Help with 5 Month Plateau - Tried Everything
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arisilbermann wrote: »DeesPancakes wrote: »
What do you disagree with? Or did I misunderstand something?
I wasn't the one who disagreed, but perhaps this is the reason someone else did:
A 1000 calorie deficit can be excessive or not, depending on the circumstances. It's equivalent to a weight loss rate of 2lbs per week, which can be appropriate for some people. OP weighs 218 lbs, a rate of 2lbs per week isn't extreme if you go by the guideline of a weight loss rate of 0.5-1% of bodyweight per week.
And whether or not a deficit of 1000 calories will make someone feel ill and cause them to binge also depends on the circumstances (for example: a deficit of 1000 calories when your TDEE is 3000 calories isn't the same as a when your TDEE is 1600 calories).
Personally I agree though that a deficit of 1500 or 2000 doesn't sound like a good idea in this case.
Thanks for this thought. Some answers here suggested further cutting calories so that would take me to 1500 a day or more. Why do you think it isn't a good idea here? Do you thoughts about likely cause for my issue here?
You did say your bmr was 1,800 calories per day, so a deficit of 1,500 - 2,000 calories per day would put you at a total consumption of between 300 and negative 200, daily... which is pretty much starvation. I must be missing something here. There's no way people operate on 300 to -200 calories, daily. You'd eventually pass out.1 -
DeesPancakes wrote: »arisilbermann wrote: »DeesPancakes wrote: »
What do you disagree with? Or did I misunderstand something?
I wasn't the one who disagreed, but perhaps this is the reason someone else did:
A 1000 calorie deficit can be excessive or not, depending on the circumstances. It's equivalent to a weight loss rate of 2lbs per week, which can be appropriate for some people. OP weighs 218 lbs, a rate of 2lbs per week isn't extreme if you go by the guideline of a weight loss rate of 0.5-1% of bodyweight per week.
And whether or not a deficit of 1000 calories will make someone feel ill and cause them to binge also depends on the circumstances (for example: a deficit of 1000 calories when your TDEE is 3000 calories isn't the same as a when your TDEE is 1600 calories).
Personally I agree though that a deficit of 1500 or 2000 doesn't sound like a good idea in this case.
Thanks for this thought. Some answers here suggested further cutting calories so that would take me to 1500 a day or more. Why do you think it isn't a good idea here? Do you thoughts about likely cause for my issue here?
You did say your bmr was 1,800 calories per day, so a deficit of 1,500 - 2,000 calories per day would put you at a total consumption of between 300 and negative 200, daily... which is pretty much starvation. I must be missing something here. There's no way people operate on 300 to -200 calories, daily. You'd eventually pass out.
The calorie deficit is subtracted from the TDEE, not from the BMR.5 -
DeesPancakes wrote: »arisilbermann wrote: »DeesPancakes wrote: »
What do you disagree with? Or did I misunderstand something?
I wasn't the one who disagreed, but perhaps this is the reason someone else did:
A 1000 calorie deficit can be excessive or not, depending on the circumstances. It's equivalent to a weight loss rate of 2lbs per week, which can be appropriate for some people. OP weighs 218 lbs, a rate of 2lbs per week isn't extreme if you go by the guideline of a weight loss rate of 0.5-1% of bodyweight per week.
And whether or not a deficit of 1000 calories will make someone feel ill and cause them to binge also depends on the circumstances (for example: a deficit of 1000 calories when your TDEE is 3000 calories isn't the same as a when your TDEE is 1600 calories).
Personally I agree though that a deficit of 1500 or 2000 doesn't sound like a good idea in this case.
Thanks for this thought. Some answers here suggested further cutting calories so that would take me to 1500 a day or more. Why do you think it isn't a good idea here? Do you thoughts about likely cause for my issue here?
You did say your bmr was 1,800 calories per day, so a deficit of 1,500 - 2,000 calories per day would put you at a total consumption of between 300 and negative 200, daily... which is pretty much starvation. I must be missing something here. There's no way people operate on 300 to -200 calories, daily. You'd eventually pass out.
BMR is the calories you burn in a coma. Any activity increases calorie burn/output. So if she's walking around, doing exercise, working an even remotely physical job, just living and doing things in life her actual calorie burn is going to be higher by quite a lot. Meaning that subtracting her deficit could still well leave her a lot of calories to live on/not starvation.3 -
4-5 hrs weekly jogging/cycling.
