Confused

AnaA78
AnaA78 Posts: 85 Member
edited November 19 in Health and Weight Loss
So i have tried it all. Now I'm intermittent fasting, i have lost 4lbs the first week now im on my second week and i have gained it all back. I have not changed anything including my exercise. This always happens, the first couple of weeks go well than back to the same. I am almost 40yrs old, i know my metabolism is a slow polk, but i don't want to discourage myself and give up. Please help me understand how or what to do!!!

Replies

  • Chef_Barbell
    Chef_Barbell Posts: 6,644 Member
    mmapags wrote: »
    Calorie deficit. /thread

    +1
  • DebLaBounty
    DebLaBounty Posts: 1,169 Member
    I had a similar experience, but by week 3 I was showing a consistent loss. Hang in there.
  • princeofmind
    princeofmind Posts: 95 Member
    Your weight can fluctuate by a few pounds over the course of a day.
    At the start of a diet you often lose things like water weight so it wont all be fat that you lost at the start.
    So if in the first week you lost 4 lbs, lets say 2 lbs was water weight and you lost 2 lbs of fat and on week 2 you lost 2 lbs of fat, that would be 4 lbs of fat lost which is a good healthy rate of weight loss. But if the day before you had eaten a fair bit of salty food for example, that loss can easily be covered up by holding onto water and how much umm... waste you're holding onto.
    I personally weight myself daily and have seen myself go from 10 stone 12 to 11 stone 3 to 11 stone to 10 stone 11. Unless I ate 17500 more than i need to on the first day then on the next 2 days had a deficit of 10500 each day then it would be impossible for that to be fat.
    I'm not saying that you need to weigh yourself daily, because weekly weigh ins are more likely to show you a loss. I'm just trying to show how easy it is for a weight loss to be hidden by the scales.
    2 weeks isn't really enough to show you how well its going.
    Keep at it, make sure you log everything you eat so you know that you are at a deficit and see how you feel in another couple of weeks.
    Its also worth noting that since the scales will not tell you about fat loss just how much you weight at the time of getting on the scales, its entirely possible that you will notice the weight loss in your clothes before on the scales.
    Don't be disheartened just yet.
    Also you say that you have tried it all but it always goes the same. Can I ask how long you normally stay with it? Just want to make sure you are giving yourself long enough to see results and aren't giving up at the first sign of defeat :smile:
  • Luna3386
    Luna3386 Posts: 888 Member
    1. Feed your stats into MyFitnessPal and set it for a modest deficit (two pounds a week if you are obese, one pound a week if you are overweight, a half pound a week if you are a normal weight).

    2. Get a kitchen scale and weigh all your solid foods in grams.

    3. Log everything you eat or drink (if it has calories). Everything. Use USDA database entries for fruits, veggies, meats, nuts, and other whole foods (as these entries tend to be more accurate).

    4. Whether you weigh in daily, weekly, or whenever else, get a weight trending app (Libra if you have Android, HappyScale for iPhone, and TrendWeight for a desktop computer). Your weight is effected by a vast number of factors: what time of day it is, your hormones, how much sodium you ate yesterday (or the day before that, or the day before that . . .), if you are constipated, the amount of food that is in your system, etc. Your weight changes constantly, not just from day-to-day but throughout the day as well. Your weight going up is not a personal judgement on your success or failure at fat loss but a simple data point. As a result, using a weight trending app can help you see your weight trend over time, thus giving you information based on a collection of data points (as opposed to an emotional reaction to one data point).

    5. Find foods and ways of eating that keep you full. For me that's high protein, high fiber. For some it is high fat. For others it's high carb. Some people thrive on intermittent fasting: for me, it makes me so freaking hungry by the time I finally eat that I can't stop binging. Pay attention to what makes you hungry and what makes you full, as a more-full you will eat less calories.

    6. Keep going! You need more than a couple weeks in order to figure out what is going. As women, our weight and hormones change based off our monthly cycle, this you may not even be in a part of your cycle that is conducive to weight loss. Also, often that initial drop of weight is simply water weight. You need to give it more time. During my first two weeks of weight loss I actually gained weight. However, I kept pushing and now, eight months later, I am 58 pounds down.

    7. The most important part of all of this is mindset: you need to make changes that will last you a lifetime. A few weeks doesn't matter. You are in this for years of sustainable change and growth toward a healthier you.

    You can do it!

    Once I started doing this I was successful. And I spent 3-4 years never making progress, jumping from fad to fad. Wish I would have listened to advice like this sooner.
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