Constructive criticism please

Hey hey, ideally we need to see your food diary or we cant help.

You will hear this from other people. So, I'll be the first. You probably aren't eating enough. You said you are not going to eat back your exercise calories and I can understand that mindset because I struggle with that as well. But.......it you are netting less than 1200 calories that may be why you are not losing. I know that P90X is pretty intense and you are probably burning a heck of alot.

I would suggest experimenting. Maybe try eating back 1/2 of your exercise calories and see if that makes a differene. What about measurements. You didn't mention those. Are you losing inches? You could be building muscle and losing fat and it's not showing on the scale.

Good luck!!

1500 calories and not eating back any calories after a P90X workout? Also, if you are truly over-estimating your calories (do you have a food scale to ensure you are actually over-estimating?), then you are not even reaching your target calories. You may need to up your calories since you may be driving your body into starvation mode and that's what's holding you back.

This change should not be about starving yourself, rather training yourself with new habits that you can stick with for life.

Seeing that your BMR is 1721 and you're only eating 1500 calories PLUS overestimating calories and not eating exercise calories back... that is your problem. You are definitely not eating enough. If you don't want to eat your exercise calories, that's fine. But you should be eating more than your BMR if you go that route.

No critricism, just free advice. Take it for whatever you think it is worth.

First, yeah you for working hard at getting fit.

Don't sweat it if you don't see results on the scale right away. Weight loss is not linear. If you eat right and do the work, the weight will come off in time. In the grand scheme of things 2 weeks is nothing.

A couple of things to remember:

Your scale lies to you. People constantly say “I worked out every day this week and ate right, and I still gained 3 lbs! This fitness stuff doesn’t work, so why bother. I quit” Not true. You just haven’t given it enough time. The scale can lie to you because it doesn’t know what part of your weight is fat, what is muscle, and what is water. If you are working hard and keeping under your calories, the weight loss will come when it is ready (which sadly is probably not the same thing as when you are ready). Weight loss is a funny thing, and everybody's results are different. Women especially seem to have inconsistent results from everything I have seen and read. There can be many reasons for this - just to name a few possibilities:

a. You are new to exercise and your body is still trying to figure out what it needs to do to cope with the new demands you are putting on it. When you start working muscles that aren't used to getting worked, they pull water into themselves as they try to repair themselves from the micro tears created by exercise (that's how they grow), and that can add water weight until the body gets used to working hard day in and day out.

b. Women's monthly cycles (Disclaimer - I am a guy - I admit I only know what is in the published studies!) cause water weight loss and gain throughout the month, which really screws up the scale results. Don’t blame me, it wasn’t my idea.

c. There is also something I have read dieticians and trainers write about sometimes called the "whoosh effect" where weight stays stubbornly on for weeks in spite of lowered calories and regular exercise, and then suddenly, "whoosh" pounds come off 3 and 4 at a time for some reason. It’s crazy, but makes sense when you remember that your body wants to be fat once it has learned how to be fat, so it doesn’t give up those pounds easily. Keep at it and, sooner or later, it will have to surrender the pounds. Unfortunately we all want instant results, which doesn’t always happen. So, keep on keepin on.

d. Muscle gains also reduce the loss of pounds on the scale, but will reduce your body size in inches; muscle weighs more than fat. This takes time, but keep a lookout for this in action. Use your favorite pair of jeans as a measuring stick and ignore the scale for a couple of weeks. Or, measure yourself at the start and track how those inches disappear over time. They will.

e. When and where you weigh yourself matters. Keep it consistent in terms of time and place, and use the same scale. They don’t all read the same. Even moving the scale to another room or a different part of the room can give you a different result.

f. If you are like a lot of people, you can gain or lose as much as 5-6 pounds during the day depending on what you ate, when you last ate, when you last used the bathroom, and so on. If you remember that, it helps keep you sane when the scale number isn't moving.

Keep after it and you will get where you want to go. :drinker:

If you're working out 5+ days/week and not eating back your calories then you're probably gaining muscle on top of the small losses you would have seen otherwise and need to eat more to boost your metabolism. Eating back your exercise calories is not a bad thing, just something you need to do with caution in order to find the right balance for your body.

are you losing any inches? when i started exercising some (nowhere close to P90x, the number stalled with even a lil gain. i have not stepped on a scale in about 3-4 weeks but my pants are fitting looser.

2 weeks isn't very long, at all. I don't think I started dropping weight for a couple of months. Depending on where you are in your cycle, it is very possible to put on a few lbs in water weight, I only weigh myself immediately after a period, as I know where I am comparing like with like, then. Hormones play such a huge part in water retention and perceived weight. Also, when you start exercising your muscles hold water to prevent damage, so it is common to see a slight weight gain when you start a rigorous program.

Keep doing what you are doing, and if you still haven't lost anything in 2 months, then have a rethink, but there's no point in stressing after 2 weeks.

" I do not eat back my exercise calories & don't plan to."

^^That's your problem.

Agreed. Also the overestimating. Just log it is what you really think it is. When you 'net' 1500 you will lose the weight. I've eaten all of my exercise calories from the beginning and still do even on maintenance. I honestly don't think I would have been successful otherwise.