Breaking my Personal Plateau

Recomp is not about gaining weight. It's about gaining muscle mass.... Whilst losing fat, and eating at maintenance . Your weight should remain stable.

Good news! If you're eating between 1000 and 1300 calories per day and not eating back exercise calories while doing the elliptical six days per week/barre three days per week, then you're not actually eating 1000 to 1300 calories. You don't have to worry about eating below 1000 to lose weight because you're eating more than you think you are.

Aside from that, doing intense elliptical six days per week isn't going to do anything for your body composition. Like others have said, recomp is what you need. You need to start resistance training if you want to improve your body composition. Sure you could tighten up your logging by getting a food scale and lose weight but what will happen when you lose five pounds and the fat doesn't come off where you want it to? Are you going to keep trying to lose weight until it does? You could go into the underweight category and it still may not happen, especially when you're not doing anything to retain/build muscle.

I am going to go ahead and echo the others here.
-If you aren't losing at that cal amount, you are definitely underestimating your intake. You are fairly tall and there is no reason you would not be losing at that amount. You can eat all the clean/healthy food you want, but if you aren't in a deficit you won't lose weight, so definitely weigh all your food.
-That being said, if you aren't happy with your body composition at your current weight, most likely the problem is lack of muscle base, so even if you lose weight (especially doing mostly cardio as you are currently doing) you will be a smaller version of your current composition now.. which is fine, but it does not sound like you want that
-17% is really lean and if you were that bodyfat % with your stats most likely you would look pretty defined.. so either the number is wrong or you are seeing fat/problem areas where they do not exist. How did you arrive a that number? Most scales and handheld devices are fairly inaccurate.
-Adding progressive resistance training (where you progress as time goes on and not just do the same weight every time) will help your body composition. I recommend you stay at maintenance (as it sounds like you are now) where you will be able to gain muscle and lose fat over a longer period of time, patience will be key.

sfaust2196 wrote: »

Hi friends! SO, I have lost over 40 pounds and now weigh 134.8 and am 5'10". Now, I know this is a healthy weight but I just want to lose a few more pounds because I still have problem areas (stomach, hips, thighs, arms.)
For the past 3 weeks, I have been between 134.8 and 136.4 pounds, fluctuating slightly daily. Why can't I break this plateau?! I started losing weight 20 months ago and have never seen this before. I have been eating between 1050 and 1350 calories each day, and performing moderate exercise (intense elliptical 6 hours a week and barre class 3 hours a week). I am not sure why this plateau is not breaking! Does anyone have any tips on what I can do? I don't really want to go below 1000 calories a day and don't have time to exercise more. I'm stuck!
BTW, I am eating pretty healthy food.... veggies, apples, quinoa, and protein in the form of beans, fish, or chicken.

I would not consider this a plateau. Women should not compare weight week to week and rather should compare weight menstrual cycle to menstrual cycle, marking the same day each cycle. In other words, compare Day 1 to Day 1, not Day 1 to Day 21.

You may very well be eating that few calories. Not sure why anybody would doubt it. It's very possible that you are retaining water due to dieting too extremely.

Lastly, I would echo trigden1991's suggestion to have a diet break. My guess is that if you upped your calories to maintenance for awhile you'd lose some water weight in the process.