It’s not working..
elpopsw
Posts: 2 Member
I’ve tried every diet under the sun and I’ve always given up after a week or two. Well for 3 weeks now I’ve been calorie restricting to 1250 a day. At first I lost 3lb but I put a pound on this week! Not sure where I’m going wrong. Does it matter what I eat as long as it’s within 1250?
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Replies
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I’ve tried every diet under the sun and I’ve always given up after a week or two. Well for 3 weeks now I’ve been calorie restricting to 1250 a day. At first I lost 3lb but I put a pound on this week! Not sure where I’m going wrong. Does it matter what I eat as long as it’s within 1250?
So you lost 2lbs in 3 weeks?
What is it you think isn't working?19 -
Many people are under the impression that weight loss should happen fast, think 2-5lbs a week but that just is not the case for the majority of the population if they intend on losing in a healthy manner. The rule of thumb is no more than 1% of your body weight should be lost in a week otherwise you risk losing muscle mass and a whole horde of health issues will arise with prolonged extreme calorie deficit.
You are doing great and unless you weigh over 200 lbs you cannot realistically lose 2lbs or more in a week. Regarding the 1 lb gain, weight loss is not linear and most of your body weight is water which is always going up or down depending on how many carbs and how much sodium you have had. Carbs hold onto water and a high sodium day will cause you to retain. Look at your weight loss over a minimum of 6 weeks, if it is trending down then you're doing a great job. I've had weeks where I did everything right and my weight either remained the same or went up, but in the long run it has been trending down.25 -
Keep at it - it sounds like you're doing well for 2 lbs down in 3 weeks. Don't sweat the 1 lb gain - if you measure through time you will have "blips" up (and down) for reasons as simple as water retention or a bowel movement off-schedule. 3 weeks isn't actually all that much time.
Also: how accurately are you measuring your food? 1,250 is on the LOW end of the calorie intake scale. The typical "newbie" mistakes are:
1) Putting the weight loss goal very fast. Generally speaking, the slower the loss the easier it is to keep to the plan and keep it off.
2) Inaccurate measuring/logging. Food scale is best, measuring cups OK. But don't rely on "eyeballing" portion sizes...and the lower the calorie amounts the more vital it is to measure your intake.
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@elpopsw yes ethereal is so correct and also consistence is key continue striving and doing it are you also lifting weights while eating those calories? If so you may be loosing inches but gaining muscle muscle so the scale would reflect that.
No.
1. People do not gain muscle while eating in a deficit. (Very obese people with little muscle to start with can do it, but not most dieters)
2. Women do not gain enough muscle to measure in a period of only three weeks. (Unless they are trying to by eating in a surplus and doing a progressive lifting regime, and are fortunate enough to put on muscle easily)14 -
Thank you all, you’ve motivated me to keep going
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Sustained weight loss takes time and effort. All those previous diets likely failed because they didn't teach you about proper eating, restricted calorie intake and exercise as a way of life.
Losing unwanted pounds is difficult for most people because they tend to focus on calorie restriction for the short term rather than permanent lifestyle changes. Once the desired "goal weight" is achieved, they simply fall back on old habits and the weight returns.
Get a plan together where you combine lower caloric intake with healthy amounts of cardio and weight/resistance exercise and the pounds will come off.
In terms of calories you can still eat what you want but remember, protein is your best friend and you want to majorly cut back on simple sugars (know all the names they are disguised as) and saturated fat.
3 lbs. in 3 weeks is a great start...just keep going...if you fall off the wagon, don't stress, just get back on. This is a lifestyle change so a blip here and there is absolutely okay.
And finally, don't weigh yourself everyday! This is counterproductive because weight can fluctuate quite a bit during the day, just like blood pressure. Once a week is fine and highly recommended.13 -
It looks like ~90% of your meals are packaged. Your typical lunch is 300 - 600 calories a day. Or you skip it in favor of a big dinner. For the same calories you can have a large garden salad and get some needed nutrients you are probably missing now.
Greens: about 6 to 10 ounces. I prefer iceberg lettuce. I get it it already chopped with added cabbage and carrots.
Tomatoes: I use around a dozen cherry tomatoes.
Cucumber: 1/2 should do it.
Cheese: around 1-1/2 to 2 ounces of your choice. I like cheddar.
Avocado: a whole avocado is around 4 to 6 ounces. I use the whole thing.
Dressing: I use olive oil and red wine vinegar with a dry package of seasoning. Avoid bottled dressing if you can. It will add calories along with added sugar and salt.
