Too many or few calories? Help please!

melissast21

I have been working out for over 14 months now my daily routine is as follows: 5x week cardio for 1 hour
Estimate burn 500 calories. On top of cardio I do intense weight training similar to HIT 3x week for 45 min each session. M-F I eat about 1200-1400 calories a day high protein.
My problem comes on the weekends because i eat so healthy Everyother day i do tend to have 3 glasses or so of wine on fridays and sat. And will have a splurge meal at nights (pasta Italian food etc) But I can't imagine these 2 splurge days can screw up everything I did thoughout the week? I consume around 1900 on fri and sat.
For the 1st 10 months of working out I only ate about 1200 calories a day and had a hard time lossing the last 5 pounds so I decided to visit a nutritionist and she suggested I eat around 1400 calories a day and do not eat the calories I burn which I didn't really anyways.
Does anyone have any suggestions? What am I doing wrong? I am 5'4 112 pounds now but before I was pregnant I weighed only 104. I seem to bounce from 110-115 all of the time. If I could just maintain my weight at 110 I would be very happy.

trimom10

Everyone is different, but I'll share what worked for me. I had never counted calories, or tried to lose weight before I joined MFP in January. When I signed up, I indicated I wanted to lose one pound a week, and that I had a sedentary lifestyle (desk job during the day). I had 1200 daily calories, and used a heart rate monitor to track my calories burned. I also ate my exercise calories. I ended up losing anywhere from 1 to 2 pounds per week, but I was vigilant about not going over my calories. I never had a cheat day on the weekend. That's what worked for me.

I've read on the message boards about people hitting a plateau and increasing their daily calories and then losing weight. OR increasing their calories for a few weeks, then going back to the lower calorie intake, and finally losing weight.

There's not a one size fits all recipe when it comes to this unfortunately.

pkfrankel

You are relying too much on what the scale reads. For your height and weight (115 lbs) your BMI is 19.2%. At 110 lbs its 18.9%. don't sweat it!

Katahna

Weekends are a little evil in that aspect, I personally do the same as you, I over indulge in the weekends.

What I have found that helps, is making sure I have a rather decent breakfast, and I place my food for the day in a specific spot in the pantry, that way you almost have a pre packed lunch per say.

e.g. when I'm hungry in the weekend, I assess the food I have put aside, and choose any of them that I feel like, that way I can still pick and choose, but I know for a fact they are the healthy option =]