hit a bit of a plateu

tbrain1989

morning everyone,

i have now hit the dreaded plateu, ive had good weight loss since i started, my life has always been pretty busy and fortunately full of exercise, it only took adjusting my diet to trigger the wieght loss, but now i seem to have stalled, my weight is really settled as even wehn i have a bad day i dont seem to waiver.

has anyone got any really good tips for breaking a plateu? any success with kick starting for the next phase

Hildy_J

Hey there,

Had a look at your diary - I think if you log accurately every single day (I noticed you have a few days missing) you'll soon find that gets you get back on track.

Well done for the weight loss so far, btw. Nice work!

Good luck! xx

joshdann

only one thing stalls weight loss - not eating at a deficit. You need to either reduce your calories a bit more (losing weight means your body needs less food to maintain) or exercise a bit more (for the same reason). Have a look here:

http://www.acaloriecounter.com/blog/why-am-i-not-losing-weight/

Also, as the previous poster said - log your food! The only way to know for sure how much you're taking in is to record everything.

tbrain1989

thanks for your advice guys and gals, i know im not the best logger, mainly at the weekends, but similarly if i dont log food i dont log exercise, i would have thought it would balance,

maybe youre right about moving my calorie goal in line with my weight loss, that sounds like a good bit of logic

Lyadeia

How long have you been stalled at the same weight? If less than a month, then it is not a plataeu and you just need to have some patience as weight loss is not linear.

If it has been 4-6 weeks, make sure you are weighing and measuring all your food and accurately logging it all. This is usually the cause for a stall because we tend to eat more than we think. Make sure you have calculated everything correctly. What is your TDEE? Are you making sure you eat less than that daily, but not too much less as a deficit that is too large typically backfires? Are you recording your exercise calories fairly? Most people overestimate what they burn. I have to shake my head when people claim to burn between 600-1000 calories for running a couple of miles in 30 minutes (for example).

tbrain1989

the calories i log for exercise are the ones that MFP gives me , and typically they are a lot less then my HR and Suunto Ambit tells me, so i take both with a pinch of salt, although the Suunto is one hell of a piece of kit

it has only been 3 weeks with no real change, so maybe i should be patient, i can imagine my weight loss will slow now as im 76% towards my goal, the last few are the hardest!

TDEE is a bit ridiculous, never understood it realy, if it was true then i would be a calorie burning machine, which clearly isnt the case

Boogage

The closer I got to goal the slower the weight loss became. For the first 30lbs is came off a bit every week but after that it came off every few weeks and often in chunks to make up for when I hadn't lost. I think its ok to over eat some days to keep our metabolisms guessing and personally I usually eat a few hundred cals below tdee-15% (as I think that's too much food for me right now as well) so the cheat days probably even things out quite a bit over time. I still try to log them so I can work out my average cals over a period of time if I want to though. I also found when I started strength training and weights I grew in size and stayed the same weight. It isn't until I take a couple of weeks off that I shrink and my weight drops lower than before. I'd just wait and see what happens. If your clothes start getting tighter and you don't think its because your muscles are pumped, then thats the time to really think about whether you're doing something wrong.