I don’t think I’m losing weight??
scaye103092
Posts: 48 Member
Hi everybody. 25 (almost 26), female, 5’3” and 200 LBS (+/-5 LBS). I’m doing what I can here but I feel like I’m not losing anything and I don’t want to step on the scale and be obsessed with the numbers. I’ve been doing this for a couple weeks now but just started actually logging about 2 weeks ago. I cut out simple carbs, just about everything I could realistically with added sugar (I’m not trying to make my own plain tomato sauce), anything too high in sodium (hoping to reduce water retention), red meats, and anything too high in unhealthy fats. My calorie requirement for weight loss was originally set to 1600 calories for 1.5 pounds of loss a week but I found I was generally eating closer to 1200, even though I felt like I was eating A LOT, so I upped it to 2 lbs/wk. I do make almost everything myself and weigh/measure everything. If I use anything from a can or packet I measure out what I want with a cup/scoop or weigh it, scan the label, and do the math to figure out how much EXACTLY of what I’m eating. I even log my daily gummy vitamins. I just can’t seem to figure out what I’m doing wrong. I’m on my feet in a retail position as the only associate working the sales floor 7 hours for each of my five shifts so I am on my feet, moving boxes, and running around A LOT. I also go to the gym 2-3 times a week after work (I’m second shift) and do 30 minutes going as hard as I can with cardio before switching to using weights to work my back and give myself a break as I’ve had pretty bad asthma my whole life and sometimes an inhaler just doesn’t cut it. Sorry for jumping around, it’s late, I’m tired, and about to head to the gym lol.
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Replies
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so...you dont weigh yourself how do you know if your losing weight or not? Youve only been at it a few weeks and you havent weighed anything. You are overthinking things13
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You feel like you're not losing anything, but you're not weighing yourself.... So how do you know?
Losing weight comes down to being in a calorie deficit consistently, over a long period. You need to trust in the process - weigh everything, even packaged foods (with the exception of liquids if there is no indication of grams) and be as accurate as you can with your intake. Have patience!
Restricting food choices and calories to an extreme is not necessary - just stick to your calorie goal. Losing fast is not necessarily better - you may find that eating more, with a bigger variety of foods, will be more sustainable long term.13 -
How much sleep are you getting? Sleep is also very important for the body. I have a very active job as well and have cut carbs and sodium. I can say for me I added strength training to build muscle so it can burn fat as well as rest. Since I made these two adjustments I have lost 15 lbs in 5 weeks with cheat days. Hope this helps, keep pushing it will come13
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JaydedMiss wrote: »so...you dont weigh yourself how do you know if your losing weight or not? Youve only been at it a few weeks and you havent weighed anything. You are overthinking things
My clothes are LITERALLY getting tighter. Doesn’t take a scale to notice that. Or to notice stretch marks appearing. Bright red.
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Ummm that could just be bloating from water weight. I could be at my lowest recorded weight and yet my clothes could suddenly be tight from unexpected water retention.
So yeah, it kind of does need a scale to notice that.
Get a scale. Weigh yourself. Get a food scale, weigh your food. Track your calories PROPERLY. Learn your weight trends. Sometimes the scale won’t move or will go up. Not because you gained weight/fat, but for all sorts of other reasons that will pass because it’s just your body going through it’s prisses of living completely unrelated to fat loss. Time of month, extra sodium, glycogen stores from excess carbs, swelling water weight from exercise, waste because you need to poop, etc etc.
You don’t need to start cutting out entire food groups and then salt the earth they grow in, just track ACCURATELY and CONSISTENTLY.
And welcome!19 -
MsHarryWinston wrote: »Ummm that could just be bloating from water weight. I could be at my lowest recorded weight and yet my clothes could suddenly be tight from unexpected water retention.
So yeah, it kind of does need a scale to notice that.
Get a scale. Weigh yourself. Get a food scale, weigh your food. Track your calories PROPERLY. Learn your weight trends. Sometimes the scale won’t move or will go up. Not because you gained weight/fat, but for all sorts of other reasons that will pass because it’s just your body going through it’s prisses of living completely unrelated to fat loss. Time of month, extra sodium, glycogen stores from excess carbs, swelling water weight from exercise, waste because you need to poop, etc etc.
You don’t need to start cutting out entire food groups and then salt the earth they grow in, just track ACCURATELY and CONSISTENTLY.