Garmin is usually pretty decent about jogging calories, as they calculate by distance and HR, but give more weight to the distance estimate.
But if say your HRmax as input on Garmin is way off, you could be getting badly inflated calorie burn there.
And that effect would be even worse for cycling as that is all by HR-calc unless you have a power meter that is giving better info and being used.
Many 1.5-2 hrs rides during the summer, my Garmin estimated calories was 700-900 inflated over the power meter (mine doesn't integrate, I have to manually correct).
Last night cool temp and lower HR finally saw it only 200 inflated.
Couple of workouts like that, inflated like that - where did your on-paper deficit go?
Running is still tad inflated for me using strictly calculation based burn, which can be much more accurate than HR-based.
Go back to some recent workouts and see what this calc says the Gross burn would be. (net would be if you had no tracker synced to MFP and logging manually on MFP, not to use now for comparison).
https://exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs
Any other workouts?
Outside of exercise, what is your step count and average daily distance?
Any walking you log as a workout, or you allow to auto-start as a workout?
Walking is a known case of inflated HR-based calorie burn, much better for calories to be tracked as just normal distance for the day.
Unless newer watches have changed something, the per second HR and using HR-based calorie burn only happens during a workout. The FirstBeat technology they use in some devices (haven't kept up which ones) even has a white paper describing how it's wrong usage for daily level activity.0 -
arisilbermann wrote: »arisilbermann wrote: »DeesPancakes wrote: »
What do you disagree with? Or did I misunderstand something?
I wasn't the one who disagreed, but perhaps this is the reason someone else did:
A 1000 calorie deficit can be excessive or not, depending on the circumstances. It's equivalent to a weight loss rate of 2lbs per week, which can be appropriate for some people. OP weighs 218 lbs, a rate of 2lbs per week isn't extreme if you go by the guideline of a weight loss rate of 0.5-1% of bodyweight per week.
And whether or not a deficit of 1000 calories will make someone feel ill and cause them to binge also depends on the circumstances (for example: a deficit of 1000 calories when your TDEE is 3000 calories isn't the same as a when your TDEE is 1600 calories).
Personally I agree though that a deficit of 1500 or 2000 doesn't sound like a good idea in this case.
Thanks for this thought. Some answers here suggested further cutting calories so that would take me to 1500 a day or more. Why do you think it isn't a good idea here? Do you thoughts about likely cause for my issue here?
To make sure we're talking about the same thing: I'm talking about your calorie deficit - the difference between total calories burned in a day and how many calories you're actually consuming. A deficit of 1500 is the equivalent of losing 3lbs/1.4kg a week, which is too agressive for someone who weighs 99kg.
The problem is, of course, that what I'm saying relates to your actual TDEE and calorie consumption. If you're using your Garmin as a starting point for your TDEE, it may or may not be accurate (greater or smaller actual deficit). And if your logging isn't accurate, that could also make your deficit greater or smaller than intended. So that's where the idea comes from to cut calories: you're burning less than you think/consuming more than you think and your deficit isn't what you think it is.
You also mention trying a series of strategies to get out of your plateau, but I'm wondering if you stuck to them long enough. Sometimes it takes more than a few weeks to spot progress between the normal daily weight fluctuations.
Yes I hear what your saying...going on my first 5 months when I was at a (theoretical mfp/garmin) deficit of 1000 calories per day or say 6000 per week give or take I lost 1-2kg per month. That means very roughly that my actual deficit was more like 10000 calories a month and say 2500 a week or 300-400 a day. So it could just be that I've plateaued because of minor changes and therefore need to increase my 'theoretical mfp/garmin' deficit to 1500 but which may be more like 500 or 600 in real terms...
I'd suggest figure out the tweaks so the device can keep being used as seasons and activity level changes.
Or perhaps your workouts stay about the same no matter what, and daily activity.
Do you see step count changes much?0 -
So how many calories do you actually eat in a day on average? Ignoring all outgoings - what are the actual ingoings?1
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DeesPancakes wrote: »arisilbermann wrote: »DeesPancakes wrote: »
What do you disagree with? Or did I misunderstand something?
I wasn't the one who disagreed, but perhaps this is the reason someone else did:
A 1000 calorie deficit can be excessive or not, depending on the circumstances. It's equivalent to a weight loss rate of 2lbs per week, which can be appropriate for some people. OP weighs 218 lbs, a rate of 2lbs per week isn't extreme if you go by the guideline of a weight loss rate of 0.5-1% of bodyweight per week.
