How to overcome what started a few months ago
0Leena0
Posts: 61 Member
The Journey to losing weight is a REAL struggle and causes a lot of frustration and as it's going it gets really SLOW ( at least for me). Last October my weight was 74 kg and on the 28th of February I reached 68.6 and now after two weeks I only lost 200g [ I'm 163-164 hight].
I usually work out 4-6 days a week and the last week I take it as rest because it's my time of the month. The problem I'm facing is that a few months ago I started feeling really sluggish like I don't want to even do anything, not just workout I just want to lay around and do nothing.
after I finish my rest week I get back to workout but then again the next month, the same thing happens, but it starts earlier which means I now have more days where I do nothing (except for dancing) compared to my workout days.
I feel really awful about it and I still need to lose a lot of weight and my weight decreasing rate is bad for me
I usually work out 4-6 days a week and the last week I take it as rest because it's my time of the month. The problem I'm facing is that a few months ago I started feeling really sluggish like I don't want to even do anything, not just workout I just want to lay around and do nothing.
after I finish my rest week I get back to workout but then again the next month, the same thing happens, but it starts earlier which means I now have more days where I do nothing (except for dancing) compared to my workout days.
I feel really awful about it and I still need to lose a lot of weight and my weight decreasing rate is bad for me
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Replies
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How much are you eating?0
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Not wanting to do anything could be depression...have you talked to your doctor?2
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goal06082021 wrote: »How much are you eating?
between 1200 - 1400 calories a day0 -
cmriverside wrote: »Not wanting to do anything could be depression...have you talked to your doctor?
I don't think so, cause after a while i come around and then starts to workout again but what is concerning me that i have this feeling every month now and it takes longer than last months which makes me feel more guilty2 -
goal06082021 wrote: »How much are you eating?
between 1200 - 1400 calories a day
How did you choose that calorie goal? 1,200-1,400 is a pretty low goal for someone who is working out six days a week. Plus you don't weigh that much -- having quick weight loss as your goal probably isn't a good idea at this point.3 -
janejellyroll wrote: »goal06082021 wrote: »How much are you eating?
between 1200 - 1400 calories a day
How did you choose that calorie goal? 1,200-1,400 is a pretty low goal for someone who is working out six days a week. Plus you don't weigh that much -- having quick weight loss as your goal probably isn't a good idea at this point.
Actually, my weight loss journey started last year in Jan I was heavy, and as i mentioned since this feeling came im not consistent with working 6 days as before now it's 4 or 5 days and sometimes 6 days. maybe for you its not much but I'm [Pear shape] and I have lots of fat in my stomach and thighs and i don't feel normal i still have to lose until I'm 55 kg at least.
as for my calories goal since i stay at home now its Sedentary so the activities i do is either workout or dancing thats why after i calculated what my caloric deficit is it showed between 1200-1400.0 -
janejellyroll wrote: »goal06082021 wrote: »How much are you eating?
between 1200 - 1400 calories a day
How did you choose that calorie goal? 1,200-1,400 is a pretty low goal for someone who is working out six days a week. Plus you don't weigh that much -- having quick weight loss as your goal probably isn't a good idea at this point.
Actually, my weight loss journey started last year in Jan I was heavy, and as i mentioned since this feeling came im not consistent with working 6 days as before now it's 4 or 5 days and sometimes 6 days. maybe for you its not much but I'm [Pear shape] and I have lots of fat in my stomach and thighs and i don't feel normal i still have to lose until I'm 55 kg at least.
as for my calories goal since i stay at home now its Sedentary so the activities i do is either workout or dancing thats why after i calculated what my caloric deficit is it showed between 1200-1400.
Me saying you don't have much weight to lose doesn't mean that you should be completely happy with your body right now or that you need to stop. It's just that when you only have about twenty pounds to lose, your progress will often be slower than when you have more to lose. You need to be more patient and consistent.