And welcome!
Thank you for actually being nice and straight to the point. I am weighing everything very accurately and logging it as so. I guess I’m just concerned because I thought at my size I would be able to lose weight quickly considering how much I’m cutting and on my feet/working out.0 -
Did you just start working out? Because that is HUGE. I know that when I work out I blow up like a pufferfish from water retention. Honestly, if I do weighted sidebends my waist goes from an hourglass to a thick rectangular brick. But that’s just my body repairing the muscles and making them tighter. It could be that you’re very similar.
But seriously, weigh yourself as well. You need to track your trends because EVERYTHING is deceptive. You need to be able to look at ALL the different stats in order to make educated guesses about what’s happening with your body instead of worst case assumptions and freaking out. Think of it like a science project, because that’s exactly what it is. If you needed to hand in this paper for biology class, would your teacher fail you because you refused to collect accurate info about your body before making all kinds of wild scientific claims? Yes. Yes he would.10 -
Most people who find they are not losing weight are doing so because of incorrect logging. Are you sure you are weighing everything? Watch this video to see why weighing is important.
https://youtu.be/XpHykP6e_Uk
If you are weighing everything (except liquids where measuring cups and spoons should be used), including prepackaged food and all condiments, cooking oils etc are you checking them against the nutritional labels on the packaging or against the USDA database for accuracy? I find it hard to believe that you fill full after 1200 calories being that you were eating much more than that to maintain at the weight you currently are. That is assuming you are not actually losing weight because without scales you really don't know.4 -
Invest in a scale to weigh yourself, measuring tape to check your inches and a food scale. Track everything. It’s hard to determine if we have lost anything if we don’t weigh ourselves. At least that was the problem with me. It took nearly a ten pound loss before I noticed a change in my face or a loss of inches from my waist. Trust the process, it won’t fail you! Sounds like you are doing everything right. Believe that it is hard to see a physical difference in ourselves until we lose a bit of that weight from what we have to lose. (I’m aiming to lose 30-40, took about 10 pounds before I saw any differences.) I retain a bunch of water so I only make sure to weigh myself once a day, and that’s right after I wake up before I’ve had any food or anything to drink. The best advice I ever received was “Take your time, this isn’t a race to the finish line, but something to make into a lifestyle.”1
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If you don't want to weigh yourself, can you use other measurements? Like inches in waist, hip, thigh? MFP have an option to register that as well.
@Lillymoo01 is right that you should use a food scale.0 -
You said:
I’m doing what I can here but I feel like I’m not losing anything and I don’t want to step on the scale and be obsessed with the numbers. I’ve been doing this for a couple weeks now but just started actually logging about 2 weeks ago.
That's not enough time for much to happen. Weight loss can be slow at first because the body "sees" that it's getting less food so it "holds on" to what it has. Eventually, your body "figures out" that the calories will come and it starts burning up what it was holding. Also...water retention. The body does the same thing with water especially if you increase your exercise. That's why we gotta drink lots of water. (Counterintutive, isn't it? We have to drink MORE water in order to LOSE water.)
Weigh yourself once a week at the same time each week. No more, no less.
Trust the process.
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You're still in that first blue box below. Put on your patient pants.
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scaye103092 wrote: »JaydedMiss wrote: »so...you dont weigh yourself how do you know if your losing weight or not? Youve only been at it a few weeks and you havent weighed anything. You are overthinking things
My clothes are LITERALLY getting tighter. Doesn’t take a scale to notice that. Or to notice stretch marks appearing. Bright red.
Stretch marks can occur while you're losing weight as well as while you're gaining, sadly.
Did you just start the exercise regime? Your body can retain extra water to deal with muscle repair, and that can make your clothes tighter.
It's early days, and you're relying on fairly subjective methods for assessing progress. I recommend patience and using more objective methods of assessing progress, such as weighing yourself and using a tape measure. Progress photos, while still subjective, are better than relying on your memory of how you looked weeks or months earlier -- and, for some reason, many, but by no means all, people are able to see themselves more realistically in photos than in mirrors.4 -
If you're not using a scale and relying on the image in the mirror to show your results, then you should be aware it's going to be a slow process. Most people don't tend to see a change in the mirror until they lose something like 10-25 pounds, so it's somewhere between 10 and 25 weeks for most people to notice the weight loss. Be prepared for that and settle in for the long haul.10
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scaye103092 wrote: »MsHarryWinston wrote: »Ummm that could just be bloating from water weight. I could be at my lowest recorded weight and yet my clothes could suddenly be tight from unexpected water retention.
