Need to lose 150 pounds. Help?

How long have you been at it?

I am a very large person too. I think our bodies learn to stabilize at a certain metabolism and plateau. Recently, I began to eat more meat and even though have done carbs too, have actually been losing!! I think the protein helps kick up my metabolism.

You are either underlogging your food calories or overlogging your exercise calories. Not saying you are doing this on purpose either, its very easy to fudge the numbers by 20% over the course of an entire day, especially exercise cals, those are highly subjective.

Your best bet is to keep dropping your calorie goal by 100-200 every week until you see the weight start to drop.

Can you open your diary? If you're accurately using a food scale to measure 1,200 calories a day, it's possible the entries you're using are inaccurate, or that you're missing something, like cooking oils.

samdambrosio87 wrote: »

1000-1200 calories a day (I try to cycle/alternate so my body doesn't get use to one intake). I usually burn 1000-1200 calories a day. I started using a pedometer and aim for 10,000 steps. I'm a nanny, so I'm moving all day as well. I try to do body weight exercises and my friend just introduced me to insanity, which I begin next week. I'm accurately counting, measuring, portioning.

Perhaps you're right, I should get checked for thyroid issues. But I've never had an issue before.

You're consuming 1000-1200 calories a day and burning the same, so you're surviving on zero calories? Is that right?

You are probably not in a true deficit, as others have said. I was doing it all wrong for awhile. I workout 5 days a week on average, so I originally had entered my activity level as "very active" ... AND I was still entering exercise calories and eating them back. Plus, MFP is notorious for SEVERELY overestimating calories burned for exercise. For example:

When I enter that I'm "very active," MFP gives me a daily net allowance of 1,980cals/day to lose 2lbs per week. Plus, I was entering MORE exercise calories and eating them back. I was over-eating, but struggling to hit what MFP recommended, so I thought I was a "special snowflake" (a common MFP term, lol) who was struggling to get enough calories but was somehow managing to gain weight. Then, I started becoming active in the MFP Community forums. HOLY EDUCATIONAL WAKE-UP CALL!!!

Now, I have myself set to "sedentary," with a much lower net allowance, and then on days that I purposely and purposefully exercise, I manually enter exercise calories as (my own personal rule) 25 calories for every 15 minutes of exercise. This way, if I inadvertently under-estimate calories in, I KNOW I'm not overestimating calories out. I eat all of those calories back that I "gave myself" for my "intentional exercise." (It's my own personal preference not to count and enter "steps," vacuuming, yard work, etc. but to each their own).

I've been on the right track now and have lost 16 1/2 lbs in 11 weeks.

A lot of people simplify it by entering that they're slightly active or very active and then they don't add back in extra exercise calories. This isn't the best for me, because, some weeks I get to workout like crazy, and then, depending on the husband, kid, and work happenings, the next week I might only fit in like 1 or 2 gym sessions.

Good luck on your journey. You got this!

samdambrosio87 wrote: »

1000-1200 calories a day (I try to cycle/alternate so my body doesn't get use to one intake). I usually burn 1000-1200 calories a day. I started using a pedometer and aim for 10,000 steps. I'm a nanny, so I'm moving all day as well. I try to do body weight exercises and my friend just introduced me to insanity, which I begin next week. I'm accurately counting, measuring, portioning.

Perhaps you're right, I should get checked for thyroid issues. But I've never had an issue before.

buuuuut now I see that you are eating 1,000-1,200 calories per day. I still say you are either underestimating calories in, overestimating calories out, or both.

1000-1200 calories is far too little to be eating for your weight. I started at 318 and am 241 right now. Been working at this since July and I literally just eat at the goals MFP sets for me for a 1.5 lb loss a week. You don't need to be that drastic and I bet you're starving. That's going to be really hard to maintain and live that way in that sort of calorie deficit your entire life. You need to rethink your calorie goals and find something that you can stick with forever because you're essentially going to be doing this for the rest of your life. Most of us will anyways. Anyways, when I was 285 I was getting somewhere around 1800 calories a day for a 1.5 lb loss. Maybe you just need to eat more. But hey, I'm no professional.

I lost 25 pounds since I started using striiv touch, any band like fitbit will help, it will accurately measure calorie burned and that will help tremendously. I also try to keep carbs under 100 per day and walk 15,000-20,000 steps...