And whether or not a deficit of 1000 calories will make someone feel ill and cause them to binge also depends on the circumstances (for example: a deficit of 1000 calories when your TDEE is 3000 calories isn't the same as a when your TDEE is 1600 calories).
Personally I agree though that a deficit of 1500 or 2000 doesn't sound like a good idea in this case.
Thanks for this thought. Some answers here suggested further cutting calories so that would take me to 1500 a day or more. Why do you think it isn't a good idea here? Do you thoughts about likely cause for my issue here?
You did say your bmr was 1,800 calories per day, so a deficit of 1,500 - 2,000 calories per day would put you at a total consumption of between 300 and negative 200, daily... which is pretty much starvation. I must be missing something here. There's no way people operate on 300 to -200 calories, daily. You'd eventually pass out.
What the others said - but BMR + avg day for me brings it to about 2400 according to MFP. Then add to that exercise 4 times a week that can shoot it up another 500-1000 depending on the day.. So 1500-2000 deficit is theoretically possible for me on exercise days0 -
Pipsqueak1965 wrote: »So how many calories do you actually eat in a day on average? Ignoring all outgoings - what are the actual ingoings?
Looking at the MFP for the past 90 days looks like usually around 1700-2000 calories per day. Sometimes less sometimes a bit more but usually that range.0 -
4-5 hrs weekly jogging/cycling.
Garmin is usually pretty decent about jogging calories, as they calculate by distance and HR, but give more weight to the distance estimate.
But if say your HRmax as input on Garmin is way off, you could be getting badly inflated calorie burn there.
And that effect would be even worse for cycling as that is all by HR-calc unless you have a power meter that is giving better info and being used.
Many 1.5-2 hrs rides during the summer, my Garmin estimated calories was 700-900 inflated over the power meter (mine doesn't integrate, I have to manually correct).
Last night cool temp and lower HR finally saw it only 200 inflated.
Couple of workouts like that, inflated like that - where did your on-paper deficit go?
Running is still tad inflated for me using strictly calculation based burn, which can be much more accurate than HR-based.
Go back to some recent workouts and see what this calc says the Gross burn would be. (net would be if you had no tracker synced to MFP and logging manually on MFP, not to use now for comparison).
https://exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs
Any other workouts?
Outside of exercise, what is your step count and average daily distance?
Any walking you log as a workout, or you allow to auto-start as a workout?
Walking is a known case of inflated HR-based calorie burn, much better for calories to be tracked as just normal distance for the day.
Unless newer watches have changed something, the per second HR and using HR-based calorie burn only happens during a workout. The FirstBeat technology they use in some devices (haven't kept up which ones) even has a white paper describing how it's wrong usage for daily level activity.
I don't log walking or anything like that - just let garmin+MFP take care of the step calibrations between them. On non exercise days usually 5000-10000 steps depending. For HR I always use a heart strap so that should be quite accurate...or am I wrong? Ill have a look at the calc0 -
arisilbermann wrote: »4-5 hrs weekly jogging/cycling.
Garmin is usually pretty decent about jogging calories, as they calculate by distance and HR, but give more weight to the distance estimate.
But if say your HRmax as input on Garmin is way off, you could be getting badly inflated calorie burn there.
And that effect would be even worse for cycling as that is all by HR-calc unless you have a power meter that is giving better info and being used.
Many 1.5-2 hrs rides during the summer, my Garmin estimated calories was 700-900 inflated over the power meter (mine doesn't integrate, I have to manually correct).
Last night cool temp and lower HR finally saw it only 200 inflated.
Couple of workouts like that, inflated like that - where did your on-paper deficit go?
Running is still tad inflated for me using strictly calculation based burn, which can be much more accurate than HR-based.
Go back to some recent workouts and see what this calc says the Gross burn would be. (net would be if you had no tracker synced to MFP and logging manually on MFP, not to use now for comparison).
https://exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs
Any other workouts?
Outside of exercise, what is your step count and average daily distance?
Any walking you log as a workout, or you allow to auto-start as a workout?
Walking is a known case of inflated HR-based calorie burn, much better for calories to be tracked as just normal distance for the day.
Unless newer watches have changed something, the per second HR and using HR-based calorie burn only happens during a workout. The FirstBeat technology they use in some devices (haven't kept up which ones) even has a white paper describing how it's wrong usage for daily level activity.
