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I'm having trouble breaking out of same weight. this is w.diet and exercise, what can I do

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  • brian46845
    brian46845 Posts: 8 Member
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    How long have you been struggling?
  • swinefish
    swinefish Posts: 24 Member
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    Have you been using MFP for a while? If so, make sure you adjust your goals. Even if you don't want to change anything, doing this will re-adjust your daily calories. Without this, the calorie count will eventually go wrong and you will end up not losing.

    If this isn't the problem, there are a couple of places where you might be having trouble. A couple of questions:
    1) Are you accurately weighing your food, and are you logging everything you eat?
    2) How do you figure out your calories burned from exercise?
    3) Do you eat back all the calories you burn from exercise?

    Also make sure you take measurements other than weight. Whenever I have a bad weight loss week, I make sure to take my waist measurement and body fat percentage to get a better idea of my actual progress.

    Hope you break your plateau soon
  • qflirty1602
    qflirty1602 Posts: 3 Member
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    I've been on this for almost a month, I know not long. I've been tracking everything I eat. have been walking, using treadmill, and elliptical. not sure why I'm not getting farther along.
  • swinefish
    swinefish Posts: 24 Member
    edited March 2015
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    I'm not a personal trainer or anything (so take what I say with a grain of salt) but there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

    Firstly, make sure that you're eating enough calories. Eating less than 1200 a day means that your body may hold onto everything it can get because it's starving.

    I also found that my weight loss got properly on track when I increased the intensity of my workouts. Maybe get an interval timer (there are a bunch of great free apps for this) and start adding short jogging or running intervals into your walks. Slowly increase the length and speed of these intervals over the next few weeks. This should increase the intensity steadily but without risking injury.

    Another possible cause of the problem may be eating back all of the calories you burn from exercise. Gym machines often overestimate the number of calories you burn from your exercise, so if you eat back all of those calories you're actually eating more than you burned. Aim to eat back no more than 50% of the calories you burn from exercise.

    It's also a good idea to add some resistance training into your workouts, since the muscle mass you add increases your metabolic rate - you burn calories without doing anything extra. To make sure your weight isn't too light, make sure you can do 12 reps of the given exercise, but that more would be difficult. If you don't want to use specific weights, body weight exercises like push ups, pull ups and squats are a great way to build muscle.

    Let me know if things start coming right, or if you're still struggling. Hope this helps.