Please Help Me - I Don't Know What I'm Doing Wrong

I admit to being a little confused since you kinda seem to want someone to tell you that going back to your old ways is okay since you lost weight back then.

Go to a dr. Talk to a nutritionist. Understand what you would do to your body if you fell back on to old habits. I honestly don't know how you felt good. You didn't eat enough to fuel your body to do anything, much less live a full day and workout.

As for what are you are doing wrong, you got really great advice here from a smart man. But seriously, get a health check.

If you don't intake a minimum of 1300 calories a day your body will go into starvation mode

Ok so you weigh 147 now. That is already right in a good weight range for your height (5’7” 122 – 155 Lbs.) You can still lose some weight and be in the healthy range.

You can still lose weight if you want, but it needs to be a nice slow easy deficit and it will take time. It is all about calories and a calorie deficit.

If you want to really shape your body you need to lift weights, change it up all the time, heavy, light, super-sets, pyramids, lots of leg routines designed for women. I did lifting with the guys for over 30 years and their routines gave me a good muscle base but didn't do much for my shape. I didn't change my shape until I started a women's weight lifting routine last year and also learned to eat at a calorie deficit that was right for me. You really need a good weight lifting routine designed for women.

You can't out exercise too many calories. Think of exercise to shape your lean body mass and make it pretty for when the fat is gone. Think of the calorie deficit for losing fat. This way if you get injured or can't workout for a period of time know that you can keep things in control with your diet until you can get back to your routine.

How is a 'female weightlifting program' different from a 'male weightlifting program'?

IMO, it should not be.

Thank you! But on average I am eating around 1700 calories a day - random or not - the average comes out to be 1700. Shouldn't my calorie intake be the same too?

Yes, you are averaging about 1750 a day, but you seem to be bouncing from one extreme to the other by consuming 1100 calories and up to 3000 calories on others. If you're going to cycle calories, they should be within a reasonable set of parameters - say 1800 a few days and 1600 on less intense workout or rest days.

Regarding your exercise theory, you need to establish deficits suitable for the amount of fat mass you have. Let's just assume you really are 30% body fat at your weight - this implies you have 103 lbs of lean body mass with the remaining 44 lbs in fat mass. There is a limit to how much fat mass that can be oxidized in a 24 hour period: 30 x lbs of fat mass. That would equal a 1320 calorie deficit worth of fat oxidation. You may think: Wow, so I can set a deficit of 1320 calories and lose that much fat per day? Not going to happen because a 1320 deficit for you would lead to a whopping 61% deficit - someone like you should only be assuming at most a 25% deficit - and the leaner you get, you'll need to reduce it to 15%. Sustaining too large of a deficit of that scale has negative effects on one's endocrine system: excessive decline in both RMR and serum leptin concentration levels, increased loss of lean body mass, and potentially increases in cortisol levels.

To minimize the alterations that come with calorie restriction, you need to establish a deficit appropriate for how much fat mass you have. If you engage in too great a deficit, you are slowing your metabolism down to unnecessary degrees by means of sabotage. Diet is a stress. Exercise is a stress. Going to extremes with both will create a significant amount of stress which your endocrine system will be forced to make significant alterations to adapt which will actually take you out of an optimal zone to oxidize fat effectively.

The slowed metabolism theory is old. At max metabolism slows down by 10%. I already said in my first post, why people don't lose "weight" in a extreme calorie deficit. I also talked how to combat the issue. I am at 48% calorie deficit, with weight training, strength is going up, weight loss is good 2-3lbs a week.

As I said above I cycle between 2,800 and 1,200 calories a day.

No, you're ESTIMATING, calorie burn, your TDEE, and how many calories your consume.Do you even have a food scale? Following simple logic, you have to burn more calories then you consume and you're not losing. What's wrong? You're not burning enough or eating to much. Do I wouldn't call that calorie cycling, that calorie consumption is pretty close together. Looks like you're going up or down just by a few hundred calories. As I said before, if I was you, i'd eat 1,700 one day, 1,200 the next, and burn about 500 calories per exercise session.

