1 year weight plateau

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tinybard
tinybard Posts: 2 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I've been eating 1400 calories for 1 year now. 30% fat, 30% protein and 40% carb for the past 2 months. 4x 1h weight lifting and 2-4x 4k jogging per week. I'm not loosing any fat% at all and gained very little muscle. I track my food with MyFitnessPal and my body% with Garmin and Fitbit. I have 15 pounds of fat to loose, and I don't know what to do anymore. I'm burning an average of 15000 calories per week.

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  • spiriteagle99
    spiriteagle99 Posts: 3,675 Member
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    How much do you weigh? If you don't weigh much, 1400 calories may be your maintenance calories. As an older mostly sedentary woman, 123 lbs., that is what MFP and my Garmin give me for maintenance.

    It is also possible that you are somehow miscounting either calories in or calories out or both. 4k running burns less than 300 calories if you are under 150 lbs. So you probably aren't burning as many calories as you think, so you may be eating back too much. Do you weigh every bite you eat? If you've been doing this a lot, it is easy to get lax on listing small things like oil in the pan that you saute meat or vegetables or catsup or mayo on your sandiwich.
  • quiksylver296
    quiksylver296 Posts: 28,442 Member
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    Do you use a food scale to weigh everything, and log it all religiously, no skipping, cheating or forgetting?

    https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10634517/you-dont-use-a-food-scale/p1
  • tinybard
    tinybard Posts: 2 Member
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    I use a scale for everything I eat, never cheat, use Garmin watch to track calories burned and I currently weight 62kg.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,154 Member
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    Do you have the Garmin synced to MFP?

    If yes, are negative adjustments enabled?

    If no, are you adjusting the exercise calories from gross to net before logging them? (I wouldn't usually ask this or worry about it tooooo much, except in a "not losing as expected" scenario like this).

    When you stopped losing, did loss taper off gradually, or were you losing at a reasonable pace then loss stopped pretty abruptly?
    If the latter, how fast had loss been happening before the stall?

    At/near the start of the stall, did anything change in your daily life activities, job, exercise, or eating routine?

    Yes, I know all these questions may be annoying. To give you personalized help, we need to know more, unfortunately.
  • keshaldra
    keshaldra Posts: 101 Member
    edited October 2022
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    Things to consider:

    1) All of the above already mentioned (especially the little tidbits like "oil in the pan", etc....those are what get me!

    2) If you stay at the same calorie amount for a long time, sometimes your body can adjust. You could try alternating 1200/1600, or intermittent fasting, etc. This can also apply to food TYPES.

    3) Since you're already weightlifting, consider upping your calories/protein for a small while to put on a little bit of muscle. When you stop, you'll have a higher BMR, which will help you burn more calories when you're NOT exercising. You said you haven't gained much muscle, which is likely because you've been in a caloric deficit. When you're losing weight, usually the best you can do is try to hang on to the muscle you already have.
  • BartBVanBockstaele
    BartBVanBockstaele Posts: 623 Member
    edited October 2022
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    Those things happen. Unfortunately, the reality is that when we lose weight, we need less metabolism to keep warm and maintain homeostasis. Some of us, luckily not many (even if that is hardly consoling for those of us wo are not so lucky), need to go lower, even much lower, than MFP and general medical advice want to accept as reasonable. Make no mistake, the limits they propose have good reasoning behind them. Going lower is potentially harmful. So is being fat. So, you may have to chose, not between Good and Bad, but between Not-Good and Not-Good. With some luck, you may able to stop doing that once you actually lost your weight which means that one not-good is less bad than the other. If not, you will have to deal with it, but it is worth taking the time to do it for being overweight is not only possibly bad, it is always bad, even if current popularism does not always allow us to say so. This is no body-shaming. Being fat is bad, it is that simple, and not many things in science are actually that clear-cut.
    Check, thoroughly check all your data, make absolutely sure you are not making mistakes. Double-check the food information you are relying on: there are a lot of nutrition facts labels that should actually be called nutrition fiction labels. Often because no one bothered to actually test the claims, and because they were simply copied from an existing, potentially and often actually, erroneous database by people in a marketing department who neither care nor know what they are doing.
    Once you have done all that, consult a doctor, a real one, tell her/him about your problem, see what he/she says and take it from there.
    I am in the same boat, and after staying essentially the same for two years, I have finally decided to accept reality and adapt to it. As a result, I am losing weight again. Slowly, but that is still better than not losing at all.
    That said, the Good News is that everybody, without a single exception, is able to lose weight. So, there is hope, even if it sometimes requires a lot of effort.
  • spiriteagle99
    spiriteagle99 Posts: 3,675 Member
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    At 62 kilos, you aren't likely to be fat unless you are very very short. Are you sure you need to continue to lose weight? And yes, 1400 calories is maintenance level for that weight if you are sedentary.
  • xxzenabxx
    xxzenabxx Posts: 935 Member
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    tinybard wrote: »
    I've been eating 1400 calories for 1 year now. 30% fat, 30% protein and 40% carb for the past 2 months. 4x 1h weight lifting and 2-4x 4k jogging per week. I'm not loosing any fat% at all and gained very little muscle. I track my food with MyFitnessPal and my body% with Garmin and Fitbit. I have 15 pounds of fat to loose, and I don't know what to do anymore. I'm burning an average of 15000 calories per week.

    Take a diet break and eat at maintenance for 2-3 months. You’re metabolism has most likely adapted to those calories through a process called metabolic adaptation. Sometimes you need to stop dieting and just stay at maintenance for a while. We’re not always meant to be dieting.
  • BarbaraHelen2013
    BarbaraHelen2013 Posts: 1,940 Member
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    spiriteagle99 wrote: »
    At 62 kilos, you aren't likely to be fat unless you are very very short. Are you sure you need to continue to lose weight? And yes, 1400 calories is maintenance level for that weight if you are sedentary.

    Respectfully disagree. 62kg (9st 7lb or 136lbs) would put me into the Overweight category on any BMI chart and I am assuredly still fat at that weight. Yes, I’m short, but not unusually so, at a shade over 5ft…plenty of women out there the same height and shorter.

    Hell, I still look fat at 53kg (8st 3lb or 115lbs! I could lose at least another stone and a half still not look underweight!

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