This should be more than enough to fill you up for a few hours. You could probably munch on this one salad over the course of the day. It's easy to tweak this recipe by changing up the ingredients or quantities. I sometimes add some pan fried chicken breast. I'll also mix up a simple tuna salad and add that instead of dressing. This basic salad is a good vehicle for introducing other vegetables, fruits and meats to your diet. It's easy to customize to suit your needs. Try this for a week and see how it works out.15 -
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tinkerbellang83 wrote: »
The problem with variation on the scales does not go away because you have fewer data points. It will still be up and down, but there will be longer between measurements. If that works better for you, I say go for it.
I weigh every day and enter the number in Libra on my phone. Libra smooths the curve out and you see the trend.
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I’ve tried every diet under the sun and I’ve always given up after a week or two. Well for 3 weeks now I’ve been calorie restricting to 1250 a day. At first I lost 3lb but I put a pound on this week! Not sure where I’m going wrong. Does it matter what I eat as long as it’s within 1250?
Weight fluctuations are a normal bodily function and happen due to all sorts of things, not fat gains related. Water retention (from sodium/exercise etc), digestion periods, bowel movements, hormones (PMS/tom), what time you weigh yourself, where you weigh yourself, if you weigh yourself after a shower etc etc etc.
Op, get a trending app (Libra for android or Happy Scale for apple), and start looking at your trends over time (monthly etc). I like my daily weigh-ins because it gives me more data points, but I also know that a blip on the scale doesn't really mean anything. Look at your first of the month weigh-ins and then compare that with your last weigh-in of the month, to get a more accurate idea of where you're actually at.
Also, you didn't gain the excess weight in a few weeks and it's not going to all come off in a few weeks. One of the most important things you're going to need to learn about this process is how to be patient. Look at the long term-in terms of months and more importantly-years. If you're serious about this then realize that it's a life-long process. Otherwise you're just going to join the millions of other people who jump from one plan to the next, failing over and over again.7 -
I have a background in data analysis. The conditions at the time of measurement mean everything. Weigh yourself as often as you like, just keep in mind the conditions at the time. Jump out of bed and onto the scale. You'll weigh the least of the day. Did you hit the can before or after the scale? Weigh before a meal? After and you may have a pound or two of "stuff" in your gut. An 8oz glass of water weighs a 1/2 pound. Keep this in mind and it may help to alleviate your concerns.
MFP has a feature called "Reports". You can enter your weight once a day if you like and it will produce a trend line, so you have a visual representation of weight over time. Day to day won't tell you much because it's not enough data or time. Check it out after a week or month and you'll have a better idea of what's going on. Tweak your diet to get the results you're looking for.6 -
tinkerbellang83 wrote: »
It's good advice for people like me and probably the OP since she talks about it.
When I weight daily and have a "bad" results after a good day (low calories and exercise) I found it very demotivating. If something else happens in the day (bad day at work, or like my husband who had cancer has some scary side effects that makes me think the cancer is back or my autistic daughter does something that remind me how hard it's going to be for her in this life) then I'm more likely to use food as an "antidepressant" and cheat.
When I weight once a week, chance are the number will be lower then last week or at least the same. And it only influence my mood one day a week, easier to manage.1 -
VeroniqueBoilard wrote: »tinkerbellang83 wrote: »
It's good advice for people like me and probably the OP since she talks about it.
When I weight daily and have a "bad" results after a good day (low calories and exercise) I found it very demotivating. If something else happens in the day (bad day at work, or like my husband who had cancer has some scary side effects that makes me think the cancer is back or my autistic daughter does something that remind me how hard it's going to be for her in this life) then I'm more likely to use food as an "antidepressant" and cheat.
When I weight once a week, chance are the number will be lower then last week or at least the same. And it only influence my mood one day a week, easier to manage.
Yes, but there's a difference between suggesting that for some people daily weighing may be problematic, and stating that weighing daily is a problem. Many people benefit from weighing daily and learning the patterns of their body's natural weight fluctuations throughout their cycle. For some the extra data is stressful, for others the extra data serves to remove emotion and replace it with logic. What's important is figuring out which way your brain works, and bluntly telling people that daily weighing isn't recommend short-changes the people whose brains don't work the same way that poster's does.
