3 weeks and I only lost 5 pounds!!!

ok. thanks a lot guys! I guess my frustration came from when i logged my calories MFP was saying "if every day was like today you'd weight 149 pounds in 5 weeks!" and i was just thinking to myself.... "I'm not even close to that! d@mmit!" lol. Thanks again for the motivation

Whoa huge deficit there! Eat up...

5lbs in 3 weeks is good. also you're working out.. you're building muscle. so it may not read on a scale but you're losing fat and gaining muscle.

No. You can't gain muscle while on a deficit. That's like building an addition to a house without any building materials and while people are stealing bricks from the original house during the night.

You can't build something (muscle) from less than nothing (a calorie deficit).

It's not from nothing. Your body has 3500 calories per pound of fat to use as something.

Only the very obese see gains in muscle mass because there's enough fat stores to release the needed energy to run the body at a deficit while the eaten food can be then used to build muscle. The average person, while eating in a deficit, will not gain mass. They can gain strength but those are two different things.

So your earlier statement that it "can't" be done was overbroad and wrong.

Nope. Just as I don't automatically add a disclaimer of "certain medical conditions being exempt" when giving advice, I didn't add the "If you're obese, you could, under the proper circumstances, see miniscule gains in muscle mass while eating at a deficit."

It wasn't over broad or wrong. It was a fact that didn't include the tiny outlier. Why are you fighting this information so much? Your assertion that 3500 calories per pound of excess fat could be used to create muscle was over broad and wrong. Yours was misinformation that people who aren't losing could use to attribute non weight loss to muscle building in conjunction with fat loss when in reality, they are likely eating too much. Your information would stall a person and give them false hopes for a healthier body that they aren't actually attaining. Mine, on the other hand, is forcing a person to take a second look at their diet/exercise, make corrections and eventually attain their goals.

Good information is more useful to people than misinformation every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

5lbs in 3 weeks is good. also you're working out.. you're building muscle. so it may not read on a scale but you're losing fat and gaining muscle.

No. You can't gain muscle while on a deficit. That's like building an addition to a house without any building materials and while people are stealing bricks from the original house during the night.

You can't build something (muscle) from less than nothing (a calorie deficit).

It's not from nothing. Your body has 3500 calories per pound of fat to use as something.

Only the very obese see gains in muscle mass because there's enough fat stores to release the needed energy to run the body at a deficit while the eaten food can be then used to build muscle. The average person, while eating in a deficit, will not gain mass. They can gain strength but those are two different things.

So your earlier statement that it "can't" be done was overbroad and wrong.

Nope. Just as I don't automatically add a disclaimer of "certain medical conditions being exempt" when giving advice, I didn't add the "If you're obese, you could, under the proper circumstances, see miniscule gains in muscle mass while eating at a deficit."

It wasn't over broad or wrong. It was a fact that didn't include the tiny outlier. Why are you fighting this information so much? Your assertion that 3500 calories per pound of excess fat could be used to create muscle was over broad and wrong. Yours was misinformation that people who aren't losing could use to attribute non weight loss to muscle building in conjunction with fat loss when in reality, they are likely eating too much. Your information would stall a person and give them false hopes for a healthier body that they aren't actually attaining. Mine, on the other hand, is forcing a person to take a second look at their diet/exercise, make corrections and eventually attain their goals.

Good information is more useful to people than misinformation every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Look, you were wrong. Just deal with it. The guy said in his original post that he was 268 when he started. Per BMI, 268 is obese all the way up to 6'7". So, unless the guy is taller than 6'7", he was obese when he started. It's not a "tiny outlier," it's the specific guy in this specific thread.

Also, don't put words in my mouth. I never said he could attribute the lack of weight loss to muscle gain. It's borderline impossible for him to gain muscle mass quickly enough for that to be the case. Maybe he could do it with freaky genetics and steroids, but that's beside the point, because I never made that claim in the first place. All I claimed was that your bald assertion that gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time "can't" be done. It can. And, specifically, it can be done by the obese and the OP is obese (unless he's taller than 6'7") so he is exactly the kind of person who is potentially capable of doing what you said can't be done.

So, to recap: what you said was wrong, especially in this particular case and I didn't make the statements you claim I did.

It wasn't wrong. At most, it was trivially incomplete. Any muscle he gained due to being obese was insignificant and not worth mentioning outside of interesting trivial science facts because it's hardly measurable.

You never mentioned attributing weight loss to muscle gain but you quoted my correction of the woman that said, " you're building muscle. so it may not read on a scale but you're losing fat and gaining muscle." with, "It's not from nothing. Your body has 3500 calories per pound of fat to use as something." This was an indirect validation of the poster I corrected. If you didn't want to validate the incorrect statement, you shouldn't have included it in the quotes and only quoted my statement.

In the end, your 'correction' of, "It's not from nothing. Your body has 3500 calories per pound of fat to use as something." wasn't useful in the least. It was nonsensically out of context at its best, misleading at its worst. My original statement contradicting the poster at the start of this quote chain stands. Everything that has been argued after, has just been silly, nit picking nonsense.

Just to reiterate, this was the statement that I corrected before you came in and muddled it up:

you're building muscle. so it may not read on a scale but you're losing fat and gaining muscle

The OP didn't gain enough muscle to offset fat losses (despite being obese). My statement stands. .

Well according you most experts, you're only supposed to lose 2 pounds per week. So in 2 weeks you should lose 2 pounds. In 3 weeks you should lose 6 pounds total. So it seems like you are right on track.

I'd be super celebrating if I lost 5 lbs in 3 weeks.

This isn't Biggest Loser - people don't lose 10lbs a week in real life.