A plateau this early?

How long has it been since you've lost weight?

beth0277 wrote: »

I have been counting calories and exercising (light cardio so not building real muscle) for about 50 days now. I've lost, but it's slowed way down. I have around a 700-1,000 calorie deficit most days (I eat 1,500 and my resting burn is around 1970 plus all my normal activities/exercising). I weigh everything and don't eat any exercise calories back. I'm satisfied and don't feel hungry. I've been drinking more water. I assume I'm just at a plateau but any ideas to break through it? I had found before that I was losing more on days I didn't work out, I'm assuming because of the water retention when I did work out, but even now if I take a few days off, I'm not seeing much in the way of losses. Current weight is 193, I'm a 5'4" female and have lost about 11 pounds since starting.

How old are you if you don't mind me asking?

You may be overestimating your RMR, I calculated it at 1645. That shouldn't matter though, when you enter your stats into MFP it will calculate it for you. So you shouldn't be counting your RMR as part as your deficit, MFP does it for you when it gives you your daily calories. Absolutely count your exercise calories. Like everyone says, make sure you weigh everything instead of measure to ensure accuracy. I plateaued after losing 8 pounds, so I adjusted the amount I wanted to lose weekly, increasing my calories, and I've actually started to lose again, not sure if it's metabolism confusion (if that's a thing!) but it worked!

seska422 wrote: »

Weight loss isn't linear. You need to look at your trend over weeks and months.

Here's a recent trend for me when I was at or below my calorie goal every day:

Love this chart!

beth0277 wrote: »

JaydedMiss wrote: »

The only problem here is unrealistic expectations. Thread closed. I get it its slowed down, But your still losing, And its only been a few slowed weeks (1 of those weeks you lost half a pound during) Do yourself a favor stop sweating the small stuff and get on with it. Stress is counterproductive. Especially when its somethign so small, I mean your still losing right.

I'm not really stressed about it - just trying to learn. We see so much about CICO on MFP and I'm just trying to understand the science behind it. If my weekly deficit is 7,000 calories, of course different variables would cause different losses and I don't expect it to be exactly 2 pounds for the 7,000 calories, but when you have two weeks with a 7,000 calorie deficit and lose .5-1 pound, I'm just trying to understand, that's all.

The thing is that our calories in and calories out are always going to be estimates. We can do things to make our estimates much better (weighing food, double-checking database entries, tracking calorie burns with a HRM for certain activities, etc), but it's generally impossible to be 100% accurate. Plus we have systems that add in confounding factors -- our muscles retain water when we exercise hard, sodium can cause temporary water weight gain, people who have periods will gain weight during certain times of the month, there is always a varying amount of food hanging out in our digestive system . . . all these things can "confuse" what we see on the scale.

So if you have a prolonged period of time when you are losing slower than you expect, you can begin to figure out if you are either under-estimating what you are eating or under-estimating what you are burning and adjust your goals accordingly.

But I wouldn't lose sight of the fact that you are losing weight and making progress -- that's a great thing!