Can't Understand Why I'm Not Losing Weight
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paulK_uk
Posts: 3 Member
These numbers are just not adding up for me.
I am a 64yo male, with BMI in excess of 30. I have a somewhat desk-based job, which means I don't move around much. According to my fitbit, I'm lucky to do 2,000 steps a day.
I've been trying to lose weight for 5 weeks and did great for the first three weeks. Then I stalled a little over the next week so decided to join MyFitnessPal and count the calories.
My BMR is around 1,573. Rounding numbers to make the math easier, that equates to 11,000 calories over a week. I ate sensibly, I thought, recorded everything and food intake was 8,700 calories - just over 1,200 a day. That gave me a "deficit" of around 3,300 calories.
Enough to lose some weight you might think. Especially as I did just over eleven-and a-half hours of exercise, burning 5,700 calories according to my fitbit. Assuming I would burn 45 calories an hour doing nothing, then that would give me a net of just over 5,000.
So, calorie deficit compared to BMR, 9,000 calories. Weight loss nil. In fact, a gain of 1 pound. To rub salt in, my scales suggested decrease in muscle and increase in fat.
Thinking my metabolism might be a bit stuck because of low calorie intake, I upped my food and the following week recorded 10,200 calories, around 1,460 per day. This gave a "deficit" of only 800 calories against my BMR but, of course this doesn't account for the fact that I do burn a few extra during the day.
I didn't do any exercise but at least thought I'd lose a little. Nope. Gained 4 pounds and heavier than I was four weeks ago.
So, the math definitely isn't adding up for me. I guess I must be doing something wrong. BTW, I always weigh myself at the same time on a Monday morning after going to the toilet and before eating or drinking anything.
Any ideas, anybody?
I am a 64yo male, with BMI in excess of 30. I have a somewhat desk-based job, which means I don't move around much. According to my fitbit, I'm lucky to do 2,000 steps a day.
I've been trying to lose weight for 5 weeks and did great for the first three weeks. Then I stalled a little over the next week so decided to join MyFitnessPal and count the calories.
My BMR is around 1,573. Rounding numbers to make the math easier, that equates to 11,000 calories over a week. I ate sensibly, I thought, recorded everything and food intake was 8,700 calories - just over 1,200 a day. That gave me a "deficit" of around 3,300 calories.
Enough to lose some weight you might think. Especially as I did just over eleven-and a-half hours of exercise, burning 5,700 calories according to my fitbit. Assuming I would burn 45 calories an hour doing nothing, then that would give me a net of just over 5,000.
So, calorie deficit compared to BMR, 9,000 calories. Weight loss nil. In fact, a gain of 1 pound. To rub salt in, my scales suggested decrease in muscle and increase in fat.
Thinking my metabolism might be a bit stuck because of low calorie intake, I upped my food and the following week recorded 10,200 calories, around 1,460 per day. This gave a "deficit" of only 800 calories against my BMR but, of course this doesn't account for the fact that I do burn a few extra during the day.
I didn't do any exercise but at least thought I'd lose a little. Nope. Gained 4 pounds and heavier than I was four weeks ago.
So, the math definitely isn't adding up for me. I guess I must be doing something wrong. BTW, I always weigh myself at the same time on a Monday morning after going to the toilet and before eating or drinking anything.
Any ideas, anybody?
1
Replies
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You always use a food scale? Use the verified entries? Picked a sensible weight loss for your weight? Men should be a minimum of 1500 calories a day. Used the calories mfp set??3
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First of all, those scales are inaccurate.
Secondly, your BMR is what you burn in a coma, you should not be cutting from that. Your deficit comes from your TDEE or if using MFP as designed, the NEAT method where exercise calories are added in addition to your goal. You should not be eating lower than 1500 per day as a male and in fact probably a lot more to lose weight. New/increased exercise will often cause water retention which will mask losses. If your numbers are right you are chronically undereating.
How are you tracking your intake? Are you weighing solids and measuring liquids?11 -
First, did you set up your stats in MFP and a weight loss goal? That should give you the calorie target you should eat to. BMR is relatively unimportant. MFP uses NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenisis), which is a
Do you weigh your food with a food scale or use measuring cups? If you use the barscanner with packaged foods, do you adjust for the actual weight or go with the labelled serving size? Both of these can be significantly inaccurate. You mention you are eating 1200 cals/day, but if you are not accurately measuring you could be getting significantly more.