What size deficit are you shooting for? When you do workout, are you eating back some calories to account for your higher activity? Both of these are important considerations for people who don't have much weight to lose -- you want to make sure your initial deficit is reasonable and you want to make sure you're including calories for extra activity. Failure to do that can result in the lack of energy that you're describing.10 -
Echoing that the last 20lb should be slower, OP, to preserve both your lean mass and your energy. Aim for 0.5lb/wk, and eat back the exercise calories to get to a 250 kcal deficit (on average). Your numbers do not sound terribly out of wack to me, however. When was the last time you had a blood test? Have you ever had anemia (low iron)?3
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goal06082021 wrote: »How much are you eating?
between 1200 - 1400 calories a day
OK. I just ran your stats through this TDEE calculator. TDEE is your Total Daily Energy Expenditure, how many calories you burn in the course of a day. You didn't say how old you are, so I ran it for a 20yo female and a 30yo female to get a range; please let me know if you are older. I also don't know your body fat percentage, so these estimates will be slightly less accurate than if I did have that information. It uses Imperial units so I converted your height from cm to feet and inches (5'4") and weight from kg to lbs (151lb).
A 20-year-old woman who stands 5'4" tall and weighs 151lbs has an estimated basal metabolic rate (BMR) of about 1440 calories per day. A 30-year-old woman of the same size has a BMR that's even lower, about 1390 calories per day. Your basal metabolic rate is how many calories your body has to burn just to keep you alive in a given 24-hour-period - you would burn about 1400 calories per day if you laid perfectly still in bed all day long. But you don't lie perfectly still in bed all day, do you? You get up and go about your business, which occasionally includes exercise. A woman of your size who exercises 5 days a week on average has a TDEE around 2200 calories per day and you're eating almost half of that. No wonder you feel awful, you aren't eating enough. Your body literally is not getting the fuel it needs for you to go about your daily activities. A deficit of 500 calories per day below TDEE is sufficient to lose 1lb per week, which is close to the top end of what you should be aiming for, at your current size; that's 1700 calories per day. And really, you don't need to lose that much, maybe 20 lbs at most? So you really could aim for just 0.5lb per week, eat 1950 calories per day, feel a million times better and still reach your goal by the end of this year.
Think of your excess body fat as a "savings account" for energy, and the food you eat as deposits into an energy "checking account." If the day's energy bill comes due and there's not enough in the "checking account" to pay it, your body will dip into its "savings" to make up the difference - and hence, you lose weight. But your body doesn't want to pull all of that energy in the "savings account" out at once. So, if the bill is too high, your body will try to reduce the "charges" - by reducing the energy you expend on the various processes that are involved in being alive. Production of replacement cells for hair, skin, and nails slows down - your hair and nails become brittle, your skin becomes dry. Digestion slows down, because we don't know when we're getting another shipment of food-energy so we need to make what we have last as long as possible, and anyway there's not enough juice to run the equipment at full capacity. This can actually permanently damage your digestive system over time. It taxes your heart, too; eating too little, especially while also working out a lot, can cause congestive heart failure in otherwise healthy people. This is why it's bad to try to lose weight too quickly, you can actually hurt yourself. It's OK for weight loss to slow down as you get closer to goal, in fact, you're supposed to.13 -
goal06082021 wrote: »goal06082021 wrote: »How much are you eating?
between 1200 - 1400 calories a day
OK. I just ran your stats through this TDEE calculator. TDEE is your Total Daily Energy Expenditure, how many calories you burn in the course of a day. You didn't say how old you are, so I ran it for a 20yo female and a 30yo female to get a range; please let me know if you are older. I also don't know your body fat percentage, so these estimates will be slightly less accurate than if I did have that information. It uses Imperial units so I converted your height from cm to feet and inches (5'4") and weight from kg to lbs (151lb).
