Stalled weight loss, how long is too long?

6-8 weeks is too long. You are likely retaining water from the new workouts and it is masking your fat loss. It will even out eventually. MFP is designed for you to eat back at least a portion of your exercise calories or else you are under-fueling.

4bugsmama wrote: »

TavistockToad wrote: »

4bugsmama wrote: »

So I'm a daily weigher and for 7 consecutive days I have weighed exactly the same. I keep my calorie count around the same daily, burn around 800 calories a day and don't eat any of those calories back. I have started doing HIIT, around a week and a half ago so I'm not sure if I'm gaining muscle or if it is a diet issue. Any insight would be helpful.

If the scales haven't moved after 6 weeks then it's time to look at things.

Why aren't you eating back your exercise cals?

I haven't been eating them back because I just thought it was best not to. I figured that if I just ate what MFP suggested as intake then that was all I should eat. Maybe I was mistaken?

MFP was designed with the intention that you'd eat back calories burnt through intentional exercise.

@4bugsmama Your progress ticker indicates that you have 0 pounds to go.

If your goal is to lose weight, you should adjust your myfitnesspal profile to show your present weight, goal weight, and weight loss goal in terms of mass loss per week. I suggest that your mass loss goal per week be no more than 1% of your present weight.

4bugsmama wrote: »

@TavistockToad my calories burned is calculated from my Fitbit, I don't enter any exercise on here at all. Does that change the amount of calories that I eat, in essence, is my Fitbit a true account of the calories I burn?

If you have had your Fitbit for a while, and have history from it, plus scale-weight history and food log, you can use that data to figure out your current approximate TDEE, and decide whether the Fitbit is close for you, or not.

First, calculate your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) from your own log data over a period of a few weeks (if you're premenopausal, use a whole menstrual cycle; maybe use the weeks before you started HIIT, since that's new and confounding factor). Take the total amount of weight lost over those weeks, multiply that by 3500 (approximate number of calories in a pound). To that, add the total number of gross calories eaten over those same weeks (MFP phone app will have weekly totals in the Nutrition area). That sum is your total calorie expenditure over the time period. Divide that sum by the number of days in the time period to get a pretty reasonable estimate of your TDEE.

So: (Pounds lost x 3500) + Gross Calories Eaten) / days in time period = TDEE estimate

It's still an estimate, but it will be as accurate as your logging; and based on your own data, so avoids the potential statistical anomalies from a "TDEE Calculator". It will be a tiny bit overstated (because you weighed more at the start of the time period), but that effect is fairly small in the overall picture, if you use a few weeks.

You can compare that estimated personal TDEE you calculated to the daily calorie burn Fitbit estimated (yes, estimated, not measured) for you over the same time period. If Fitbit lets you look at an average of X number of days, and you can use the same time period, that would be the proper perfect comparison. Otherwise, if you have individual days from Fitbit, you could average those. What I'm getting at is that the daily Fitbit number will be up and down, and the TDEE estimate from above will be an average over a period of time. Even if there's not a perfect match, it should give you a decent idea of whether it will be close enough to be useful.

I hope that makes sense. If not, ask.

These kinds of calculations are a very useful, especially as one gets closer to maintenance . . . and they really provide a payoff for bothering with logging accuracy along the way.

Devices like Fitbit make calorie estimates by doing calculations based on limited inputs (your age, weight, etc.; and measurements like arm movement, heart rate, etc.), and then using statistics from large research studies to estimate. Consequently, they'll be pretty close for a lot of people (the people close to the averages in the statistics), further off for a few, and way off for very, very few (the ones way out at the tails of the bell curves, sort of).

I'm one of the "far off" people: My Garmin very significantly underestimates my calorie burn, as i estimate it based on about 4 years of weight loss/maintenance and food/weight logging.

Best wishes!