Can I lose weight while exercising?

audreymae7 wrote: »

If you have a source of fats/proteins/carbs at each meal I'd say at this point you don't really need to worry about calories or weight - the scale doesn't mean much - muscle weighs more than fat. If you're not getting results play around with your carb and fat intake. My favourite way to go is to not have any carbs except before and after my work out! I usually have calories around 1700 or so, I don't really pay attention haha just make sure you're eating good quality foods and work hard in the gym. Look in the mirror not always the scale. Maintain good cardiovascular and strength training!

Please don't tell someone to ignore calories when they're trying to lose weight. This is some of the very worst advice I've seen here.

Here is some info, that might help a little. You said you lost 55 pounds from Feb. to June, down to 189. So, you started at 243, in Feb., right? Do you have any idea, when you were at 243 (prior to starting your weight loss plan), if you were steady at that weight, or were you gaining gradually? I will make an assumption that you were gaining 2 pounds per month, on average, until Feb. when you decided to start losing weight, for the purposes of some calculations, below.

Roughly speaking, to lose one pound, you need to (roughly) either run a 3500 calorie deficit in food intake, OR you need to burn 3500 calories in exercise (or some combination thereof). 3500 calories is a rule-of-thumb number for 1 pound of weight loss/gain. So, losing 55 pounds in four months is roughly 14 pounds of weight loss per month, and using that 3500 calorie number, that means, you ran a calorie deficit of 49,000 calories (roughly) per month, to lose those 55 pounds in those four months. Now, using a 30 days per month number, that means you ran a calorie deficit of roughly 1600 calories per day, to lose that 55 pounds. Now, if you were running a calorie deficit of roughly 1600 per day, and you said your daily consumption was 1200 calories, then we can make a rough calculation that says 2800 calories per day is what you would have needed to keep you steady at 243 (1200 consumed, 1600 deficit). Now, I don't know you, but I will make some assumptions. I will assume you are 30 years old, you are 5'4" tall, and you used to be (before your intense hour-per-day workout regimen that you are now doing) moderately active. If you plug that data, and your 243 pound weight, into a TDEE calculator https://tdeecalculator.net/, guess what it comes up with, for a "maintenance" calorie intake? 2801 calories! So, in this case, it would seem that "theory" matches with "real world data." That's good.

Do you follow so far?

To continue...

You said someone said you were starving yourself, at 1200. Essentially, you were. You were losing roughly 4 pounds per week at that 1200 calorie-per-day intake, and most times, losing 1-2 pounds per week is all you should be targeting. Why? Because trying to lose more than that can become counterproductive, in the following way: if you cut your calories SO MUCH that you are losing more than that 1-2 pounds per week, your body can actually begin to slow its own metabolism, as a protective measure. Your body apparently senses, basically (as I understand it) that you have gone into "starvation" so to speak, and so your body responds metabolically to slow itself down, and burn fewer calories to preserve itself, since you are not getting enough caloric intake. This is the opposite of what you want, of course; you want to do things to INCREASE your metabolism, when you are trying to lose weight.

So, considering the 1-2 pounds of weight loss per week rule of thumb, then you should be looking to run a 3500 to 7000 calorie deficit per week (either through less eating, or more exercise, or both), which puts you at that 1-2 pounds of weight loss per week number.

So, let's start from where you are now. While 2800 calories would have maintained 243 pounds for you, you now weigh 195. So what, using the calculator (for a 30 year old woman, 5'4", moderately active), what is "maintenance" calorie intake per day? Roughly 2500. So, doing some more arithmetic, that means that if you want to lose 1-2 pounds per week, starting at 202, then you need to target 2000 calories per day (1 pound per week loss), or 1500 per day (for 2 pounds per week loss). That would be if you were doing moderate activity. Since you are doing heavy exercise, that is about 300 more calories burned per day than my "moderate activity" assumption, so that would be an additional weight loss per week of just less than 2/3 pound (300 calories times 7 days, or 2100 calories, divided by 3500 calories per pound).

To continue...you asked about exercise. You say you went up to 2100 calories per day, but introduced 6 to 7 workouts per week, burning 530 calories per workout. Doing so, you gained 20 pounds in a month. That seems odd, to me -- based on the calculations above. Something isn't normal, there. Some of that weight gain was muscle (a few pounds possibly), and some water weight (maybe a few more pounds). But, if muscle and water account for 5 pounds, that means you gained 15 pounds of fat -- or the equivalent of having eaten 53,000 calories TOO MANY that month (1700 too many PER DAY). Which, of course, is impossible, since you only increased your intake by 900 per day (from 1200 to 2100) WHILE increasing your calorie burn through exercise by roughly 300 calories per day. Something is not right, there.

BUT, let's look to the next month, after you gained that weight. Doing the same thing the next month, you said you lost 8 pounds. That, to me, makes more sense, and is more consistent, numbers-wise. The next month, you dropped your calories to 1700 per day, and lost another 7 pounds, to 195. That makes decent sense, too, though I would have expected a bit more than 7 pounds of loss that month with another 400 calories reduced from your diet. Still, something around 2 pounds per week weight loss is "in the ballpark" for what you are doing exercise-wise and eating-wise. To reiterate why I say that...using my assumptions from above (30 years old, 5'4"), at 195 pounds, and with heavy exercise, the tdee calculator says you need roughly 2700 calories per day, to maintain. You are eating 1700 -- so that's a 1000 calorie deficit per day, or 7000 per week. That suggests you should be losing 2 pounds per week. While I am still confused about how you ended up at 210, you lost roughly 2 pounds per week for the next two months after that. So, again, this makes reasonable sense.

Finally, you say you are now "stuck" at 195. For how long have you been "stuck? A few weeks? A month? I would give it more time; temporary plateaus are common during weight loss, and all the numbers/calculations suggest that you should be losing about 2 pounds per week, on average, eating 1700 calories per day and doing the heavy exercise you mentioned. I think giving it some more time, and doing the same as you are doing, you should find additional weight loss from your 195 pound level.

Hopefully, this extremely long post has contained some information that is helpful to you.

Steve