled or gaining. I'm not saying that's happening for you, but it's a possibility if weighing infrequently. I don't think there's anything wrong if a person choose to weigh weekly rather than daily, but I think it's useful to keep the pros and cons in mind for any weighing schedule we chose, and missing seeing low days would be a possible con of weekly weighing.

FWIW, eating 400 over an accurate pound a week deficit goal on 2 days a week will "cost" about a pound of weight loss every 8-9 weeks. If having the high days help you stick with the process, that's a small price to pay IMO, but that's another thing it's good to be aware of.

This process can definitely, work, but it does tend to require patience, persistence, and problem-solving.

Best wishes!

P.S. Like you, I'm 5'5". I was fully menopausal when I lost around 50 pounds at age 59-60, and also severely hypothyroid (medicated). None of those factors - age, menopause, hypothyroidism - doomed weight loss. I lost pretty predictably once I had enough personal logging and scale-weight data to adjust my calorie goal based on personal results. In the scenario you describe, I don't necessarily think you have enough data while on the same eating/activity regimen to make that kind of more personalized estimate yet.

LiveOnceBeHappy

When I do your TDEE, I get 1537 calories for maintenance for sedentary, and 1761 for light exercise. You subtract 500 calories from those to get your calories to lose 1 lb per week (approximately 1250 should be your goal). You say you're eating 1536 calories, and two days a week about 2000 calories. This is why you are not losing weight. You need to reduce your calories.

AnnPT77

Other people's calorie goals don't really shed any light on OP's calorie needs, though. An estimate from MFP - based on accurate profile entries, of course - is a better starting point than someone else's results.

If I thought other people's experience mattered to OP, as I most emphatically don't, I'd be balancing others experiences with mine: I'm her height, and weighed 131 pounds this morning; I'm 24 years older. I'd lose around a pound a week, maybe a bit more, at 1536 calories gross intake plus an extra 400 twice a week. I'm maintaining, maybe even dropping ultra super slowly, at 1850 plus exercise. Yes, I'm an outlier. But that's not the only reason my experience doesn't matter.

At the time of this post, OP was about 4 weeks in. Given the recent scale stall, it's likely she's not an above-average calorie needs outlier, sure. Is she close to average in calorie needs? Lower?

She's lost 3 pounds. She's eating at her calorie goal, except for those 2 days a week at 400 over, which we'd expect would slow her weight loss - if she's average - by about a pound every 8-9 weeks, so we'd expect it to slow it by nearly half a pound in 4 weeks.

So we'd expect her - if average, i.e. if the MFP estimate for a pound a week is correct - to have lost 3.5 pounds in 4 weeks. She's lost 3. Honestly, I don't think that's dramatically far off from expectations, far off as it might be from what is wished. Half a pound difference in 4 weeks is around 62 calories a day.

Maybe her calorie needs are a little lower than average, based on those numbers. If my approximate arithmetic above is correct, it'd be a little lower. Not much. It's so little that we're in the range of the variability of estimating error.

I'm not her, but if I were at 140 pounds trying to get to 134 - which I have been in the relatively recent past - I would personally not be going for a pound a week. I'd suggest half a pound a week or slower. But I hear in her post that she wants to speed things up, so slower than the current slow probably wouldn't suit her. 🤷