Not loosing! Help

According to the trusty calculator over at TDEEcalculator.net, your break-even caloric intake is around 1850 if you're very sedentary, and 2,100 if you're lightly active (excluding your workouts). At 1,200-1,500 calories with 5 vigorous workouts per week, weight should be melting off you like an ice cream cone sitting on a metal picnic table under a hot August sun, next to a bonfire and adjacent to a flamethrower testing facility.

So ...

There are only two ways to not lose weight while dieting:

• thyroid problem or other rare medical condition
• not eating at a calorie deficit

The odds are always with the 2nd one - not eating at a deficit. Let's start there.

How sure are you that you're eating "anywhere from 1,200-1,500 calories per day"? Are you measuring all your food by weight, to the gram, or are you ballparking it and/or making assumptions? It's exceptionally easy to be 30-50 % over on the calories without even noticing it, in the absence of a food scale. Also, 400-500 calories per workout is a lot of workout calories, how sure are you about that number? It isn't an "impossible" number, but 500 calories is a heavy duty workout of 45-60 minutes of vigorous cardio + weights. Most people don't do that 5x per week.

There are a lot of mysteries about the human condition but one thing is pretty simple - the balance sheet of weight loss. If you take in less calories than needed to break even you will lose weight. So I would start with nailing down the numbers with precision, and then take it from there.

EDIT: I didn't see the 3 weeks part on the first read-through. 3 weeks is not enough time to draw any conclusions. As @nutmegoreo points out, water retention is the likeliest culprit, and then there's women-type things I'm unqualified to comment on. There's much fluctuation and seeming randomness in the first few weeks of a new diet, so a good rule of thumb is to wait a full 6 weeks before drawing any conclusions or getting concerned. But in the meantime, locking down the food weighing and logging to bring more exactitude to the project would be an excellent thing to do.

handmaggie12 wrote: »

BoundlessBow wrote: »

Are you using a food scale to accurately measure your portions?

No I have been meaning with a cup/ Tbs but not a good scale.

This is likely the issue. You're currently estimating that you're eating 1,200-1,500 calories a day, but your intake is probably higher due to the inaccuracy of the method you're choosing to measure your food. Not sure where you are, but I can get a food scale for under $15. It's one of the best weight management investments I ever made. I use it every day and once I began using it, my weight loss finally began operating as I expected.