What am I doing wrong?

edorice

You could start with eating back half of your exercise calories. Make sure you're not going over board on carbs.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/10589-for-those-confused-or-questioning-eating-your-exercise-calo

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/69708-calorie-deficit-for-dummies-a-little-long
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/155953-should-i-eat-my-exercise-calories?hl=exercise+calories
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/138631-stupid-exercise-calories-yeah-i-said-it?hl=exercise+calories#posts-1888371

yyzdnl

Great going so far you have lost about 20% of your goal.

Sure I will catch some heat pushing back on the prevailing wind on this thread but here goes. All the advice against the low cal (1200) diet is great. You need more fuel to keep your metabolism up and to prevent muscle loss. But and it is a big but, from what I have read and research is clear if you maintain a calorie deficit you will loose weight. The number one reason people don't is because they overestimate cals burned and/or underestimate cals eaten. If you are not loosing weight just eating more is not necessary the answer.

Here would be some of my recommendations.
Re-visit your calculations for BMR and maintenance calories required. Use your new weight since you have lost 11 pounds.
Get a tape measure to measure your body. This is a much better tool than a scale.
If you don't have one get a kitchen scale. Measure everything for a while.
Don't forget to count the extras cooking oil, spice, supplements. This was a problem for me I was missing over 100 cals a day in spice and omega 3 pills alone.
If you don't have a heart monitor get one. Don't forget to subtract your maintenance calories from what it tells you to burn.

Here is a link to John Hussman's site he has more info than I could ever post. He also has some great tools for calculating BMR and calorie targets, best of all no advertising.

http://www.hussmanfitness.org/

If you would like add me as a friend I will help best I can.
Good luck ,
Daniel

myofibril

If you're also doing P90, you could be gaining weight in muscle as well. Are you taking measurements? The inches will speak for themselves better than the actual weight loss will.

There is no way she would be gaining muscle on such a calorie restricted diet. Muscle takes a surplus of calories have any measurable build.

This is generally true, but not in all cases.

Without going into a lengthy discussion of calorie partitioning there are generally two instances where individuals can experience a short term increase in muscle mass depsite a calorie deficit: somone with high body fat who begins subjecting their muscles to overload for the first time or a formally lean and athletic individual coming back to training after a period of absence.

I guess we've all seen astonishing transformations in infomercials or marketing materials where the "results are not typical." What these "amazing or revolutionary" (yeah, right....) programmes do in general is take a previously athletic individual and train them up again. I suspect that some programmes deliberately fatten up their "participants" just so they can lean them out making it magically appear that the results are acheivable by the average user. They purposefully manipulate the results based on this training phenomenon just to try and sell more units of what is, in many cases, just an average routine.

If you don't fall into the above categories (in other words most people) then yeah, forget it. It's unlikely you are acheiving the holy grail of fat loss coupled with an increase in muscle mass (particularly sacroplasmic hypertrophy) unless you are following a very specific and advanced dieting regime either deliberately or by chance.

stormieweather

Great going so far you have lost about 20% of your goal.

Sure I will catch some heat pushing back on the prevailing wind on this thread but here goes. All the advice against the low cal (1200) diet is great. You need more fuel to keep your metabolism up and to prevent muscle loss. But and it is a big but, from what I have read and research is clear if you maintain a calorie deficit you will loose weight. The number one reason people don't is because they overestimate cals burned and/or underestimate cals eaten. If you are not loosing weight just eating more is not necessary the answer.

Here would be some of my recommendations.
Re-visit your calculations for BMR and maintenance calories required. Use your new weight since you have lost 11 pounds.
Get a tape measure to measure your body. This is a much better tool than a scale.
If you don't have one get a kitchen scale. Measure everything for a while.
Don't forget to count the extras cooking oil, spice, supplements. This was a problem for me I was missing over 100 cals a day in spice and omega 3 pills alone.
If you don't have a heart monitor get one. Don't forget to subtract your maintenance calories from what it tells you to burn.

Here is a link to John Hussman's site he has more info than I could ever post. He also has some great tools for calculating BMR and calorie targets, best of all no advertising.

http://www.hussmanfitness.org/

If you would like add me as a friend I will help best I can.
Good luck ,
Daniel

Excellent advice.

FYI, if you (or anyone ) are logging their weight into MFP, it will recalculate your BMR/TDEE and calorie goals for you every 10 pounds lost.

kimmerroze

I did take pictures before I started any exercise at all. And I can notice in the pictures that my body is different. But I havent lost any inches since I've measured which was in the last 2 weeks.

Orrgarde- No I'm not eating my exercise calories. I eat 1200 and then the last 3 days I've burnt 1000 so I should be eating those again?

I always eat back most of my exercise calories. I have a heart rate monitor though which tells me how many calories I have burnt during an exercise. Be careful if your only using the information that is on here - What MFP tells says you have burnt isnt accurate as it will be different for everyone depending on age/sex/height weight etc, and of course how hard you have worked! Let us know how you get on :-)

I use a hrm so I know how many calories that I've burnt.

So if I eat my exercise calories back whats the point in exercising if you just eat those back and start back to where you were to begin with? Thats the part I'm not getting. I'll try it, but I dont get it.

The point of Cardio exercising is to work out your "cardio" vascular system, this means your heart, your lungs, all your blood vessels. If your heart is unhealthy it will have to work harder (higher beats per minute) to pump that blood through your body. when you work it out, it increases the strenght of your "cardio" vascular system making your heart get blood to your body better. it also helps move your metabolism quicker, which aids in how fast your body breaks down and processes your food.

Strength training, along with cardio is used to build muscle, muscle is what helps burn fat. If you have little muscle, you will burn fat slower, the more muscle you have the faster your burn fat. The point of exercise is to build muscle. The point of eating is to fuel your muscle.


the reason you need to eat your exercise calories is to help repair your muscles, when you dont eat them, your body will store that fat, and eat the muscle because it is trying to survive. When it does this you lose your muscle, and thus slow your fat loss.

kdiamond

While I do not agree you are burning 1000 calories a day doing exercise (I have friends with body buggs that do not burn that many calories running marathons), I do agree you are probably eating too little.

Try upping to about 1500, give it 3-4 weeks, then reassess. Everyone is too dependent on calculations, although not one of us is built the same. You need to experiment to see what works for you.