Your august data indicates a basic everyday consumption (i.e. excluding exercise) of 1700kcal/day.

Doing the same for your september data we get instead

weight change = +5 lb. Assuming 5lb of fat => 20 350 kcal => 656 kcal/day stored
food intake - exercise = 1795 - 417 = 1378 kcal/day

which indicates a basic everyday consumption of

1378 - 656 = 722 kcal/day


So either your metabolic rate dropped tremendeously as you increased calorie intake and exercise, or your data quality is really low. Which seems more likely to you?

I guess my issue here is, it's OBVIOUS that I'm operating at a deficit with my exercise. Why then am I not losing weight?

And if 1000 calories is TOO LITTLE, then why was that the ONLY time I've ever lost weight and felt good (not to mention look good)?

Well, you CANNOT be operating a deficit and not lose weight. Whatever we may not know about the complexities of how the body works, we do know enough to be sure about that.

So that leaves two possibilities: Either your data on "total calories consumed" are wrong, or your body uses less energy than you think it does. According to http://www.answers.com/topic/basal-metabolic-rate the minimum energy expenditure to just keep the body going (doing no mechanical work, e.g. lying in bed) is 1200 to 1800 kcal/day, but as low as 700 kcal/day in some individuals.

I can't *know* which of the two it is, but on the face of it, it seems more likely your data is wrong than that you have a serious metabolic condition. You are quite healthy, neither obese nor underweight, and that suggests you have a normal metabolism. Your data on the other hand seems to be all over the place. Both exercise and food intake varies a lot from day to day and also from month to month. In July you exercised on 2 days, once burning 216 kcal and the other day 1851.

You can sanity check your own data by converting weight loss into calories. Your basic everyday consumption equals the sum of calories consumed in any period minus exercise plus calories burned from fat. Fat is 9 kcal/gram whether it comes off your body's storage or in the food. I would do this calculation if your data was a table (so I could simply copy it over into Excel), but as it is an image you'll have to do it yourself.

For example, based on your Aug 2012 data, you lost 3 pounds. Assuming all of it was fat, that's 1.36kg * 9000kcal/kg = 12 240 kcal. Food intake was 31*1375 = 42 625, of which exercise took 31*75 = 2325 kcal. Based on this data your basic metabolic consumption was 12 240 + 42 625 - 2325 = 52540 kcal over 31 days, which works out to just under 1700 kcal/day. The point isn't to find out what your rate is but to check the sanity of your data, and 1700kcal/day is not completely crazy and so indicates your data for august *may* be correct.

My suggestion is that you do this same calculation for all of the other months to see whether there is any consistency. If there is not, and your data suggests a basic metabolic rate that varies wildly from month to month, I'd suspect the data rather than the metabolism if you have no other indicators of metabolic problems. If you aren't sure, take your data with you to your doctor, who should be able to investigate whether you have any metabolism issues.

One last point: The above calculation assumes all of the weight loss came from fat. This does not really matter when using it just to check if data from month to month yields consistent results, so long as the proportion of the weight loss that came from fat is about the same. But here your very variable data could be a bit of a problem. If you change the amount of carbs drastically, you also change how much water your body holds. (Btw I saw one poster say your body "can be up to 50% water"; a normal healthy body is actually about 70% water!) If you lost 1 lb of water weight in one month (eating little carbs) and regained it the next, this would greatly affect the result. To see this, assume you'd actually lost 3 lb of fat in both months. Since you lost 1 lb of water too the first month, you'll record a weight loss of 4 lb. The next month you'll record only 2 lb, half as much, even though your water weight has nothing to do with your energy balance.

I would advice you to make a moderate plan of at least 1300 kcal/day, with a fixed energy distribution between carbs, protein and fat. Then try to stick to it stringently enough that you get consistent weeks. (Being consistent on a daily basis is hard, especially when you need to watch carbs/fat/protein separately in addition to total calories. And at least I find that I need to allow myself a little more on weekends than the rest of the week. But say you get at leasts 1200kcal every day, and not more than 1400kcal per day on average in any week, and you'll be on your way, losing weight quite slowly but steadily.)