When you log food, try to verify the entries you use. Many times people find generic entries that have implausibly low calorie counts.
Lastly, as a male you should not be as low as 1200. The recommended minimum is 1500, and should probably be higher than that. If you exercise, log it and eat back a portion (exercise activity can be overestimated so its helpful to be conservative and eat back 50%-75%).
If you make adjustments above, give it some time to start to see results.
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Along with the above, I'm adding in water retention from sudden increase in exercise which is masking weight loss.
Keep yourself hydrated and after a while your body will lose the excess water and hey presto! Your scale has moved.5 -
In answer to the questions. Yes I use a food scale; yes I weigh/measure everything; yes, I use the MFP database but also check labels against what is in MFP. Finally, I used MFP to calculate colorie suggestions. MFP suggested 1,200 plus whatever I burnt in exercise to give me a 1.5 pound loss per week.
As for 1,500 calories per day for a male, yes I've seen that quoted and also a 1,200 to 1,500 range. That's why I upped my intake last week and checked MFP predictions each day. They indicated I should be losing weight - not putting it on, as I did.
My aim was to follow MFP and ignore the exercise calories in the hope of losing a bit extra. I guess that I do need to eat more in compensation for the exercise - but MFP is still saying 1,200 as a base! And, yes, I have entered my details correctly.
I suppose the answer this point is to burn 300 calories per day in exercise and consume enough for a 1,500 calorie intake. Plus, of course, lots of liquid. Then take it from there.
Thanks you all for your advice & insights. I do appreciate you giving me your time.1 -
Then it's almost certainly water retention from muscle repair.4
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Get up and moving brotha. Diet is just half the battle. A daily walk or even as little as 30 min in the gym can do wonders for your weight loss goals. Good luck!2
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There's a glitch, 1200 is the minimum for a female. And that is NET, you should be grossing more with your exercise. Undereating will cause you to lose more LBM (muscle, organs are muscle) than is ideal.
It is often recommended to never eat below your BMR.3 -
FlexxxMachine wrote: »Get up and moving brotha. Diet is just half the battle. A daily walk or even as little as 30 min in the gym can do wonders for your weight loss goals. Good luck!
Diet is the only battle. You can do absolutely no physical activity and still lose weight by consuming the appropriate number of calories. Exercise of course is wonderful for health and extra food to eat but it's not essential to weight loss.12 -
Yes, take note of the people who are telling you about water retention, the weight fluctuations this causes can be very large. I went on a two hour hike at the weekend after a few months of reduced exercise - I'm now stiff, sore and carrying an extra 5lb of water. I've seen people quote water weight increases after exercise of up to 10lb. Water comes and goes unpredictably, and can easily mask fat loss in the short term.
So what can you do about it? Nothing. Except for accepting that weight loss is (a) not linear and (b) a long term project. If you want to know if your approach is working, you need to be thinking in terms of results after a month, not a week. If you want feedback over a shorter timescale than that, I suggest weighing daily and feeding results into a weight trend app (I use Libra) which will iron out the fluctuations and give you an overall trend. Or you can use Excel for this if you're handy in that way.4 -
You mentioned that you weigh on Monday morning. Maybe it is a good idea to weigh everyday to see your fluctuations. You might be losing weight but retaining water just on this and previous Monday. Not uncommon to happen to me. My weight goes up and down and if I don't weigh everyday I would miss the new lows for sure.6
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Don't count calories. CICO doesn't work long term for most people. It usually damages your metabolism. Instead I would recommend following a diet similar to that of LCHF or Keto. The basic principle is this:
you eat carbs (could be sugar rich or it could be whole wheat bread). This dumps a fair amount of sugar into your blood. You create insulin to help move this sugar out of your blood. Your liver takes some and stores it as Glycogen as does some of your muscles. If you don't deplete your muscles of Glycogen you will only take a small amount in from your blood. This means any sugar that is left over in your blood (blood usually has only 1 teaspoon worth and any given time) will be stored as fat.
If insulin levels are high constantly through constant eating such as 3 meals and 2 - 3 snacks you could be stopping yourself from releasing fat for energy. This is usually because while insulin is high you aren't able to get at your stored fat.
Another side effect of following a diet higher in carbs is that if you spike your insulin lots throughout the day you quickly shift the sugars meaning you feel hungrier more often. Then you produce more of a hormone called Ghrelin which makes you crave food. There have been reports also that your satiated hormone called leptin, is partially blocked if your insulin is high which means your brain doesn't receive the message that you are full.
