Weight loss as a T1 diabetic

RChapman8612

Hello and thank you in advance.

I have been using MFP for 6weeks now, have logged everything I've eaten and consistently come in at under 1900 calories per day. I do not drive so walk everywhere easily doing 10k+ steps per day. I am vegetarian and avoid sugary and carb heavy foods.

I am 5'11, 40yrs old male and weighed 13st 10lbs at the start of my journey.

I still weigh 13st 10lbs. I am T1 diabetic using Novorapid/ Tresiba. Glucose levels are monitored and well maintained.

Any advice to lose weight?

Thanks again.

Rob

sollyn23l2

You're eating more than you think most likely. You can be doing all the right things, unfortunately, and still not lose if you're not tracking accurately and consistently. How do you track? Do you weigh/measure everything?

AnnPT77

Sollyh has a point, and that's not a personal criticism of you. Logging is a surprisingly subtle skill with a learning curve. I'd bet most of us who've been at it for a while have had face-palm moments in the early stages when we realized some meaningfully large systematic error we'd been making.

Given your stats, we'd expect you to lose maybe a pound a week. (For other USA-ians, OP's 192 pounds).

Another few thoughts:

• I hope you're realizing that the goals MFP or any other calculator (even fitness tracker) spits out are based on the statistical average calorie needs of a person who has the same few demographic data points as you. Most people are close to average, but a few aren't, and a rare few can be surprisingly far off. That's how statistical averages work, right? (If you're stats aware, I'll mention that calorie needs have a fairly small standard deviation - tall narrow bell curve . . . but there still people out toward the tails of the curve, and the reasons why might not be obvious.
• Six weeks should be long enough to begin seeing even slow (but still satisfying) loss in the overall trend of scale weight. Picking it out from the day to day weigh-ins might be more deceptive. A weight trending app might help, but those just use statistics to try to see the trend behind the normal up-and-down scale numbers. They're not magic crystak balls. (Examples: Happy Scale for Apple/iOS, Libra for Android, Trendweight with a free Fitbit account, Weightgrapher - I'm sure there are others.)
• If the 10k steps are an increase from your previous walking, there could be a water retention distortion in the first couple of weeks, but that should be out of the picture by 6 weeks.
• You're only a bit into the overweight BMI range. I know BMI isn't perfect, but it suggests you aren't extremely high in excess fat, especially as you're male. But slow loss would be a good plan for anyone not extremely overweight, even someone who doesn't have a health condition in the picture. (I understand that your T1 is well controlled, which is great . . . but it's still a health condition.) From personal experience, when I've been losing slowly - half a pound a week or less - I have had 6-week periods when it didn't appear that I was losing at all, and even my weight trending app thought I was maintaining or even gaining through part of that time period. If your calorie needs are a bit below average, or your logging a bit off, and you're losing but only slower than intended, this may apply to you.

As a vegetarian myself, I'll add that being vegetarian, avoiding carbs - those don't matter directly to fat loss. Other than how food choices may affect energy level and appetite, calories are calories when it comes to losing body fat, at least within a reasonable range of human eating styles. Variability in carb intake can create water retention effects on the scale, but consistent carb intake - which I'm guessing you shoot for - shouldn't exaggerate effects like that.

So: Give your logging accuracy some thought. Make sure you're logging every bite, lick, taste, condiment, dressing, beverage, oil used in cooking, etc. Use a food scale if you can do that without becoming obsessive. (They're cheap.) Don't use other people's recipe-type foods on the food database (things like "cheese lasagna", "bean burger", etc.). We don't know how much or little cheese, oil, mayo or other calorie-dense adds might be in there. When you first log a packaged food, check the package against the database entry to ensure it's accurate. (Note: Bar-coded foods aren't any more accurate than others, still need to be checked.) And so forth.

If your logging can be tightened up without making yourself crazy, do that. If you still don't lose weight, the next step would be to reduce calories further, I'm sorry to say.

Best wishes!

Strudders67

I'm assuming you did put your stats into the Guided Set Up on MFP. What Activity Level did you select? What rate of weight loss did you select? And how many calories did MFP allocate you? You say you're eating under 1900 a day, but that doesn't mean that's what you should be eating.