feeling disheartened

Give it more time, don't give up! I'm on 9 weeks & my weight goes up and down all the time

as the above user said, exercise is a great start but it is much easier to abstain from eating a calorie than to burn it off.

eating clean alone wont make you lose weight, you need to count calories so you know you arent overeating still. you can still gain fat off of vegetables alone

give it more time.. you probably weren't eating right before and skipping meals, etc. Your body is making some happy adjustments to getting nutrients and exercise. Just keep at it and stay within your calories and track everyday. drink lots of water too.

2 weeks in - it's disheartening, but as others have said, it's too early to start judging results. Here is what I have learned and what worked to help me lose 100 pounds in 2 years:


In order to lose weight you have to be in a calorie deficit.

In order to know if you're in a calorie deficit, you have to weigh (with a scale)/measure/log your food- every bite/every day.

Exercise is important to health, but not necessary to lose weight. Find something you enjoy and do it consistently.

Eat foods you like, make healthy choices along the way, learn portion control/moderation

Meet your calorie deficit, then work on meeting your macros (protein, fat, carbs)

Have PATIENCE and don't quit.

Anything worth while takes time. Hang in there, you will see results.

well I have been doing this for 3 years and a half....2 weeks is nothing. The scale is just one of the tools I use to see if what I am doing work. For exemple today, I am up 2 pounds, but down 1 inch at my thighs.

Second, to gain one pound of fat, you have to eat an extra 3500 calories....did you eat that much? I don't think so.

Finally, weight and measure your food as precisely as you can......it will show you where unexpected high calories but clean food.

Good luck

Your weight on the scale on any given day is not an accurate show of what you "actually weigh" ( a fairly meaningless term), as
your weight can fluctuate as much as 5 lbs or more for a variety of reasons (water retention, food and waste in the stomach and intestines, etc). For example the water in a full bladder weighs over 1 pound on its own. So my recommendation to everybody is this: weigh daily and use an app like WeightTracker or a Google spreadsheet to track your 5 or 7 day rolling average.

Here is a link to a Google Doc that I made that tracks 3 and 7 day rolling average and charts the progress.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmDRH8nzcubodFhQWU1wb0toNmR4M1BOU3ZBUldkWmc&usp=sharing

You should, hopefully, see a trend of loss even if on any given day your weight fluctuates by a few pounds, but more data points will get you a more accurate estimate of your weight, and will show you if you are actually losing or not.

Is today the only day you've weighed? Weight fluctuates a lot based on many factors. For me, the biggest one is sodium - if I have a sodium-heavy meal the day before, my weight the next day will be very high due to the water my body has retained. I know most people here don't recommend this, but I like to weigh myself every day so I get a full picture of exactly what's happening to my body, though I try to log that weight once every couple of days. I need to only log it once a week but ... well, I'll get there.

So today is exactly two weeks since I began taking this seriously.

When I began I weighed 216lbs - today I weigh 222lbs!

I forgot to take measurements when I started I'll do that today though.

I've worked out twice a day only had two days off.

I generally walk on my treadmill I do 5 minutes on 0 (2.5) then 5 minutes incline level 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 same speed and 10 minutes cool down on zero. I then either do kettlebells with my husband or insanity with him on an evening.

Well today I stepped on the scale and I am feeling rubbish I've put a lot of hard work in. Stopped drinking soda (coke) and I am eating as clean as I can and I'm still putting on weight.

I'm beginning to think this isn't worth it

Nowhere in this post do you mention the amount of calories you are eating per day. That is the problem.

Do you think it may be because you've burnt off the fat but replaced it with muscle which weighs more?

Since I started back into this routine, I have had an easier time breathing(I have asthma). Have you noticed any differences otherwise, leaving aside what the scale says?

I am always under target although I tend to log in a book rather than on the site although I do use the site to gage how many calories per portion of whatever. I am currently eating between 1600-1700 per day and that's not including any working out I do. According to my hrm which is programmed with my gender, height, weight my morning incline is around 400-500 and the kettlebells or insanity around 350 mark.

I would strongly suggest that you use the site to accurately log your calories for say a month or so. It would be ideal if you used a weighing scale to measure out your servings if at all possible.

I understand this may be a pain but it will give you a much better handle on portion sizes and so on and help with consistency.

I wouldn't worry about your current gain. It's entirely likely that it is fluid retention particularly given your current weight.

Be consistent. Be patient. Be awesome.

PATIENCE. Just because sometimes we hit the "wall" doesn't mean we are only restricted to the distance behind us. You have to be patient and push through the struggles to experience the accomplishments ahead. Stick at it. Your hard work will pay off

I am so sorry . I know what that feels like. I deal with that too. Are you weighing at the same time every weigh day?

Because for me, I absolutely have to do it in the morning because I will literally weigh maybe 10 pounds more just from eating daily meals and drinking lots of water. Then I'll wake up in the morning and my weight measurement is accurate, and I can tell whether I've lost or gained weight.

There are times too when I definitely feel like I lost weight, but the scale shows something different. Then I have to rework what I'm doing. There was a week when I was maintaining high (and unhealthy, though I didn't know it) caloric deficits but I wasn't losing any weight. The following week I didn't work out and I ate more, keeping with the myfitnesspal deficit and lost 2 lbs that week. I'm not at all saying that you or anyone else shouldn't work out to lose weight (my metabolism was probably just still revved up because of all of the working out that I had done the previous week and was still going at that pace but without my body holding on to and storing my intake), I'm just saying that maybe there is something that isn't working within what you're doing, but it's hard to see because you really are trying your best with what you think should be working.