Breaking through a plateau

are you NETTING at least 1200 a day??

you have to net 1200 after exercising and eating them back. eating less does not always meaning losing more. i think you should bump up your numbers back to where you were losing when you were being good. just my opinion of course

As you gained weight you probably had plateaus going up. Your body remembers these plateaus and will automatically plateau there again on the way down. Some refer to these as "set points." It may take some time and sometimes some adjustments to get past them.

Mix it up. Vary your exercise from day to day and vary your menu. If you get bored you are less likely to be successful.

And you need to NET at least 1200 cal, I would say for you to net at least 1450 or your body is in starvation mode!

I don't know if this will help or not - I've been stuck at the same weight for 4 months. My cals were set to 1300 and I religiously recorded my exercise calories with an HRM and ate them back (or at least most of them). By exercise, I run 3 - 7 miles 4 times a week, cycle to work and back every day and horseride once a week.

I then read Tom Venuto's Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle and used the calculations at the back of his book to work out my calories AND also followed some advice which I got here on the Forum from Stroutman81, which includes your exercise calories in your daily allowance so you don't have to worry about eating them back or not. I have cut and pasted the information from his post below (which is pretty close to the Tom Venuto stuff too):

".....This is how I go about calories.

I set maintenance at 14-16 calories per pound. Most tend to start most women or people who've already lost a considerable amount of weight at 14 and most men and highly active people at 16. Of course there are always those outliers who seem to have a sluggish metabolism or seem to be mostly sedentary... and in those cases, I might slide the entire spectrum down slightly, to say, 12-14 cals/lb. On the other side of the fence, there are always those who seem to be gifted in the metabolism department or they're highly highly active and I might slide their maintenance spectrum up to 16-18.

It all depends on the individual and circumstances.... but it's just a starting point anyhow... so not all that important. It's how they adapt their approach according to what's happening in response to the starting point that is important.

Once a reasonable estimate has been made about maintenance, I subtract 25-35% from it to reach a daily calorie target. There are cases where I'll go above or below this range... but by and large this is the range I work with. I'll typically hover on the lower end of that range for lighter folks and the higher end of the range for heavier folks.

With this method, you don't have to worry about eating exercise calories back or not. Here's why...

The 14-16 calories per pound for maintenance assumes the person is exercising most days of the week. So exercise calories are already factored in. Meaning anything below this maintenance intake should be a "raw" deficit... meaning it doesn't need any manipulation. It's net, in other words."



In the last 2 weeks, I have changed my settings manually on MFP so that my calories reflect whatever I worked them out to be (think it was about 1560). I now treat ALL my running calories (moderate exercise at least 3 days a week) as being included in that calorie allowance and only eat back my cycling calories - which on a daily basis don't really amount to very much - it's a short journey LOL. In the last 2 weeks I have lost 5lbs so it appears to be working!

Hope this might help a bit - sorry it's a long post!!!