Why am I not losing weight?
sweetiefairygirl
Posts: 2 Member
I’m very frustrated right now, to maintain my weight I would need almost 2500 cals, I’ve been eating about 1500 a day & im not losing!! Any ideas?
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Replies
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How long have you been tracking?
How are you measuring your foods?8 -
Have you been logging accurately using a food scale? How often have you been weighing yourself? How long have you been eating at a deficit?
Why it matters:
Measuring cups and eyeballing portions is wildly inaccurate. You would be surprised at the difference once you start weighing everything.
While you don't necessarily have to weigh yourself every day, having more data points will show you your weight trends. Perhaps you've only seen your high days and not your lows.
If you've only been eating at a deficit for three days, you probably won't see meaningful results.
As an aside, I recommend potentially reevaluating your deficit - if 2500 is truly your maintenance level, a deficit of nearly 1000 is aggressive. You can still lose weight at a lower deficit at a healthier rate. I just read through them yesterday, but I highly recommend checking out the most helpful posts thread that's pinned to the top of this board.5 -
Thanks guys, I’m going to start measuring & weighing, I was getting so discouraged!4
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1. If it's been less than 3 weeks or so, don't sweat it! Normal fluctuations happen and unfortunately sometimes we stall for a week or two even when we're doing everything right.
2. If you aren't already, be sure that you're logging everything. Sometimes people forget about things like veggies, drinks, cooking oils, and condiments. For some people these can add up to enough to halt your weight loss progress.
3. Consider buying a food scale if you don't already have one and use it for everything. Everything. For a couple of weeks to see what kind of discrepancies you're running into. They're about $10-$20 dollars in the US and easily found at places like Amazon, Target, and Walmart. Measuring cups and spoons are great, but they do come with some degree of inaccuracy. A food scale will be more accurate, and for some people it makes a big difference.
4. Logging accurately also means choosing accurate entries in the database. There are a lot of user-entered entries that are off. Double-check that you're using good entries and/or using the recipe builder instead of someone else's homemade entries. Don't trust the barcode scanner or restaurant entries 100%.
5. Recalculate your goals if you haven't lately. As you lose weight your body requires fewer calories to run. Be sure you update your goals every ten pounds or so.
6. If you're eating back your exercise calories and you're relying on gym machine readouts or MFP's estimates, it might be best to eat back just 50-75% of those. Certain activities tend to be overestimated. If you're using an HRM or activity tracker, it might be a good idea to look into their accuracy and be sure that yours is calibrated properly.
7. If you're taking any cheat days that go over your calorie limits, it might be best to cut them out for a few weeks and see what happens. Some people go way over their calorie needs without realizing it when they don't track.
8. If you weigh yourself frequently, consider using a program like trendweight, happy scale, or libra to even out the fluctuations. You could be losing weight but just don't see it because of the daily ups and downs.
9. Some people just burn fewer calories than the calculators predict. If you continue to have problems after 4-6 weeks, then it might be worth a trip to the doctor or a registered dietitian who can give you more specific advice.5 -
If you are not weighing all of your solid foods and weighing/measuring all of your calorie-containing liquids, then you are likely eating more than you think you are. Get that scale and get weighing!1
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If your goal is to eat a thousand calorie deficit chances are you are losing some weight. It may not be as much as you want without a food scale and a good handle on logging accurately with the sometimes wildly inaccurate MFP food database.
Here is a good article to read on weight fluctuations and why they will sometimes mask your progress:
http://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations/
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sweetiefairygirl wrote: »I’m very frustrated right now, to maintain my weight I would need almost 2500 cals, I’ve been eating about 1500 a day & im not losing!! Any ideas?
logging calories is an estimate. Wow, 2500, you must be super tall! But still, 1500 is typically a deficit except for a 5 foot nothing female like me.
How long?
It can take 30-90 days to get results so you could focus on the food scale rather than the body weight scale for weeks on end before you determine progress.
Also, it's super easy for people to say "but I'm eating at a deficit and nothing is happening" because people don't wait long enough. Also, we play mental accounting with calories just like with finances so some days we actually eat more than we logged. It's super easy for the intake to actually be higher then what you logged.
As the others said, make sure you are using a food scale, possibly not try to eat back exercise calories, troubleshoot your process, wait, be patient, focus on the process not the results, and the results will come later much delayed.
Best of luck!
Roberta
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Weigh everything in grams. It's amazing how much difference it has made for me. It's really just math but your numbers need to be accurate. Best of luck to you!1
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