IMHO, it's better to learn and understand the process rather than ignore info that upsets you if you can avoid it. If avoiding it is necessary, by all means do that, but for many people it can be really freeing to be able to look at those daily numbers as "data".19 -
I have a background in data analysis. The conditions at the time of measurement mean everything. Weigh yourself as often as you like, just keep in mind the conditions at the time. Jump out of bed and onto the scale. You'll weigh the least of the day. Did you hit the can before or after the scale? Weigh before a meal? After and you may have a pound or two of "stuff" in your gut. An 8oz glass of water weighs a 1/2 pound. Keep this in mind and it may help to alleviate your concerns.
MFP has a feature called "Reports". You can enter your weight once a day if you like and it will produce a trend line, so you have a visual representation of weight over time. Day to day won't tell you much because it's not enough data or time. Check it out after a week or month and you'll have a better idea of what's going on. Tweak your diet to get the results you're looking for.
"You'll weigh the least of the day". That can be demonstrably untrue. While it's nice to try to duplicate conditions, in reality it is virtually impossible. Fluid fluctuations, which are the biggest driver in scale differences day to day, don't always care what time it is.
You are absolutely correct in focusing on the trend line, but "keeping conditions the same" is much more complicated than that because there are way too many variables that do not cycle with our body's rhythms, whatever they are....like you mention. Speed of digestion (what you have in your gut), day after a strength workout (extra water), day after a long run (again, extra water) and any other stressors that produce cortisol which has an effect too.
There have been many many days where I have weighed 4-5 pounds less in the afternoon than I did in the morning - and vice versa.
The trend line, if you are doing this long enough, takes the noise out and makes the time of day that you weigh irrelevant.
That said, before everybody goes off and "woos" my answer, I would acknowledge that you stand a better chance at getting reasonably close conditions, but it just isn't that simple. And where I differ from most, just not that important to the data you are trying to analyze. Time and number of samples are much more important.8 -
Agree with the post above. Trying to weigh "naked" around the same time every "morning" on an empty stomach is as ideal as you can get. Water weight is what it is and even that you can sort of control.
Don't get discouraged.
Keep on this path because 3lbs in 3 weeks is great and that 1 pound gain is likely just fluid retention. What you want to see is a general trend downward and not let the fluctuations catch you up too much.2 -
VeroniqueBoilard wrote: »tinkerbellang83 wrote: »
It's good advice for people like me and probably the OP since she talks about it.
When I weight daily and have a "bad" results after a good day (low calories and exercise) I found it very demotivating. If something else happens in the day (bad day at work, or like my husband who had cancer has some scary side effects that makes me think the cancer is back or my autistic daughter does something that remind me how hard it's going to be for her in this life) then I'm more likely to use food as an "antidepressant" and cheat.
When I weight once a week, chance are the number will be lower then last week or at least the same. And it only influence my mood one day a week, easier to manage.
You could just as easily have a bad result after a good week of low calorie and exercise, so why would that be any more demotivating to the OP? I appreciate it might not work for you but as @kimny72 says it's not a blanket statement that applies to everyone and this is the problem I have with that particular poster repeatedly making this statement.
OP has not said anything that indicates she would be demotivated by it. All her post indicates is that she did not understand that it can be totally normal to see a gain on the scale as well as a loss even when everything you're doing seems to be correct.
Weighing daily can give you a much better understanding of what has caused the weight gain as it gives you an opportunity to evaluate the data of the whole week against your food logging/exercise schedule/other factors.
For example, this is my weight data from Libra from the last 10 days:
DATE WEIGHT TRENDWEIGHT COMMENTS
03/04 237.8lbs 236.0lbs Had Chinese Takeaway on 2nd March, increased Sodium & Carbs
03/05 235.4lbs 235.9lbs Water weight continued to come off (Was 239.2lbs on Sun 3rd)
03/06 231.2lbs 235.3lbs On a long road trip, quite dehydrated.
03/07 232.5lbs 234.9lbs Normal Meals/Macros
03/08 234.2lbs 234.8lbs Normal Meals/Macros
03/09 235.2lbs 234.9lbs Couple of beers the night before
03/10 235.0lbs 234.9lbs Normal Meals/Macros - water weight coming off
03/11 234.6lbs 234.8lbs Normal Meals/Macros - water weight off
03/12 235.0lbs 234.9lbs Due period
03/13 234.5lbs 234.8lbs Normal Meals/Macros
As you can see I can easily attribute the rises and falls in my weight due to the data I have. If I'd weighed in only on Mondays I would have seen a 3lb jump on the scale from 25th Feb to 4th March, and I wouldn't have any other data to understand that my weight had been up and down over the whole week.
