Gaining weight back but not increasing calories

AngelaL22

Hello everyone!

I am having a problem with my weight loss. When I initially lost my weight (about 2 years ago) I lost about 40 pounds. Within the last 8 months or so I've managed to tack on 15 pounds. I am strict with my food intake and I try to eat clean. I also started couch to 5k and 30 day shred about 8 weeks ago, the scale isn't budging and my body isn't looking any different. I am starting to get discouraged.

Can anyone offer me any advice? Or had a similar situation?

Thanks!!

Unknown

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NeverCatchYourBreath

My thoughts on it... if you're working out regularly and tracking what you're eating (and being honest about it) then it has to be that the amount you're eating isn't right for your body to lose weight.

My advice... and this will take some patience... start increasing your calories by 100-200 every day for several weeks until you see a steady gain on the scale from week to week. At that point you'll know for sure what it takes for you to GAIN consistently. Once you have that number, start decreasing your calories again by 100-300 every day for several weeks until you see the scale staying the same. Then you'll know you need to lower the calories just a bit more to start getting the scale to go back down.

When doing that, don't make drastic changes in calories per day for those few weeks, you only need to up them or lower them JUST ENOUGH to get the scale to move. Also, when you're lowering the calories, if you feel weak, lethargic, have headaches, body aches, etc... then increase the calories back up because those are warning signs your body is giving you. So listen to it.

Another option is this... remember a general guideline is 3,500 calories is one pound of fat. So if you're burning 300 calories during exercise per day then you can try lowering your calories intake by 200 (to equal 500 less calories per day) and see if that makes the scale go down. Just remember you have to compensate for the days you don't workout by not eating as much and that type of thing..........

There is no exact science to any of this... hope I helped a little haha.

leggup

If you eat the same # of calories every day and you're not losing weight for 4-6 weeks, congrats, you have your maintenance calories.

I can eat clean/raw/vegan/you name it and still gain weight. So can you. Weight loss is about calories in, calories out. Even with all of your calories out (exercise) you still have too many calories going in. I use a food scale to know (as accurately as possible) how many calories I consume each day to keep them within a range at which I will lose weight.

tl;dr: You're eating too much.

ana3067

Clean =/= calorie-free or even low-cal. You need to track your intake, if not daily then regularly any time your weight fluctuates more than by a few lbs.

Chances are you are either underestimating your intake (meaning you are eating more than you realize) or you have changed your activity levels and thus have different energy needs.

Calculate your TDEE (maintenance) to include your daily activities, eat that much for a month with daily or almost daily logging, and see if you maintain. If you do then congrats! Time to subtract 10-20% from that number and eat that amount until you lose. If you don't eat the same things every day at the same amounts, then it's probably a good idea to track your intake regularly.

http://www.exrx.net/Calculators/CalRequire.html
http://www.health-calc.com/diet/energy-expenditure-advanced

Either choose the one that looks more reasonable to you or average them out. Also, it's asking for an AVERAGE. So that means if you work out 50 minutes 4x a week, you are not working out 50 minutes every day; you're working out about 29 minutes every day when it's averaged out. So either enter it that way or do one calculation for active days, one for sedentary days, and average those two out.