Need advice!

HeatherElliott2011
HeatherElliott2011 Posts: 4 Member
edited November 30 in Getting Started
I'm counting calories, watching my carb and sugar in take. Drinking 1/2 my body weight in oz of water! I lost 6 lbs the first week but nothing the past two weeks! What am I doing wrong?

Replies

  • bruhaha007
    bruhaha007 Posts: 333 Member
    That is great you lost 6lbs the first week. It is possible much of that was water weight which comes off the easiest. Fat takes longer so I suggest giving it a couple more weeks and tweeking if you still don't drop any. 1 lb per week would be a good goal. What are you doing for exercise?
  • kgirlhart
    kgirlhart Posts: 5,173 Member
    Are you weighing your food? You may be eating more than you think you are. Sugar and carbs are irrelevant unless you are diabetic. If it has only been a couple of weeks then you need to be patient.
  • HeatherElliott2011
    HeatherElliott2011 Posts: 4 Member
    I haven't been weighing my food. I do low impact arobics 3 X per week and walk at least 4 timed a week. I'm eating 1358 calories per day! Logging everything on mfp.
  • kgirlhart
    kgirlhart Posts: 5,173 Member
    If you aren't weighing then there is a chance that you are overestimating how much you are eating. But since you just started then the first week you probably lost some extra water weight. Do you weigh every day or just weekly? If you weigh daily you will see that the weight fluctuates up and down but overtime you should see a downward trend.
  • HeatherElliott2011
    HeatherElliott2011 Posts: 4 Member
    Thank you for the advice! I will get a scale and start weighing my portions! Keeping at it! I'm trying to only weigh once a week but I find myself weighing daily.
  • bruhaha007
    bruhaha007 Posts: 333 Member
    Oh, also take measurements and don't just rely on the scale. Your body composition may be changing.
  • kgirlhart
    kgirlhart Posts: 5,173 Member
    I used to think weekly weigh ins were best, but I started weighing daily and once I got used to the fluctuations I really like it better. I use an app called happy scale to enter my weight daily and I can see the downward trend. I like it because some weeks it would look like I only lost .3 pounds or it might look like I gained that week if I was just weighing once a week. But when I weigh daily I get to see all the lows and when I am up a little I can really see that it is water weight. Usually from a high sodium day the day before.

    I was hesitant to weigh my food at first. But once I started it really isn't that hard and it has become a habit. There were some things that I was pretty good at estimating, but some I was way overestimating and a few that I was actually underestimating.
  • WendyLaubach
    WendyLaubach Posts: 518 Member
    I weigh every day, but my weight goes up and down in waves. As long as the long-term trend is down, I pay attention only to the low points in the cycle. After several months of this, I've learned that if my daily calorie intake is in the right place, each low point will be a little lower than the last, if I'm patient for a few days.


    If the long-term trend (say, a week or two) isn't consistently down, it's time to ratchet down on the calories. There are a couple of ways to decrease the calories: (1) you can tighten up on your weighing and measuring, or (2) you can keep being a bit loose in weighing and measuring but lower the calorie limit. The exact scientific number of the calories you eat is something you may never know for sure, but if you always count by the same system, you can keep reducing what you eat until you find that week after week you show a consistent steady reasonable loss.


    One thing's for sure: if you're not losing, one way or another you're eating too much. Don't put too much stock in the "numbers," which may be off for all kinds of reasons. Maybe your metabolism is slower or faster than average, maybe you're not counting perfectly, maybe a lot of things, but the formula is always: eat less, lose more. Exercising will help, but if you eat back more than a fraction of your calories you'll probably get in trouble with counting there, too. Apparently all known systems of counting exercise calories are wildly overstated. I suppose the machines sell better when they give you good news!

    Anyway, log, log, log. It's just about the only way to be consistent about what you're taking in. Even better: pre-log, so you don't eat something and then it up and say, oops, there went my budget. Also, you're a lot less likely to indulge in a giant piece of cheesecake or something if you have to look it up and write it down before it goes on your fork. Instead, you'll be saying, "Hmm, cheesecake would be nice, but do I want to spend 90% of today's calories on this piece? How about just a taste instead?" A taste is often as satisfying as a giant bowlful.
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