Is my metabolism that screwed up?

Bama1818 wrote: »

So my stats are 6'2 31 220lbs. Currently I'm eating around 2200 calories a day track everything by weighting them in grams. I hit then gym at least 5 days a week doing heavy lifting plus some type of cardio be it just getting on a machine or doing weight circuits. I should be losing weight according to this App but still just staying around 220lbs I've tried going lower in the sub 2000 cal range and still just stuck around 220. Going to give fasted training a shot now any other ideas to throw at the wall?

I just got my resting metabolism done at my nutritionist office. She gave me my calories for the day and macros and come to find out that even though I clean for a living and never stop moving I have a slow metabolism I eat pretty well but she tweeked my diet and I have been following it perfectly and lost 3 pounds already. So if your not sure what your numbers should be most medical insurance covers it since it is preventative...

allyphoe wrote: »

Looking at your diary, your logging looks pretty consistent, particularly recently. Compared to your average over the 240 logged days prior, the last 28 days have fewer total calories consumed (2,200 vs 2,450), fat as a lower percentage of total calories (33% vs 36%, with the change split evenly between carbs and protein), and significantly more logged exercise (160 calories per day vs 50).

When I first went from zero cardio to regular cardio with basically no transition time, my giant spreadsheet actually showed that I got no additional net calorie burn from that exercise, even with a 90-day window to analyze. A combination of sloppier logging (oooh, brains are sneaky, tricksy things) and reduced non-exercise activity was enough to completely offset the calories burned by intentional exercise. So you may want to keep an eye out for that.

My personal guess is that you need patience more than an additional calorie cut. I'm 43 and 5'3 and when my weight is in the 150s, I maintain on 2,100 plus intentional exercise. My giant spreadsheet of doom calculates more or less month-by-month; some months imply (based on intake and scale change) that maintenance for me is as low as 1,850 or as high as 2,500, and I've even had a 3-month period where it looked like maintenance was 1,900. But I've got a 636 day span of data when my weight was relatively consistent, and across that entire period, 2,100 is the right number.

Great post and analysis.

Hey Bama,
Here would be my offerings. Our camerades above have also offered some good thoughts. Patience and changing things up here and there; decrease 100 cals a day, maybe introduce some HIIT sequences, no calorie eat back from exercise calories, etc...

On exercise calories and a diet: Yoni Freedhoff, this guy seems to have a pretty good story to tell in the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7FK8noIc5I
The one thing that I'd like to see is what the supposed science is, the biochemistry behind the slow down. From the video, it seems like the most sensible explanation is that exercise induces your body to subsequently slow down energy expenditure; example you may without exercise burn your natural 2500 calories in energy in a day. Add exercise and although you burn 500 calories at that activity the body, following exercise, slows down its energy expenditure such that at the end of the day you are still right around the 2500. If there is any, and there is a question in the data if there is, the effective calorie deficit from exercise is probably in the single digits %'s.

On Fasting - if it suits you then go for it Yoni Freedhoff review of study on fasting as a diet process.
http://www.weightymatters.ca/2017/05/new-study-suggests-if-anything-fasting.html
Basic outcomes of this interesting approach were that there was no difference over the year-long study between intermittent fasting (BTW this means meal skipping not days without food) and calorie restriction.
Probably the most interesting side note to this study was the drop out rate. The percentage of people that dropped out of the fasting intervention 38% and the restricting intervention was 29%.