Not losing weight in a deficit

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DonnaMiles1966
DonnaMiles1966 Posts: 11 Member
edited December 2020 in Health and Weight Loss
I'm 53 years old and weigh 87kgs. I excersise 5 days a week, around 60 minutes weight/compound (includes rest time between sets) followed by 30 minutes of cardio. I am in a caloric deficit of 1300, that I consume on my non gym days, but when training I consume burnt calories. So for eg my 1300 base, then add say 550 burnt during excersise, I consume those calories back, including my 1300. My macros are set to 40% protein, 40% carbs, 20% fat. If anything I'm gaining weight, or staying the same, not losing. What am I doing wrong? Any suggestions would be appreciated. :) I should mention I've kept at this routine for approximately 6 months now.
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  • DonnaMiles1966
    DonnaMiles1966 Posts: 11 Member
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    I use barcodes on any packed foods, scanning them into my food diary, I also Google calories in certain foods that aren't logged in MFP. I spoke to a trainer who says estimates burning approx 300 plus calories burnt during my weight training per the hour, then whatever the cardio equipment I'm using in the 30 minutes shows burnt calories. eg: 10 minutes on stair treadmill I burn approx 100 calories, as per the computer on the machines. MFP tends to add the burnt calories automatically when putting in excersise performed, and as a rule I change it to lower numbers as it tends to show higher numbers. Hope that makes sense.
  • nooshi713
    nooshi713 Posts: 4,877 Member
    edited December 2020
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    Nony_Mouse wrote: »
    shanek1990 wrote: »
    My advice would be not to add estimated calories burnt back into your daily allowance. It is difficult to accurately gauge the amount of calories you are burning. The number provided by the equipment is simply generated from an algorithm and there are many factors it does not account for. If your goal is weight loss, adding those calories back negates your hard work and is self sabotaging in my opinion.

    MFP is designed to add additional calories from exercise, it's not a TDEE method. By not adding any back, you are under-fuelling. It's a fairly simple process to work out how many of your exercise calories to eat, and infinitely better than eating none of them at all. Your calorie allowance is generated from an algorithm too, are you throwing that out as well?

    How to fine tune those things to yourself? Track cals in meticulously, eat back 50-75% of estimated exercise calories, after 6 weeks check your average weekly weight loss against your expected loss (ie, what you set MFP to), adjust calories up or down if necessary.

    The OP said she is not losing weight and may be gaining so something is off. She said she is maintaining and maybe gaining. She is logging about 550 per day in exercise calories.

    If her goal is 1 lb a week loss then she should not log them and if her goal is 1/2 lb a week then she should log half.

  • Lietchi
    Lietchi Posts: 6,114 Member
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    How do your clothes fit? Do you look better? Strength training for 6 months, I would expect to see body composition changes, even if your weight is staying the same. The scale doesn't always tell the full story.

    Aside from that, as has been said before, it sounds like a good idea to check the accuracy of your food logging and your exercise calories do sound like they could be a bit overestimated. For your food logging, you could make your food diary public and let us see if there are some easy mistakes we can spot or improvements we can suggest.

    PS can I just say: kudos for sticking with this for 6 months, great commitment! We get a lot of people here asking why they haven't lost weight after for example a single week 🙂
  • DonnaMiles1966
    DonnaMiles1966 Posts: 11 Member
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    The original starting calorie deficit being 1300 is supposed to have me losing 1kg per week, according to the calculation, then I'm estimating burning around 550-600 calories plus during weight training and cardio. Most days I struggle to consume the burnt calories back, but either way it puts me back to the 1300, if that makes sense? I've been told on training days I should be eating around 2000 calories, but there's no way I can eat that much, lol. I keep my protein intake up, eat lots of greens, veg, whole grains, steak/chicken ect, also I rarely eat breakfast, usually start eating around brunch. I avoid processed food, opt for fresh where possible, and mostly drink only water. Seriously I feel I'm doing everything right, but it just doesn't seem to be working. I have gained some muscle mass in the last 6 months, perhaps that's accounting for some of the weight?
  • Nony_Mouse
    Nony_Mouse Posts: 5,646 Member
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    DonnaMiles1966 wrote: »
    Also I reckon I need to buy some scales ;)
    See if that can make things easier.

    It will certainly make things more accurate. Aside from packaged foods (the weight of which can be off by quite a bit, btw, something like 20% either way), how are you measuring things?
  • DonnaMiles1966
    DonnaMiles1966 Posts: 11 Member
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    I have made my diary public :)
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,389 Member
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    You could try logging 250 calories for your workout sessions. The stair climber thing really doesn't burn 100 calories per 10 minutes. If you went mountain hiking then that would come down to 600 calories for an hour. Hardly any exercise burns so many calories. For running you can use distance(miles) * weight (lbs) * 0.67. However threadmils are generally poorly calibrated and might not give the actual distance. But this might give you an idea for calorie burns for an exercise that is not walking and that involves jumping. Exercises where one feet stays on the ground tend to burn a lot less. For walking, the multiplier is 0.3 instead of 0.67

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