Yet Another "I'm Stuck" Thread New and Improved with data!

Can't get your body fat % without waist measurement (at navel). I can tell you that if you were only moderately active, you would be burning 3066 calories a day. (exercising 3-5 days a week). Your base rate for organ function is 1978. So you have to eat at least that to survive. If you want to lose weight, you can knock 10% off your total daily energy expenditure (3066-306=2760 calories) and you should see some results there.

Related note: On your food diary, I looked solely at sodium intake. The highest recommended intake per day is 2500. There are a lot of days (not all, but quite a few in the last two weeks) where you are up around 3200. That will cause water retention. That can account for around seven pounds of weight.

I notice you eat a kashi bar and a greek yogurt and m&ms quite a few days during the week. I love Greek yogurt. It is awesome. I also love chocolate, but I really have to limit myself because it makes me so thirsty. So do kashi bars. Sodium... Drat. Maybe substitute another snack? More veggies? More whole grains?

Love the banana and proteins in the morning (like egg whites and lean meats). I need to take that page from your diary and try to copy it. I am horrible about not eating breakfast... Sigh. Oh, I am assuming your water intake is up there and just not recorded. I am short and drinking about a gallon a day.. your body regulates water intake based on the previous 24 hours, so if you aren't getting enough, you will get payback the entire next day for it...

Hope I am being helpful.

nothing wrong with M&M's or salt (assuming your blood pressure is OK). Just realize that at 220 lbs, water retention can change your weight by a good 5-7 lbs.

BTW, you don't need diuretics. Just drink a lot of water for a few days and limit the salt and the water will come off.

First of all, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to add much more than many of the smart people who've already commented. But as I just moved on from what seemed to me like a 6 week plateau, I'm very sympathetic.

From californiagirl:

This sounds so much like me for 15 years. You can't over exercise too many calories. The exercise burn is highly over rated, of course you burn calories.

I totally believe this. First, I think too many people overestimate exercise calories. Even if you are using a HRM and getting an "accurate" measure I have a suspicion exercise calories don't work like food calories do. I have an excel spreadsheet of my daily calories CONSUMED. I then average that out, figure out how many pounds I've lost in the same amount of time, multiply that figure by 3500, and then calculate what my actual TDEE or what my actual daily deficit is (if anyone wants more details on this please PM me, I don't want to bore everyone to tears).

Using this for the last two months gives me a TDEE of about 1650. This matches almost exactly what the fat2fitradio tool's page says is my "sedentary" TDEE. So am I sedentary? No. I run 3 times a week and lift weights 2-3 times a week. But apparently, my body doesn't care. I agree with whoever it was that says you are working out and lifting so your body preserves muscle, not so much for the calorie burn.

Second totally agree with GauchoMark to start making a spreadsheet of your weight (I am even more crazy and I weigh myself up to 3 times a day. Therefore I know REALLY well now what causes my weight to spike up and down during the day, usually water related). My body weight tends to fluctuate by about 2 lbs a day (yours might be more as you are heavier than me). I don't "count" a new low I see until it is repeated again and again in morning AND evening weigh-ins. Anyways, graphing all this information into a spreadsheet helps me to see that even though the numbers might be muddy over a 6 week period I can tell my body has dropped down from what it was a couple months ago. And that's what you're looking for. Weight loss isn't linear. If you expected to lose say, 5-10 lbs in 2 months you might lose that any day now. Our bodies tend to let go of weight in chunks.

Third: switch it up. If I followed the advice of every plateau thread on here I'd be eating more calories. That scared the CRAP out of me. I didn't want to try it. I've lost so little weight that the idea that I'd gain again made me miserable. So I cut calories by about 200 a day. Just for a few days. I did it basically for as long as I could stand it, which was about 3 days. Then went back up. Next couple days, my body dropped some weight. It's been slowly creeping down again since then. The 600 "extra" calories I didn't eat over those three days probably had absolutely nothing to do with my breaking the plateau up.

Eat more, eat less, change your workout, lift more weights, lift heavier weights, cut back on cardio for a week, swim for a week instead, cut back on lifting for a week, walk more, walk less, cut back on carbs for a week, up protein for a week, whatever causes a change.

Sidenote on exercise overstimation: general wisdom for runners is that you will burn between 80-100 calories per mile you run. The heavier you are, the faster you run, the higher the calorie burn. If you are lighter or more efficient, your body will burn less calories. I can run about 2.5 miles in 30 minutes. So at best that's 250 calories I burn at a pace that is quite challenging for me. When I see people most calorie burn from their HRM I am always surprised. I know if you weigh over 200 lbs you're going to get a better burn, but I really wonder. Every time I get a number of a machine I ask myself "was this easier/harder for me to do than running this whole time". If the answer is no, I didn't burn more than 500 calories in an hour.

So I say, keep eating what you are eating. It is probably working, your scale just isn't showing you that yet. Change something up in order to break the plateau, but probably what you are doing is working.

Also you might check out Lyle McDonald's Body Recomposition site: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com

He offers a ton of articles on fat loss, muscle mass, etc. He has a series of articles on training the obese beginner that I found very helpful and he tends to note (like many others have) that doing a lot of cardio on a calorie deficit is not always a quick/easy thing. Anyways, check it out. Good luck!

Just give it more than a week - if you really have been undereating, it may take a few weeks for your body to adjust.