Losing the last lbs

salmaalamiie5307
salmaalamiie5307 Posts: 1 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
Hello everyone!

This is my first time ever posting anything in a forum so I hope I'm doing this okay. Before I get to my actual question, I'll tell you a bit about myself. My name is Salma and I am 19 years old. I started my weight loss journey about a year ago. I am 5'4 and started at 197lbs. I didn't know much so I began with intermittent fasting. 20:4 with around 1000 cals every day. I did this for a few months and eventually learned that I was pretty dumb for that. I started then tracking my macros and doing a regular calorie deficit of 1800 cals. after about 5 months I plateaued, upped cals for a bit (still within the deficit) and then did a deeper deficit.

While all this was happening, in the beginning i was working out consistently, doing a mix of crossfit and weight training. But at that point my nutrition was all over the place so as you can imagine it wasn't too great all together. During the calorie deficit, I was stuck at home with no equipment so I did a lot of cardio.

It was only until the last few months I got a pair of 5's,10's and 20's that i started trying to incorperate more strength training. OK so as of now (finally), I went into a deeper calorie deficit, My cals now are 1548 daily. I am strength training and eating well. Generally, for macros, I was doing 40%C, 30%F and 30%P. Just for the past few days I'm trying a low carb diet, just to experiment (20% C, 40%P, 40%F).

Overall everything is going okay but I'm becoming frustrated. I'm at 140 now, my BF% is around 19%. My goal weight is 127-130 lbs.

Thing is, I've been overweight my entire life. so now it feels like im stuck with this lower belly and some loose skin which i can already see start to develop.
Now i work out at home 5x a week, 2 upper body days, 2 lower body days and 1 full body day. I do circuit training. Seems the most practical given I'm at home. I do usually 8 mins of core at the end of all my workouts and always try to incorperate some kind of cardio in at least one of my circuits.

I have no heavy weights and I'm just doing what I can, being the caloric deficit and making my workouts a tiny bit more challenging over time, upping reps and using bands etc...

The reason I'm becoming frustrated if because I feel like these last lbs wont come off, and for some reason, I feel like when they do, my stomach is just not going to leave. I see all these transformation pics and peoples lower stomachs seem to have left and i feel so behind everyone no matter how hard I try. I'm just so angry.

I don't know, maybe this is just word vomit, I honestly don't expect anyone to actually read all of this. At least for now, this is my story. its january and i hope to lose the last 10-15 lbs by may. With my experience i think that makes sense. Point is, results are slower and my patience is becoming less and less. I guess just trust the process but ugh this is just so exhausting.

Whoever stuck around till the end of this, thanks for reading, let me know if you have any tips or any kind of similar experiences.


Wishing you all well :)
-Salma

Replies

  • Fflpnari
    Fflpnari Posts: 975 Member
    Are you weighing all of your food? How accurate is your logging? Are your clothes fitting any different?
  • B_Plus_Effort
    B_Plus_Effort Posts: 311 Member
    edited January 2021
    Salma, welcome, congratulations, you are doing everything wright, so let's put things into perspective

    it took you 19 years to get to almost 200 pounds

    then you lost an AMAZING 57 pounds in 1 year (talk about absolutely a perfect perfect weight loss of a healthy 1 pound per week)

    you also recognized that intermittent fasting is not the way to go, another thumbs up

    you also upped your protein, another thumb up

    all that is happening to you is completely normal, of course the last few pounds are the hardest to loose, think of a runner who says I want to run an 8 minute mile and currently can't even run the entire distance, she will go from a 15 minute mile to a 12 minute to a 10 minute to a 9 minute to maybe an 8:30 than an 8:20, then maybe maybe an 8:10 see how it gets harder and harder to shave off the time, same goes for pounds

    but guess what, you have the rest of your life to work on yourself, no I am not saying it will take 70 years to loose the last 10 to 13 pounds, but it will take some tuning, listen to your body and enjoy the process, your body will tell you what it wants, remember a couple of key things:

    1. the magic happens when we sleep, are you getting at least 8 hours of sleep, how many of those 8 hours are you asleep prior to midnight (not in bed texting your BF, ha ha, but sleeping), I heard the best rest we get is from sleep prior to midnight

    2. don't over weight train your muscles, you need more muscle to burn the fat, but you do not grow muscle at the gym or while lifting, that's when you destroy it, that's when you break it down, so try only training the same muscle group 2 days per week (say upper body twice a week and on different days lower body twice a week)

    are you doing cardio or are you doing smart cardio, 220 minus your age is 201 lets call it 200 ok 70% of that is 140 so in order for you to be burning fat while doing cardio your heart rate should be close to 140 beats per minute

    some people half donkey their cardio and say they did 60 minutes of exercise, while I can do some jumping jacks then get on an incline treadmill and burn more fat in 20 minutes than they can in three times that amount, see what I mean

    hey long question deserved a long answer, you are doing great, just keep grinding and remember, the easiest calories to burn are the ones you don't put in your mouth in the first place

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