I don't log walking or anything like that - just let garmin+MFP take care of the step calibrations between them. On non exercise days usually 5000-10000 steps depending. For HR I always use a heart strap so that should be quite accurate...or am I wrong? Ill have a look at the calc
It's not a matter of getting an accurate HR (unless using an optical sensor, and that almost has issues going the other direction - missing high HR), but rather the calculation for calories from that.
One simple aspect to those calculations is the HRmax figure.
Say Garmin still has the default HRmax set to 220-age, say 40 years old, so 180 HRmax is set.
What burns more for a workout, getting an avgHR of 140 (78% of HRmax), or 160 (89% of HRmax)?
Of course the higher.
Now, what if you indeed get an avg 160, but your HRmax is in reality 200.
Garmin thinks workout was 89% of HRmax, but it was actually 80%.
That's inflated calorie burn.
In my case 168 would be calculated HRmax, reality is about 190 now.
My ride Sat would be either 89% uncorrected or 79% corrected - that would have made inflated values worse.
There's more to the calculation (for instance assuming a higher BMI is a lower fitness level for VO2max), so bad HRmax figure isn't the whole reason, but could help estimates.
As to daily walking, extra calories is based on distance the steps take you, not merely a steps figure.
So comparing a known distance walk to what the Garmin sees might be useful - but you don't have a huge amount of steps that I think that would be an issue.
With Garmin you'd have to look at daily distance and steps, do your walk, and get ending distance and steps to compute if right on.
Suggest avg daily pace around 1.8 mph - which will seem slow.
Again, you don't have so many steps I'd do that process unless easy to work into schedule some day.
For the workout running - GPS is used for that right?1 -
DeesPancakes wrote: »
What do you disagree with? Or did I misunderstand something?
I'm not the one who went clicky on "disagree" BUT someone may have been reacting to your comment about damaging the metabolism. That's not a thing. It's not a car; you can't dent, ding, or wreck it. There is such a thing as metabolic adaptation but that is absolutely NOT the same thing as claiming metabolic damage.4 -
arisilbermann wrote: »It would help if you told us your height, age, current weight, and the nature of your job and exercise. (Fitness trackers are more reliable guides for some activities, vs. others.)
It would help if you'd open your MFP food diary, if only for a few days, so some of the experienced folks could assess the possibility of logging issues.
(That last is not a dig: Logging is a skill set that takes practice and refinement based on experience and learning. Since you're not getting the results you expect, that's one possible source of variation, so it would be helpful to either be able to suggest refinements to you that might help your data precision, or to rule out possibilities of logging being a significant source of variation. Calorie counting is a data-driven weight management method, the log is the main data, so some precision there can be helpful, if things aren't working out as expected).
Thanks for this. I've made it public. Height 171cm, weight 99kg (started at 109), using garmin connect and fr45 and h10hrm for tracking exercise. I do mainly desk work with some teaching although it's a standing desk. I set my mfp to maintain weight and then strive for the minus calories. I run/cycle about 3 times a week for about 1 hour and then agaim for about 2 hours. Usually low intensity jogging. Some strength work and speed work.
Any insights would be great. Thanks
Thank you.
Mostly, that looks pretty good, honestly. There are a few places you could tighten up, if you want to pin down intake more precisely. Examples: If possible, I'd weigh things like rice raw; weigh the "per piece" items (bread, sausages, Costco cookie, whatever) at least a few times to confirm (some foods are persistently over the label weight, and if calorie dense that can be meaningful); separately log things like beef mince at its labeled fat content, plus any fat you fry it in (vs. the "Lean Beef Mince Pan Fried" kind of thing).
I don't see much in the way of condiments, beverages, oils/fats used for cooking, dressings: If you're not eating them that's fine; but if you are using some and want a bit more precision, log those explicitly, at least for a while. Some of us (me!) think that it's good to log every BLT (bite, lick, taste) for a while, to get a handle on personal calorie needs.
To be clear: I'm not saying everyone needs to weigh/log food with tight, compulsive precision. What I'm saying is that if one has a bit of a caloric mystery going on, doing that tight precision for a month or so can improve one's own data, make it more useful for diagnosing what's really happening in the situation. People who can fall into obsessive counting probably shouldn't go there. People who simply don't want to do it don't have to; it's just a tool that can be used, nothing more.
You've already said you'll try logging your non-logged days for a bit, IIRC, which seems like a good plan to me (but I love data unnaturally much, sometimes . . . though in a pretty pure non-emotional way 😆).