A 20-year-old woman who stands 5'4" tall and weighs 151lbs has an estimated basal metabolic rate (BMR) of about 1440 calories per day. A 30-year-old woman of the same size has a BMR that's even lower, about 1390 calories per day. Your basal metabolic rate is how many calories your body has to burn just to keep you alive in a given 24-hour-period - you would burn about 1400 calories per day if you laid perfectly still in bed all day long. But you don't lie perfectly still in bed all day, do you? You get up and go about your business, which occasionally includes exercise. A woman of your size who exercises 5 days a week on average has a TDEE around 2200 calories per day and you're eating almost half of that. No wonder you feel awful, you aren't eating enough. Your body literally is not getting the fuel it needs for you to go about your daily activities. A deficit of 500 calories per day below TDEE is sufficient to lose 1lb per week, which is close to the top end of what you should be aiming for, at your current size; that's 1700 calories per day. And really, you don't need to lose that much, maybe 20 lbs at most? So you really could aim for just 0.5lb per week, eat 1950 calories per day, feel a million times better and still reach your goal by the end of this year.
Think of your excess body fat as a "savings account" for energy, and the food you eat as deposits into an energy "checking account." If the day's energy bill comes due and there's not enough in the "checking account" to pay it, your body will dip into its "savings" to make up the difference - and hence, you lose weight. But your body doesn't want to pull all of that energy in the "savings account" out at once. So, if the bill is too high, your body will try to reduce the "charges" - by reducing the energy you expend on the various processes that are involved in being alive. Production of replacement cells for hair, skin, and nails slows down - your hair and nails become brittle, your skin becomes dry. Digestion slows down because we don't know when we're getting another shipment of food-energy so we need to make what we have last as long as possible, and anyway, there's not enough juice to run the equipment at full capacity. This can actually permanently damage your digestive system over time. It taxes your heart, too; eating too little, especially while also working out a lot, can cause congestive heart failure in otherwise healthy people. This is why it's bad to try to lose weight too quickly, you can actually hurt yourself. It's OK for weight loss to slow down as you get closer to goal, in fact, you're supposed to.
I forgot to mention my age. In a few days, I will be turning 28. I don't know what is my body fat percentage, I only have a normal scale. My workout duration is [ 1 Hour ], I barely lose 0.5 kg a week since last July I barely lose 1 kg a month (sometimes in a month I lose less than 1 kg no matter what I do or change in my diet or workout) so I don't think that my body was starved nor I was feeling hungry or deprived. In these Days that i don't workout i try to eat around 1200-1400 because my body will burn around 1600 cal so i am in deficit
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IMHO, 1kg/month is perfect for your situation. Regardless of the CI and CO numbers, your rate of loss suggests a deficit of ~250kcal/day. That makes me think the fatigue problem is not caloric intake.
If your nutrition is decent (not glaringly lacking particular nutrients), and you don't feel hungry or deprived, but you still feel tired and drained all the time, I would check in with your GP for some bloodwork.3 -
There is no end date to your weight management process. It continues especially if you want to retain a large loss.
It would probably make sense to check with your doctor and bloodwork to make sure everything is ok and nothing else is happening that would account for how you're feeling
If you decide that your current situation is related to your energy consumption and expenditure, then, nased on what you said she described, you can continue pushing and eating even less!
You will then continue to lose slowly while feeling less and less good and it is going to have an increasing impact on the quality of your life!
It doesn't sound very appealing to me.
Or you can consider that you may have painted yourself in a low energy corner and explore the concept of a diet break.
Possibly even reverse dieting and increasing your daily energy availability and exercise performance.
A few months down you can reevaluate and create a -250 deficit from your increased TDEE to continue losing...4 -
IMHO, 1kg/month is perfect for your situation. Regardless of the CI and CO numbers, your rate of loss suggests a deficit of ~250kcal/day. That makes me think the fatigue problem is not caloric intake.