I have learned from this not to put too much stock in only one weigh in, but to trust my logging and the trend, in the past I'd have rage quit on that Monday thinking that surely what I was doing wasn't working, rather than the truth being my body was retaining a lot of water because I had higher sodium and carb intake than normal.
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I’ve tried every diet under the sun and I’ve always given up after a week or two. Well for 3 weeks now I’ve been calorie restricting to 1250 a day. At first I lost 3lb but I put a pound on this week! Not sure where I’m going wrong. Does it matter what I eat as long as it’s within 1250?
Others have already covered the bit about weight fluctuation - it’s totally normal especially in the beginning to see an upward blip after a significant early loss (which is often water weight). Overall weight loss trends are usually looked at over a period of 4-6 weeks for women especially because of additional potential fluctuations.
Your post suggests you have a history of getting impatient when you don’t see results and giving up altogether. Likely this is because you have unrealistic expectations, and/or are being too restrictive with your plans.
How much weight do you have to lose? What are your overall stats? What rate of loss did you choose? Do you exercise? Do you realize MFP sets your calorie target without exercise so that if you do exercise, you’re supposed to eat back at least a portion of those calories. And finally, one of the most critical elements for those who successfully use MFP to achieve their goals is accurate logging - ideally using a food scale. If you don’t have one, get one and start using it right away. And take some time to read the stickied “most helpful forum posts” at the top of the getting started section. They are a wealth of information.
Good luck!5 -
Wow, Tinker! You really dont fluctuate much! I'm so all over the place!0
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ericadcruz32 wrote: »Wow, Tinker! You really dont fluctuate much! I'm so all over the place!
I haven't this last week for some reason probably as food intake and exercise has been relatively consistent but I can be up and down as much as 5lbs per day, depending on what I am eating, exercising, etc.
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I’ve tried every diet under the sun and I’ve always given up after a week or two. Well for 3 weeks now I’ve been calorie restricting to 1250 a day. At first I lost 3lb but I put a pound on this week! Not sure where I’m going wrong. Does it matter what I eat as long as it’s within 1250?
You need to adjust your expectations. Body weight fluctuates and you're not going to lose weight every week. You're going to have weeks with smaller losses, larger losses, no losses, and gains. You have to look at weight loss over the long term as a trend...weight loss looks like this.
The red line is the trend...it's the important one to look at.6 -
Very well demonstrated, wolf man!0
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My weight loss is over 17 lb now and it’s a zig zag. Two down, half a pound up. One down, one up. Two down, one up. That’s because fat isn’t the only thing in my body that weighs something. I have food leftover in my intestines. I naturally have bloating or water retention with certain times of the month - or because I had carbs with dinner. I lost weight pretty fast at 1300 calories per day. But did it go up and down as it went down? Of course!4
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I have a background in data analysis. The conditions at the time of measurement mean everything. Weigh yourself as often as you like, just keep in mind the conditions at the time. Jump out of bed and onto the scale. You'll weigh the least of the day. Did you hit the can before or after the scale? Weigh before a meal? After and you may have a pound or two of "stuff" in your gut. An 8oz glass of water weighs a 1/2 pound. Keep this in mind and it may help to alleviate your concerns.
MFP has a feature called "Reports". You can enter your weight once a day if you like and it will produce a trend line, so you have a visual representation of weight over time. Day to day won't tell you much because it's not enough data or time. Check it out after a week or month and you'll have a better idea of what's going on. Tweak your diet to get the results you're looking for.
Some good advice in there about fluctuations!
I have to say, I don't consistently weigh the least of the day in the morning, necessarily. Some people may. Sometimes I do, sometimes I weigh less in the late afternoon. Meh. First thing after wake-up and bathroom is the most consistent conditions, though, so that's still a good plan for most people.
As a minor quibble, MFP's weight graph doesn't provide a trend line - at least not in free MFP. It just provides a graph of the weight data points. That's why so many of us use trending apps alongside MFP (like Libra for Android, Happy Scale for iOS, Trendweight with a Fitbit account, others).
These apps have a trend line distinct from the graph of weight data points, but based on those data.
Looking backwards, typically they apply a smoothing algorithm to show a simplified historical trend line (less bumpy); looking forward, they apply statistical methods to derive an estimated future trend line, based on your recent past. There may be user-tweakable settings that can affect how the past data are used to do the smoothing and projections (Libra has some for sure; not sure about the others, since I use only Libra.)
Since you have background in data analysis (as do I), I'm sure you understand the distinction I'm making between the graphed data points, and the smoothed/statistically-projected trend lines.
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