Hi excercise hard but can't lose

Exercise can assist with weight loss as well as improve one's health. However, if one is not paying close attention to his or her caloric intake, and consuming more calories than is being burned through exercise etc., weight loss will not happen.

If you don't already have one, buy a food scale (one that weighs in grams), weigh all solids, measure all liquids. It makes a huge difference in the long run.

If you're not losing with exercise, it's not because of the exercise.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

I was told by a trainer once that the changes happen on the inside first. I believe that is very true and makes sense. So don't give up. The changes will catch up to the outside.

It is hard to know the specifics of what to do for any one person, but from my own reading and watching these boards awhile, the things that seem to help a lot of people are:

1. Get a food scale and start using it whenever possible. Since MFP has a database of calories in different foods, you don't need to buy a fancy, expensive one that has its own food calorie database (like my Salter that I bought before I had an iPhone). You will want the option of measuring in grams or ounces. Some scales also provide ml and fluid oz.

It's also convenient to just memorize that an ounce is 28 grams, and that for water (and most drinks that are mostly water), 1 ml weighs 1 gram. You never know what units MFP will have for that food in its database and knowing these conversions will help you convert units if you measured in grams but the database only has ounces.

2. Read about and use "target heart rate" methods to adjust the intensity of your aerobic exercise to have the most efficient benefit for the effort you put forth. The harder you exercise, the more calories you burn per minute, but the higher % of those calories comes from sugars rather than fat. So there's a diminishing return for exercising "too hard" if your goal is fat loss. Hard exercise has heart-health benefits, so it is worth doing some of it as part of your exercise plan. But by using target heart rate zones, you exercise only hard enough to meet your goal (fat burning vs. cardiac conditioning) efficiently and don't burn yourself out.

3. If you have been weight-lifting, lifting isn't directly burning fat--the calories burned per lifting session aren't that many. Lifting helps weight loss longer-term because it builds muscle mass. The muscle mass needs to be fed 24/7, and so it will increase your basal rate of burning calories. It will also make you stronger so that you can lift and carry things more easily (kids, pets, groceries), and eventually increase your speed at aerobic activities (speed tracks strength, endurance tracks cardiovascular conditioning).

I mention the cardio vs. strength training issue because it is unclear what you mean by "exercising hard"

4. Are you recording your exercise sessions accurately? MFP tends to over-estimate calorie burn rates for activities. If you have a smart phone, there are several free apps that you can use to track your exercise more accurately. I use Runkeeper but recently bought a Polar A300 with heart rate monitor, so I'm using the Polar for walks in areas with poor GPS signal, for swimming, and for general activity monitoring. There are also free phone apps that use the phone's motion sensors to turn a smartphone into a pedometer. If you choose an app listed in the "MFP Apps" section, it can be set to automatically send it's data to MFP so you have it here to work with.

5. Are you exercising consistently? Aerobic exercise needs to be done at least 3x a week to be effective; strength training needs to be done once per week. At that rate, progress is very slow; you can get faster progress if you increase aerobic exercise to 4x, 5x, or 6x per week, or strength training to 2x or 3x per week.

6. Are you sleeping consistently and getting rest between exercise sessions? This may sound like heresy, but while exercise burns energy (fat or glucose/sugar), it does not actually build endurance or muscle. Say what?

Exercise signals the body that there is a need to build up. The actual building occurs during the rest sessions between exercise sessions. You can think of exercise as a traffic-jam on a road system that signals the city there's a need to fix roads in that area; the actual road work doesn't happen during traffic hours, it happens at night when traffic demands on the road are low.

This is one reason ordinary folk generally take at least one "rest day" a week, without working out, and higher-level atheletes take at least one "easy day" a week where they work out at lower intensity and duration.

Hope these basic principals help you figure out why what you're doing isn't working for you.

I find my body likes to eat around 2000 calories no matter my level of activity. So for me, what works is exercising enough so that I can eat that many calories in a day. That way I'm not hungry but I'm still at a calorie deficit to lose weight.

Right now my record on MFP is unimpressive because I hurt my foot (nerve injury) in November and couldn't resume exercise until the beginning of July. So I gained back the 30 lbs I lost last year, because exercise is so crucial to my particular ability to lose weight and maintain a lower weight.

thetruekim47 wrote: »

Thanks for the comments. It seems simple now. I'm throwing away all those diet books and just count calories. I'm back to old school

Becayse you werent paying enough attention to the consumption side, then you were never sufficiently in deficit and the extra exercise you did wasnt enough. Its easier in the first instance to reduce intake than increase calories burned. Calories burned through exercise can help supplement that, but its harder. thats where the balance of your efforts were wrong based on the results you have achieved. No worries though you cna adjust and start losing again. A lot of it is learning.

I've read that weight loss starts in the kitchen. I lost 60 pounds counting calories with almost no exercise. I'm not unusual in that many here have lost weight without any exercise.

As far as I am concern, I think lot of people over estimate exercises/gym and lost of weight. If your plan is to drop weight, then you should do high burning cardio exercises. Ex, one hour of gym= +-250-400cal burned. one hour of running = +-800-1000cal burned.
I understand not everyone can do one hour run or 1h30 bike. However, there is a starting point for everything. I'd say if you have one hour to make exercises, make it worth. I personally do 1hr gym, between 1 and 2 hours cardio and 1 hour walk about 6 days a week. But not everyone has that much time to spend on their health ;-)
Don't give up!