If your nutrition is decent (not glaringly lacking particular nutrients), and you don't feel hungry or deprived, but you still feel tired and drained all the time, I would check in with your GP for some bloodwork.
by the situation you mean my height and weight ratio?
i think i will consider doing a blood work1 -
-snip-
I forgot to mention my age. In a few days, I will be turning 28. I don't know what is my body fat percentage, I only have a normal scale. My workout duration is [ 1 Hour ], I barely lose 0.5 kg a week since last July I barely lose 1 kg a month (sometimes in a month I lose less than 1 kg no matter what I do or change in my diet or workout) so I don't think that my body was starved nor I was feeling hungry or deprived. In these Days that i don't workout i try to eat around 1200-1400 because my body will burn around 1600 cal so i am in deficit
OK. As a woman, remember that we ARE supposed to have SOME body fat. 18-19% BF is ideal for a woman your age. You're probably around 20-25% at the very most - I think it would be hard to be more than that and still weigh just 68kg. You must have some level of muscle, since you do work out quite a lot. Just because you don't "feel hungry" doesn't mean you're not hurting yourself; some people don't have great hunger signaling for whatever reason.
Also, 0.5kg per week is VERY GOOD progress, that's about as much as you should aim for at your current size. It is not safe or sustainable for you to lose faster than that, you are going to damage your health. I agree with ahoy_m8 that 1kg per month is a good goal for you.
Again, please eat more. You can, and you will feel better when you do. Even if you don't work out, your sedentary TDEE is somewhere between 1700 and 1900 depending on your BF%.
edit to add: Please do speak with a doctor and get bloodwork done, yes, just to rule out something like a thyroid issue or similar, and get your vitamin and mineral levels checked as well. Iron and vitamin D especially.0 -
There is no end date to your weight management process. It continues especially if you want to retain a large loss.
It would probably make sense to check with your doctor and bloodwork to make sure everything is ok and nothing else is happening that would account for how you're feeling
If you decide that your current situation is related to your energy consumption and expenditure, then, nased on what you said she described, you can continue pushing and eating even less!
You will then continue to lose slowly while feeling less and less good and it is going to have an increasing impact on the quality of your life!
It doesn't sound very appealing to me.
Or you can consider that you may have painted yourself in a low energy corner and explore the concept of a diet break.
Possibly even reverse dieting and increasing your daily energy availability and exercise performance.
A few months down you can reevaluate and create a -250 deficit from your increased TDEE to continue losing...
I never considered lowering my calories to less than 1200. I never explored the reverse dieting term but to me it sounds like weight gain which i would not go that path, I'm already struggling to lose my weight.
but I do have 2 times in a month a cheat meal but i don't give my self free pass ( if that considered a diet break)0 -
goal06082021 wrote: »-snip-
I forgot to mention my age. In a few days, I will be turning 28. I don't know what is my body fat percentage, I only have a normal scale. My workout duration is [ 1 Hour ], I barely lose 0.5 kg a week since last July I barely lose 1 kg a month (sometimes in a month I lose less than 1 kg no matter what I do or change in my diet or workout) so I don't think that my body was starved nor I was feeling hungry or deprived. In these Days that i don't workout i try to eat around 1200-1400 because my body will burn around 1600 cal so i am in deficit
OK. As a woman, remember that we ARE supposed to have SOME body fat. 18-19% BF is ideal for a woman your age. You're probably around 20-25% at the very most - I think it would be hard to be more than that and still weigh just 68kg. You must have some level of muscle, since you do work out quite a lot. Just because you don't "feel hungry" doesn't mean you're not hurting yourself; some people don't have great hunger signaling for whatever reason.
Not sure where this is coming from. I'm nearly the same height as OP and the same weight. That's the very top of the normal BMI range/borderline overweight. Over 25% bodyfat seems like a very real possibility to me.4 -
A diet break is a good idea. It's a good idea for anybody who has been in a sustained deficit for many months. It is simply eating at maintenance calories, and maintaining current weight, for a period of time, usually a week or two but nothing wrong with taking longer maintenance breaks. It's good practice for life-long weight maintenance, and it can possibly help reverse adaptive thermogenesis (minor decreases in CO due to deficit eating) to the extent there was any. It is a sustained effort, not a single cheat meal.