I hope others might take a look at your diary, too, see if they see things I missed. Thank you for opening it!
I think Heybales commented on issues of trusting Garmin for the exercise estimates in your case. He's the most knowledgeable guy around here on that kind of topic, so I have zero to add on that.
I will add one editorial comment: All of this nonsense is *estimates*. The base calorie goal is an estimate (average of similar people from research studies), the logged food is an estimate (one apple sweeter than the next, 20% variance in product labeling, etc.), the exercise calories are an estimate (even in the case of a tracker, as I'm sure Heybales' comments make clear) - everything.
It's really common around here to see people decide, when things aren't happening as expected, that the exercise calories are wrong. Maybe so . . . but there's also a bias to assume that, because those were the last and most suspect piece of the puzzle. It's more "scientific" IMO to consider all the pieces and the pros/cons of how we estimate them. (It's like a fun science fair project for grown-ups, in my weird world.)
I think you have a good plan to log eating more precisely for a while. Your early months, as you seem to understand, seem to suggest that either your base calorie needs are lower than the population average (possible), your exercise is overestimated (also possible, with Heybales analysis of possibilities really insightful), or there's something missing from your food intake . . . or a combination.
As an approximation process, you could stick with your current logging, believe those first month's feedback and adjust base calorie goal accordingly . . . though that's only one option.
Knowing that the estimates are all estimates is important, IMO . . . but it's also important to know (believe?) that for many/most people, they can be accurate enough to be a good guide, when applied in a practical (non-compulsive) way. Sometimes people toss baby with bathwater, think that if they can't count their apple to the last sugar gram then calorie counting is trash. Nah. Close enough can work fine, works for lots of people.
Five months is a pretty long time, but since your calorie goal seems surprisingly low, the "undereating, stress hormones, creeping water weight gain" hypothesis could be in there someplace, too. If Heybales has had an opinion about that, I'd listen to him about that, too. Meantimes, pinning down your logging accuracy may give some insight, as long as doing so doesn't make you feel anxious, obsessive, or any other negative way.
Best wishes!3 -
DeesPancakes wrote: »
What do you disagree with? Or did I misunderstand something?
I wasn't one who disagreed with you either (in terms of clicking "disagree"). But:
If OP was losing 1-2kg per month when at what was expected to be a 1000 calorie deficit (which should be a loss more like 3-4kg per month), then he probably wasn't really at a 1000 calorie deficit, for whatever reason(s) . . . especially if those were the results in an early phase of calorie restriction. (Later on, creeping cortisol/stress-related water retention could confuse scale-weight results, but that's less likely early on. Yeah, new exercise can add water weight early on and similarly confuse matters . . . but 5 weeks is a long-ish time for that to happen, unless the exercise ramps up a good bit over that period.)
Absent confounding factors (like cortisol effects from longer, extreme cuts), one's actual loss rate over a multi-week period is usually a decent-ish indication of actual effective average calorie deficit, for most people . . . better than the so-called "calculator" estimates of calorie needs, or even fitness trackers' estimates.
In that context, extreme alarm over too-deep calorie cuts seems misplaced, to me. But heck, JMO: WhadDoIKnow? I'm not a pro, just some whacky li'l ol' lady. 🤷♀️3 -
DeesPancakes wrote: »
What do you disagree with? Or did I misunderstand something?
I wasn't one who disagreed with you either (in terms of clicking "disagree"). But:
If OP was losing 1-2kg per month when at what was expected to be a 1000 calorie deficit (which should be a loss more like 3-4kg per month), then he probably wasn't really at a 1000 calorie deficit, for whatever reason(s) . . . especially if those were the results in an early phase of calorie restriction. (Later on, creeping cortisol/stress-related water retention could confuse scale-weight results, but that's less likely early on. Yeah, new exercise can add water weight early on and similarly confuse matters . . . but 5 weeks is a long-ish time for that to happen, unless the exercise ramps up a good bit over that period.)
Absent confounding factors (like cortisol effects from longer, extreme cuts), one's actual loss rate over a multi-week period is usually a decent-ish indication of actual effective average calorie deficit, for most people . . . better than the so-called "calculator" estimates of calorie needs, or even fitness trackers' estimates.
In that context, extreme alarm over too-deep calorie cuts seems misplaced, to me. But heck, JMO: WhadDoIKnow? I'm not a pro, just some whacky li'l ol' lady. 🤷♀️
Thanks for your two posts...very helpful and I think doubling down on recording is worth a shot.4
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