Slow weight loss

annieatkin

Hi, I've started again. Motivation to continue after the initial couple of weeks is a weakness. I have lost 3lb in 3 weeks, I know I shouldn't be disappointed but can't help it. Lost half an ounce this week. Been eating up to 1450 and this week going to try 1200. I need to move more I know. Help needed.

csplatt

You don’t need help! It’s perfect, unless perhaps your weight is very high?

springlering62

the graph isn’t going to be consistent. It’s our brains that say that it should be. Reality is totally different.

Here’s a random month from earlier in my own loss (SW 225, was at 200 when I started with this Bluetooth scale):

crazy, right? Yet the consistent trend was downwards. Consistent is the key word here. If you give up after three weeks every time, you’re never going to accomplish anything.

What if…..instead of being disappointed over three pounds, you’d set your goal to eat a little more, and shoot for half pound loss, stayed consistent, and a year later been celebrating a 27 pound loss you’d maintained, instead of berating yourself and starting over yet again?

It’s our expectations that keep us from being successful, versus planning and reasoning, which does.

AnnPT77

After being here on MFP for nearly ten years, I'm pretty convinced that what prevents a huge fraction of people from actually reaching weight goals is:

1. Picking an aggressive, restrictive, unpleasant plan
2. Feeling discouraged because they're working so hard at it, but only getting weight loss results that are excellent in the real-world context of successful weight-losers, but that fall short of the utter nonsense touted in tabloids, the blogosphere, reality TV, skeezy marketing.
3. Giving up because it's just too hard, and it feels like the reward isn't worth the effort based on those first two points.

Therefore, I'm always going to advocate choosing a more realistic, easier-to-follow plan, then applying patience and perseverance. The way most long term successful people here lost weight was boring to talk about, but easier to stick with. Then they stuck with it.

Maybe your plan isn't difficult, I don't know. I'm skeptical, though, because your OP does sound so discouraged. I hope you're eating foods you enjoy that add up to appropriate calories for gradual loss (including some treats you can moderate, just for joy), reviewing your food diary to find tweaks to your routine that keep you full and happy most of the time, and trying to introduce more movement into your life in ways that are fun (not just exercise, but also daily life movement).

If you ask me, the real goal here is to find new, permanent happy habits that first gradually lead to goal weight, then keep us at that healthy weight long term. That's the big prize, staying at a good weight with happy life balance long term, ideally forever. Finding that is a different mindset from "lose weight fast using restrictive eating and punitively intense exercise".

Unless you only have a tiny number of pounds to lose, a pound a week is fine - faster would be a poor idea IMO for anyone under maybe 200 pounds, and it's fine for most people over 200 pounds, too. The only exception would be someone so very obese that their current weight is itself a health threat, and those people losing really fast (because they need to) should be under close medical monitoring for nutritional deficiencies or health complications.

Look at it this way: If you average a pound a week, you'll be 50+ pounds lighter in a year. Yes, a year is a long time . . . but that year is going to pass anyway. Pretty much your two options are either to find a sustainable personal plan, and stick with it, lose those pounds one at a time; or get discouraged and give up. Where does the latter option get you?

I'm wishing you success, because in my experience, the quality of life improvement is more than worth the effort. Hang in there, keep finding better habits, the progress will add up.

Best wishes!

P.S. They're right about ups and downs on the scale being standard. It's almost entirely about water retention and waste in the digestive system, not fat. If you're a woman who has menstrual cycles . . . well, hormonal water retention happens. It's not the most common pattern, but a few women here have reported only seeing a new low weight once a month, at a particular point in their cycle. Gains of several pounds - from hormone-related water retention - are quite common. If you have cycles, at minimum compare your body weight at the same relative point in at least two different cycles to assess progress. If no cycles, go 4-6 weeks to see a reasonable average.

Decreasing calorie goal every time a person gets a week pseudo-stall is one of the common ways people progressively make a plan more difficult to follow, and increase the odds it'll get so hard they give up. Don't rush it. Patience.