Help please.

How long have you been doing this? Sometimes your body hits a wall and wants to hold on to the calories because it thinks it's losing energy too fast. You may need to take some recovery days where you eat more. I don't mean overeat, just refuel yourself every so often.

How long have you been "stuck?" Are you not losing at all, or just slower than you were losing?

You might be over training and under eating. Depending on your weight, 1200 calories might be too little. You'll notice overtraining if your resting pulse is running high. I would take a break and refuel!

1. If it's been less than 3 weeks or so, don't sweat it! Normal fluctuations happen and unfortunately sometimes we stall for a week or two even when we're doing everything right. Give your body some time to catch up with the changes you're making.

2. If you aren't already, be sure that you're logging everything. Sometimes people forget about things like veggies, drinks, cooking oils, and condiments. For some people these can add up to enough to halt your weight loss progress.

3. Consider buying a food scale if you don't already have one. They're about $10-$20 dollars in the US and easily found at places like Amazon, Target, and Walmart. Measuring cups and spoons are great, but they do come with some degree of inaccuracy. A food scale will be more accurate, and for some people it makes a big difference.

4. Logging accurately also means choosing accurate entries in the database. There are a lot of user-entered entries that are off. Double-check that you're using good entries and/or using the recipe builder instead of someone else's homemade entries.

5. Recalculate your goals if you haven't lately. As you lose weight your body requires fewer calories to run. Be sure you update your goals every ten pounds or so.

6. If you're eating back your exercise calories and you're relying on gym machine readouts or MFP's estimates, it might be best to eat back just 50-75% of those. Certain activities tend to be overestimated. If you're using an HRM or activity tracker, it might be a good idea to look into their accuracy and be sure that yours is calibrated properly.

7. If you're taking any cheat days that go over your calorie limits, it might be best to cut them out for a few weeks and see what happens. Some people go way over their calorie needs without realizing it when they don't track.

8. If you weigh yourself frequently, consider using a program like trendweight to even out the fluctuations. You could be losing weight but just don't see it because of the daily ups and downs.

9. Some people just burn fewer calories than the calculators predict. If you continue to have problems after 4-6 weeks, then it might be worth a trip to the doctor or a registered dietitian who can give you more specific advice.

You could also be turning fat into muscle. Muscle weighs more than fat but is smaller. How are your clothes fitting you? You might notice other kinds of changes even if the scale isn't moving. If you have a measuring tape, measure some parts of yourself around and keep track of that too. Sometimes the inches getting smaller will make you feel better!

hbgs23 wrote: »

You could also be turning fat into muscle. Muscle weighs more than fat but is smaller. How are your clothes fitting you? You might notice other kinds of changes even if the scale isn't moving. If you have a measuring tape, measure some parts of yourself around and keep track of that too. Sometimes the inches getting smaller will make you feel better!

It takes calories and an intense workout routine to build muscle. Even then, women don't have the testosterone to build enough muscle to pace the loss of fat.

OP, there are many different factors involved. If you are close to TOM, increasing exercise, or having a high sodium day right before you weigh in, these can cause water retention which will mask any losses you have. If you aren't using a kitchen scale to weigh all solid foods, you are likely eating more than you think.

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Also, with a net calorie deficit in excess of 500 calories per day, you are forcing your TDEE to fall. This, if your intake calories remains constant, leads to a slower rate of weight loss which can seem to be a 2-week plateau. Add in all the other confounding factors of females and I think you've got every fragment of the explanation for your mini-plateau. Net intake the calories MFP recommends for a couple of weeks. This will allow your TDEE to reset to normal. Then resume your calorie deficit, but don't net more than -500.

Melemur wrote: »

I read somewhere that sometimes if you do the same thing over and over you end up plateauing for a while so it's good to change up what you're doing like workout routines even eating habits maybe try doing something like no carbs 3 days during the week or more vegetables or changing up your workout routines to trick your body so that it can lose that weight I'm not a fitness expert that's just what I've heard or read in articles I really hope this helps

tricking the body is Im pretty sure a myth. if you do the same exercises all the time your body gets more efficient at doing the exercise,which means you have to work harder to burn the same amount of calories the smaller you get. thats why its suggested to switch or up the intensity. has nothing to do with tricking the body. and saying no carbs for 3 days is not sound advice either.changing your diet wont make a difference unless you are not in a deficit and changing things puts you into one.

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