If you follow a higher fat, moderate protein and lower carb diet you will lower your insulin naturally which in turn allows you to get at your fat to burn it for energy. You turn that fat into ketones and you use that in place of Glucose for energy.
You should read up here for more information on the topic.-6 -
CICO is the thing that works long term for most people. Don't listen to the minority of people who think fad diets are more successful than others and preach on about them endlessly.
Eat 1500 calories a day, eat back half of your exercise calories, thus doesn't include normal activity such as walking around the office or to the station. You could put on a few pounds in water due to salt in a meal so keep that in mind.
The fact you lost muscle mass shows your calories are too low so keep it reasonable and it'll be sustainable in the long term. Also don't trust home scale for fat readings, they are based on electrical resistance so can show massive ranges after sitting in the bath or having a drink.
Youll get there if you keep a decent plan and commit to it2 -
OP, weight loss isn't a linear thing. Based on this, you should be giving things 4-6 weeks to see trends. The body will naturally fluctuate up to 5 lbs in a given day based on sodium & glycogen levels, waste in your GI track, and fluid increases from exercise. It's no different than low tides and high tides in the ocean.
I might recommend that you weigh yourself daily, to see the fluctuation and to have more data points. Personally, when I was doing this, I would take the average for the week. Unfortunately, if you have a high sodium Sunday, then weighing on Monday would be skewing your results.1 -
Don't count calories. CICO doesn't work long term for most people. It usually damages your metabolism. Instead I would recommend following a diet similar to that of LCHF or Keto. The basic principle is this:
you eat carbs (could be sugar rich or it could be whole wheat bread). This dumps a fair amount of sugar into your blood. You create insulin to help move this sugar out of your blood. Your liver takes some and stores it as Glycogen as does some of your muscles. If you don't deplete your muscles of Glycogen you will only take a small amount in from your blood. This means any sugar that is left over in your blood (blood usually has only 1 teaspoon worth and any given time) will be stored as fat.
If insulin levels are high constantly through constant eating such as 3 meals and 2 - 3 snacks you could be stopping yourself from releasing fat for energy. This is usually because while insulin is high you aren't able to get at your stored fat.
Another side effect of following a diet higher in carbs is that if you spike your insulin lots throughout the day you quickly shift the sugars meaning you feel hungrier more often. Then you produce more of a hormone called Ghrelin which makes you crave food. There have been reports also that your satiated hormone called leptin, is partially blocked if your insulin is high which means your brain doesn't receive the message that you are full.
If you follow a higher fat, moderate protein and lower carb diet you will lower your insulin naturally which in turn allows you to get at your fat to burn it for energy. You turn that fat into ketones and you use that in place of Glucose for energy.
You should read up here for more information on the topic.
This is a typical response from a low carber. CICO is NOT a diet or eating strategy. It is an energy balance, in which all diets obey. It takes into consideration basal metabolic rate, non exercise activity thermogenesis, thermal effect of food and thermal effect of activity. Low carb follows this. If you eat more calories than you expend, you will gain weight.
Also, there is a lot of debate on whether insulin suppresses or encourages appetite. Either way, appetite is more individual and based on overall dietary context. A diet high in protein and fiber (something that we all advocate for), will typically keep most people full. Not everyone gets full off a fat and many of us are full off of carbs. Personally, a potato is more filling than fat for me. This is the reason why the first thing I cut is fat. In I have been able to maintain a loss of 50 lbs for about 6 years now and working on getting into single digit body fat (around 16% now).
The fact is, dietary strategies are personal. Some strive on high carb plant based diets, some very low carb, and others in the middle. And there is no reason to overcomplicate and confuse people with half truths about diets, which is what you are doing. Because if you want, I will gladly discuss all the other hormones/enzymes, our body produces on high fat diets to inhibit lipolysis (breakdown of fat) and induce lipogenesis. Because if one thing is certain, it's our bodies ability to store fat.10 -
Don't count calories. CICO doesn't work long term for most people. It usually damages your metabolism. Instead I would recommend following a diet similar to that of LCHF or Keto. The basic principle is this:
you eat carbs (could be sugar rich or it could be whole wheat bread). This dumps a fair amount of sugar into your blood. You create insulin to help move this sugar out of your blood. Your liver takes some and stores it as Glycogen as does some of your muscles. If you don't deplete your muscles of Glycogen you will only take a small amount in from your blood. This means any sugar that is left over in your blood (blood usually has only 1 teaspoon worth and any given time) will be stored as fat.
