Weight Loss Challenges

MammaBurk12

Good morning. I have been struggling with losing weight and there seems to be confusion over how many calories I should consume to lose weight. I tend to fluctuate between 2-3 pounds each week and I find it so frustrating. Wonder if anyone else is having the same issue. I am also working with a nutritionist which is helpful but I haven’t been able to find the magic number to lose weight.

AnnPT77

Fluctuating weight is normal - water retention and waste in the digestive tract vary by several pounds within a day or across a few days.

Drink a pint of water, immediately weigh a pound more. Eat an apple, immediately gain the weight of that apple. It's not fat weight, so why worry about it?

By contrast, even fast fat loss of 2 pounds per week is about 4.6 ounces of fat loss per day - just a bit over a quarter pound. At constant calorie deficit, fat loss creeps along in the background, playing peek-a-boo on the scale with the much larger water and waste fluctuations.

It's the multi-week weight trend that tells you how many calories to eat to lose at a certain rate. Get a starting calorie estimate from MFP or your nutritionist (if s/he is a degreed professional registered dietitian). Stick close to that calorie estimate on average for 4-6 weeks, whole menstrual cycles if you have those. Plus or minus 50-ish calories on average is close.

At the end of that whole time period of reasonable consistency, compare your average loss per week to your target loss per week. If it's close, that's your calorie level. If it's far off, keep it safe/moderate, but adjust using the assumption that 500 calories per day is about a pound a week, and use arithmetic if it's partial pounds.

Here's a couple of weeks from the latter part of my weight loss, taken from my weight trending app. The dots are the daily weigh-ins. The solid line is the short- term statistical trend. The dots are up and down a bunch, and so is the trend, even though that's smoother.

Zooming out, this is the whole loss process, though you can barely see the dailies, mostly just the overall trend:

Advice: Play the long, patient game. That's where the win is.

Best wishes - the quality of life improvement success brings is more than worth the effort!

Jthanmyfitnesspal

Yes! Click on my icon and find my posts from this winter/spring! It's amazingly hard sometimes.

This calculator page is somewhat helpful. It uses a formula that is very similar to MFP

https://www.calculator.net/calorie-calculator.html

(Ignore everything on the page except the calculator itself.)

The "activity level" is always a guess. You can always select sedentary (the lowest setting) and add in for exercise. Or you can link your fitness watch to MFP for a more tailored daily estimate based on actual activities.

Even with all that: the plans are estimates based on a population average. If you are not losing weight on the plan, you need to cut back on it (😪), making sure that your logging is accurate. Also, exercise estimates are sometimes overstated and it's best not to eat all your exercise calories back. You also don't need to eat the same number of calories every day: you can eat a little less on the weekdays so you can have a little extra on the weekends.

Best of luck!