nothing for 3 weeks? am i doing this wrong!?

Three weeks - 7 pounds. That is MORE than 2 pounds a week!! Way to go!

The body doesn't necessarily lose weight at a nice, steady rate of oh...say...2 pounds every Wednesday at 9:18 pm :laugh: It may be a week or three before a pound or three drop off.

exercise doesn't have that much of an impact on weightloss, i think. the 1200 net Calories/daily likewise isn't true for everyone.

From a practical perspective, then, exercise is never going to be an effective way of slimming, unless you have the training schedule – and the willpower – of an Olympic athlete. "It's simple maths," says Professor Paul Gately, of the Carnegie Weight Management institution in Leeds. "If you want to lose a pound of body fat, then that requires you to run from Leeds to Nottingham, but if you want to do it through diet, you just have to skip a meal for seven days." Both Jebb and Gately are keen to stress that there is plenty of evidence that exercise can add value to a diet: "It certainly does maximise the amount you lose as fat rather than tissue," Jebb points out. But Gately sums it up: "Most people, offered the choice, are going to go for the diet, because it's easier to achieve."

There's another, more insidious, problem with pinning all your hopes for a holiday bod on exercise. In what has become a defining experiment at the University of Louisiana, led by Dr Timothy Church, hundreds of overweight women were put on exercise regimes for a six-month period. Some worked out for 72 minutes each week, some for 136 minutes, and some for 194. A fourth group kept to their normal daily routine with no additional exercise.

Against all the laws of natural justice, at the end of the study, there was no significant difference in weight loss between those who had exercised – some of them for several days a week – and those who hadn't. (Church doesn't record whether he told the women who he'd had training for three and half hours a week, or whether he was wearing protective clothing when he did.) Some of the women even gained weight.

Church identified the problem and called it "compensation": those who exercised cancelled out the calories they had burned by eating more, generally as a form of self-reward. The post-workout pastry to celebrate a job well done – or even a few pieces of fruit to satisfy their stimulated appetites – undid their good work. In some cases, they were less physically active in their daily life as well.

His findings are backed up by a paper on childhood obesity published in 2008 by Boston academics Steven Gortmaker and Kendrin Sonneville. In an 18-month study investigating what they call "the energy gap" – the daily imbalance between energy intake and expenditure — the pair showed that when the children in their experiment exercised, they ended up eating more than the calories they had just burned, sometimes 10 or 20 times as many. "Although physical activity is thought of as an energy-deficit activity," they wrote, "our estimates do not support this hypothesis."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/sep/19/exercise-dieting-public-health

From a practical perspective, then, exercise is never going to be an effective way of slimming, unless you have the training schedule – and the willpower – of an Olympic athlete. "It's simple maths," says Professor Paul Gately, of the Carnegie Weight Management institution in Leeds. "If you want to lose a pound of body fat, then that requires you to run from Leeds to Nottingham, but if you want to do it through diet, you just have to skip a meal for seven days." Both Jebb and Gately are keen to stress that there is plenty of evidence that exercise can add value to a diet: "It certainly does maximise the amount you lose as fat rather than tissue," Jebb points out. But Gately sums it up: "Most people, offered the choice, are going to go for the diet, because it's easier to achieve."

There's another, more insidious, problem with pinning all your hopes for a holiday bod on exercise. In what has become a defining experiment at the University of Louisiana, led by Dr Timothy Church, hundreds of overweight women were put on exercise regimes for a six-month period. Some worked out for 72 minutes each week, some for 136 minutes, and some for 194. A fourth group kept to their normal daily routine with no additional exercise.

Against all the laws of natural justice, at the end of the study, there was no significant difference in weight loss between those who had exercised – some of them for several days a week – and those who hadn't. (Church doesn't record whether he told the women who he'd had training for three and half hours a week, or whether he was wearing protective clothing when he did.) Some of the women even gained weight.

Church identified the problem and called it "compensation": those who exercised cancelled out the calories they had burned by eating more, generally as a form of self-reward. The post-workout pastry to celebrate a job well done – or even a few pieces of fruit to satisfy their stimulated appetites – undid their good work. In some cases, they were less physically active in their daily life as well.

His findings are backed up by a paper on childhood obesity published in 2008 by Boston academics Steven Gortmaker and Kendrin Sonneville. In an 18-month study investigating what they call "the energy gap" – the daily imbalance between energy intake and expenditure — the pair showed that when the children in their experiment exercised, they ended up eating more than the calories they had just burned, sometimes 10 or 20 times as many. "Although physical activity is thought of as an energy-deficit activity," they wrote, "our estimates do not support this hypothesis."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/sep/19/exercise-dieting-public-health

From a practical perspective, then, exercise is never going to be an effective way of slimming, unless you have the training schedule – and the willpower – of an Olympic athlete. "It's simple maths," says Professor Paul Gately, of the Carnegie Weight Management institution in Leeds. "If you want to lose a pound of body fat, then that requires you to run from Leeds to Nottingham, but if you want to do it through diet, you just have to skip a meal for seven days." Both Jebb and Gately are keen to stress that there is plenty of evidence that exercise can add value to a diet: "It certainly does maximise the amount you lose as fat rather than tissue," Jebb points out. But Gately sums it up: "Most people, offered the choice, are going to go for the diet, because it's easier to achieve."

There's another, more insidious, problem with pinning all your hopes for a holiday bod on exercise. In what has become a defining experiment at the University of Louisiana, led by Dr Timothy Church, hundreds of overweight women were put on exercise regimes for a six-month period. Some worked out for 72 minutes each week, some for 136 minutes, and some for 194. A fourth group kept to their normal daily routine with no additional exercise.

Against all the laws of natural justice, at the end of the study, there was no significant difference in weight loss between those who had exercised – some of them for several days a week – and those who hadn't. (Church doesn't record whether he told the women who he'd had training for three and half hours a week, or whether he was wearing protective clothing when he did.) Some of the women even gained weight.

Church identified the problem and called it "compensation": those who exercised cancelled out the calories they had burned by eating more, generally as a form of self-reward. The post-workout pastry to celebrate a job well done – or even a few pieces of fruit to satisfy their stimulated appetites – undid their good work. In some cases, they were less physically active in their daily life as well.

His findings are backed up by a paper on childhood obesity published in 2008 by Boston academics Steven Gortmaker and Kendrin Sonneville. In an 18-month study investigating what they call "the energy gap" – the daily imbalance between energy intake and expenditure — the pair showed that when the children in their experiment exercised, they ended up eating more than the calories they had just burned, sometimes 10 or 20 times as many. "Although physical activity is thought of as an energy-deficit activity," they wrote, "our estimates do not support this hypothesis."