If insulin levels are high constantly through constant eating such as 3 meals and 2 - 3 snacks you could be stopping yourself from releasing fat for energy. This is usually because while insulin is high you aren't able to get at your stored fat.
Another side effect of following a diet higher in carbs is that if you spike your insulin lots throughout the day you quickly shift the sugars meaning you feel hungrier more often. Then you produce more of a hormone called Ghrelin which makes you crave food. There have been reports also that your satiated hormone called leptin, is partially blocked if your insulin is high which means your brain doesn't receive the message that you are full.
If you follow a higher fat, moderate protein and lower carb diet you will lower your insulin naturally which in turn allows you to get at your fat to burn it for energy. You turn that fat into ketones and you use that in place of Glucose for energy.
You should read up here for more information on the topic.
This is a typical response from a low carber. CICO is NOT a diet or eating strategy. It is an energy balance, in which all diets obey. It takes into consideration basal metabolic rate, non exercise activity thermogenesis, thermal effect of food and thermal effect of activity. Low carb follows this. If you eat more calories than you expend, you will gain weight.
Also, there is a lot of debate on whether insulin suppresses or encourages appetite. Either way, appetite is more individual and based on overall dietary context. A diet high in protein and fiber (something that we all advocate for), will typically keep most people full. Not everyone gets full off a fat and many of us are full off of carbs. Personally, a potato is more filling than fat for me. This is the reason why the first thing I cut is fat. In I have been able to maintain a loss of 50 lbs for about 6 years now and working on getting into single digit body fat (around 16% now).
The fact is, dietary strategies are personal. Some strive on high carb plant based diets, some very low carb, and others in the middle. And there is no reason to over complicate and confuse people with half truths about diets, which is what you are doing. Because if you want, I will gladly discuss all the other hormones/enzymes, our body produces on high fat diets to inhibit lipolysis (breakdown of fat) and induce lipogenesis. Because if one thing is certain, it's our bodies ability to store fat.
Wasn't trying to confuse. Just trying to give what I believe to be the truth about diets and our bodies. I agree with you that we are all different and that some thrive on high fat others on high carbs. To be completely honest, I don't know what the poster eats and I'm only making assumptions to his diet. Based on this I posted my reply as I did.
I really don't think counting calories is the answer to maintaining a healthy weight / lifestyle. To me, counting / weighing all my food is unsustainable over a long period of time. I like to listen to my body and eat a keto / LCHF lifestyle. I feel full and I'm losing weight. I don't count a single calorie, all I do is I make sure my carbs are low and my fats are higher. Works for me so I'm sure it could work for others.
CICO for me, is when people say all calories are equal and as long as you reduce them you will lose weight no matter what the calorie is. Hopefully you will agree with that not all calories are the same and what our body doesn't deal with them all the same? Yes you can overeat with low carb just like any food plan but on a personal level, once I figured out where I was in terms of what I could and what I couldn't eat I found a happy medium.
Just like most of the advice posted it is a personal experience, I know what is working for me and I'm fairly sure it could work for others based on the evidence I have seen and read. Each to their own, I'm not selling anything, just suggesting a different lifestyle that has helped me and may help others.0 -
While some calories are definitely more valuable than others health wise, when it comes to losing or gaining, it really doesn't matter. I hear you on the measuring forever though...I hope that in the future I'll be able to eat more intuitively in combination with being more aware of how calorie dense most foods are.1
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Calorie is a unit of measurement. It offers no guidance as to quality of that energy source. However, all that is required is a calorie deficit. Google the Twinkie diet.2
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VintageFeline wrote: »Calorie is a unit of measurement. It offers no guidance as to quality of that energy source. However, all that is required is a calorie deficit. Google the Twinkie diet.
The link to this guys food diary here
Doesn't really prove anything. He might be better suited to using carbs / sugar for energy than others like myself. I naturally find myself in calorie deficit by following a keto style of eating without the need to count calories. May work for others if they give it a crack?0 -
if you are truly logging all your food and drink accurately and are sure you don't have diabetes or thyroid issues (determined by medical tests ordered by your doctor), and you're not losing weight, cut your daily calories a bit at a time till you find the amount where you do lose weight. the numbers you'll find online that you should be eating to lose weight are extremely general. if you have less lean body mass than average or are less active than average, your body will use less calories than MFP or most of the calorie counters say.2
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