So yeah, it kind of does need a scale to notice that.
Get a scale. Weigh yourself. Get a food scale, weigh your food. Track your calories PROPERLY. Learn your weight trends. Sometimes the scale won’t move or will go up. Not because you gained weight/fat, but for all sorts of other reasons that will pass because it’s just your body going through it’s prisses of living completely unrelated to fat loss. Time of month, extra sodium, glycogen stores from excess carbs, swelling water weight from exercise, waste because you need to poop, etc etc.
You don’t need to start cutting out entire food groups and then salt the earth they grow in, just track ACCURATELY and CONSISTENTLY.
And welcome!
Thank you for actually being nice and straight to the point. I am weighing everything very accurately and logging it as so. I guess I’m just concerned because I thought at my size I would be able to lose weight quickly considering how much I’m cutting and on my feet/working out.
In two weeks, it's highly unlikely you will notice a difference in your size. When I first started, It took about 25 pounds to feel a difference in my clothing (I'm 5'2" and started over 220). The reason? I had been refusing to buy bigger clothes and had failed to realize that I was stuffed into them like sausage casing. It took a long time for them to get to the point of feeling comfortable. That's when I first noticed the difference in weight without looking at the scale. Taking pictures in the same clothes every month made a big difference too. Hold them up beside each other to see the differences.6 -
Update: several months in and I’m down around 70 pounds. Turns out my body just took a little extra time to catch up to the changes I was making. I didn’t see any weight loss for the first 6 weeks!30
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Way to stay at it! Awesome OP!1
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scaye103092 wrote: »Update: several months in and I’m down around 70 pounds. Turns out my body just took a little extra time to catch up to the changes I was making. I didn’t see any weight loss for the first 6 weeks!
Great job!1 -
Fantastic work. You should be very proud of yourself. Sticking with the process when you are not seeing results straight away is very hard. But you have proved that it does pay off.2
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I've often found that my perception of whether or not I lost weight on any given week seldom correlated with whether or not I actually lost any weight.
Stick to the numbers, not how you feel.
Try taking measurements if you're worried about getting obsessed with the scale.3 -
A perplexing question...But if you don't lose weight, then how did you originally gain weight? I am running out of options here, but somehow it must have had to do with eating more calories than the body needed. So in a reciprocal way - eat a little bit less than the body needs, and voila! By the way - I can't imagine that anyone gained a huge amount of weight overnight - so it will take at least the same time to lose the weight again.0
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OP updated to say that she has lost weight...neugebauer52 wrote: »A perplexing question...But if you don't lose weight, then how did you originally gain weight? I am running out of options here, but somehow it must have had to do with eating more calories than the body needed. So in a reciprocal way - eat a little bit less than the body needs, and voila! By the way - I can't imagine that anyone gained a huge amount of weight overnight - so it will take at least the same time to lose the weight again.
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Thank you for actually being nice and straight to the point. I am weighing everything very accurately and logging it as so. I guess I’m just concerned because I thought at my size I would be able to lose weight quickly considering how much I’m cutting and on my feet/working out. [/quote]
I have lost 85lbs (down from 280) so I am just now down to "your size". Now is actually the time when I have stalled and am finding it difficult to lose! "Your size" isn't that large to start with, and it takes time. I have only lost 2lbs in 3 weeks now that I am "your size". Prior to hitting 200lbs, I could lose 3lbs in a week.
I think in our heads it should be going faster because we have made so many changes. Just remember, it's a slow process. But quitting doesn't speed it up.
Set some other goals. I made it a goal to eat one veggie at every meal, increase water intake, and eat a variety of lean meats (I was getting sick of chicken breast). I find that if I make my goals what I CAN do/eat, instead of restricting, I feel more fulfilled.
You didn't gain weight over night, you're not going to lose weight overnight.0 -
This is an old post, OP was coming back to say she has now lost 70lbs peeps!2
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Congratulations!! I'm so glad you stuck with it when the early returns weren't great!1
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Thanks for updating us. I just read through the entire thread. There is LOTS of good information here when you feel like nothing is happening.0
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