ETA: responding to above re: "situation," yes you're exactly right - ht & wt is what I meant.0 -
goal06082021 wrote: »-snip-
I forgot to mention my age. In a few days, I will be turning 28. I don't know what is my body fat percentage, I only have a normal scale. My workout duration is [ 1 Hour ], I barely lose 0.5 kg a week since last July I barely lose 1 kg a month (sometimes in a month I lose less than 1 kg no matter what I do or change in my diet or workout) so I don't think that my body was starved nor I was feeling hungry or deprived. In these Days that i don't workout i try to eat around 1200-1400 because my body will burn around 1600 cal so i am in deficit
OK. As a woman, remember that we ARE supposed to have SOME body fat. 18-19% BF is ideal for a woman your age. You're probably around 20-25% at the very most - I think it would be hard to be more than that and still weigh just 68kg. You must have some level of muscle, since you do work out quite a lot. Just because you don't "feel hungry" doesn't mean you're not hurting yourself; some people don't have great hunger signaling for whatever reason.
Also, 0.5kg per week is VERY GOOD progress, that's about as much as you should aim for at your current size. It is not safe or sustainable for you to lose faster than that, you are going to damage your health. I agree with ahoy_m8 that 1kg per month is a good goal for you.
Again, please eat more. You can, and you will feel better when you do. Even if you don't work out, your sedentary TDEE is somewhere between 1700 and 1900 depending on your BF%.
edit to add: Please do speak with a doctor and get bloodwork done, yes, just to rule out something like a thyroid issue or similar, and get your vitamin and mineral levels checked as well. Iron and vitamin D especially.
Honestly, i tried reading about how to approximately know my body fat percentage but it was too confusing.
I don't lose 0.5 kg every week. as i mentioned for one week i can lose 0.5 kg in a week but then hold for two weeks.
on the 28th of Feb, I was 68.4, and until the 15th of Feb I only lost 200g despite my working out, i did have a cheat meal in those two weeks but i doubt that it holds my weight for two weeks0 -
goal06082021 wrote: »-snip-
I forgot to mention my age. In a few days, I will be turning 28. I don't know what is my body fat percentage, I only have a normal scale. My workout duration is [ 1 Hour ], I barely lose 0.5 kg a week since last July I barely lose 1 kg a month (sometimes in a month I lose less than 1 kg no matter what I do or change in my diet or workout) so I don't think that my body was starved nor I was feeling hungry or deprived. In these Days that i don't workout i try to eat around 1200-1400 because my body will burn around 1600 cal so i am in deficit
OK. As a woman, remember that we ARE supposed to have SOME body fat. 18-19% BF is ideal for a woman your age. You're probably around 20-25% at the very most - I think it would be hard to be more than that and still weigh just 68kg. You must have some level of muscle, since you do work out quite a lot. Just because you don't "feel hungry" doesn't mean you're not hurting yourself; some people don't have great hunger signaling for whatever reason.
Not sure where this is coming from. I'm nearly the same height as OP and the same weight. That's the very top of the normal BMI range/borderline overweight. Over 25% bodyfat seems like a very real possibility to me.
can i only know my body fat percentage through the special scales?0 -
Special scales useless. Navy bodyfat calculator and similar/visual evaluating almost better.
Most readily available options have too large a margin to be significantly more useful than BMI plus waist to height combination for evaluation
You SHOULD be looking at weight trend over time, as you seem to be.
It is perfectly normal for both exercise and TOM to be affecting your daily weights, and you seem to be recognizing that.
Explore Libra/happy scale/trendweigh or weightgrapher if you haven't already
Reverse dieting does not have the goal of weight gain though a tiny weight gain budget may be required for optimizing.
The goal is to bring your TDEE back to a more normal level for your height/weight/activity if it has currently plunged below that. The added benefit to that is that your weight will then decrease faster and more easily when you create a deficit from that higher TDEE.
Before dealing with reverse dieting a long enough time period at maintenance could make some sense.
Please note again that when you increase daily intake to maintenance food in transit and possibly some glycogen replenishment could both potentially conspire for a measured uptick to your scale weight. That's not fat gain even if the scale number is up a bit.
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