My Story So Far... (crosspost from Introduce Yourself)

Congrats! Great story.

What is your current calorie count and protein intake? I ask because you're 167 with goal weight 134, you've lost 29 pounds in the last 12 weeks which is 2.4 pounds per week, and you're still targeting 2.2 pounds per week until goal weight. Seems fast to me.

Since you're focusing on weights, you may want to gauge your progress as body fat percentage in addition to, or instead of, BMI. Use the Navy method rather than a cheap scale. Muscle mass skews the BMI result.

Good to hear you'll be adjusting goals as you get closer. I just wanted to make sure you were having realistic targets and are currently getting enough nutrition. Btw a deficit of 3500 suggests one pound per week, which imo sounds great for you currently, but you previously mentioned targeting 2.2 pounds.

Also, if you're only consuming 1200 while also working out a lot, that's not enough imo. MFP assumes you are entering exercise calories separately and eating those back, or as many people here do, they eat back a portion not necessarily all, since exercise calories can be inflated for various reasons.

40% of 1200 calories is 120g protein, which is an excellent minimum target for your situation. Since you're cutting while doing weights, you could benefit from going a bit higher, adding another 20g-30g.

How are you measuring your body fat %?

clairrob wrote: »

Retroguy2000 wrote: »

What is your current calorie count and protein intake? I ask because you're 167 with goal weight 134, you've lost 29 pounds in the last 12 weeks which is 2.4 pounds per week, and you're still targeting 2.2 pounds per week until goal weight. Seems fast to me.

Thank you! I'm aiming to have at least 1200 calories a day or have a deficit of 3500 in any given week. My protein intake is usually 40% of my daily calories. I will definitely be altering my goal based on body composition, and I understand that my weight will start to plateau based on having less to lose and if I'm honest I'm dreading the day. All I've seen is loss so far so I don't want to be disheartened.

My body fat has reduced from 46.2% in November to 38.4%, I'd be happy if I ended up at 30% or high 20s

You're doing great so far, for sure.

But if you've averaged 2.2 pounds a week at 1200 calories (or whatever), your deficit is not 3500 per week, but has been more like 7700 per week. (Roughly 3500 calories in a pound of fat, times 2.2 pounds per week), or a daily deficit of about 1100 calories.

The calculator (or MFP or fitness tracker) estimates give you a starting point, but once you have enough personal experiential data (calorie intake and weight changes), your own data is what tells you your actual deficit much more realistically.

What's enough data? Generically 4-6 weeks minimum on the same regimen of eating/exercise, but women who have monthly cycles should compare body weight at the same relative point in 2 or more different menstrual cycles in order to calculate average weight change per week).

Losing too fast risks losing unnecessarily much lean tissue alongside body fat, because researchers believe we can only metabolize a certain amount of body fat per pound of such fat remaining on our body. I'd suggest not waiting for your loss to plateau, but rather to slow it down intentionally if necessary as you get lighter.

A pound a week (actual 3500 calorie weekly deficit) is probably reasonable for you for maybe another 15 pounds-ish, but losing faster than that increases risks, IMO. Since you have body composition goals, hanging onto muscle mass you currently have is a good plan, because it's relatively slow and effortful for us to regain. Many people don't realize that overweight/obese people tend to carry more pounds of lean mass than similarly-active slim people, because it takes some muscle and such to move that larger body through the world every day.

Best wishes for continuing success!

You're doing great and you have done great.
It is impressive.
I bet you do feel awesome!

But.
Yes. there is a but.

But what happens after weight loss matters.
But 2.2lbs a week is way too fast for a target BMI of 21
But losing 2.4lbs a week is too fast if you're already within the normal weight range.

Yes. I truly get the fear of "but what happens when I don't lose".
Yes. I truly get the fear of "but what happens if I don't see the scale go down"

BUT: BOTH WILL HAPPEN DURING MAINTENANCE. Including, CONTRARY to what @glassyo (with who I usually agree) mentions, your weight going UP during maintenance. AND including your weight going up DURING WEIGHT LOSS. Yes I did say UP, during weight LOSS.

Normal weight variations during non "kittens to the wall" weight loss exceed gradual changes to your weight level. Your weight, especially if you have a monthly cycle, can easily swing 2,3, even 5lbs within a week or two. Slow and steady weight loss and maintenance involve smaller and longer term weight level changes. So yes. You could be losing 4lbs a month and weight a lb more on the 31st than you did on the 1st.

Sooner or later you will have to make peace with all this and you will have to start targeting tiny changes as opposed to going "all in" all the time. An all or nothing mindset will be hard to maintain over the next 50+ years.

And, I've always found it easier to engage in experimentation while still pushing for a loss as opposed to trying to discover everything without the cushion of an ongoing deficit.

Continue losing weight by all means. But start figuring out how to deal with smaller deficits (and overages) as opposed to only targeting large deficits. And 2.4 and 2.2lbs and more than 50% of your TDEE ARE huge deficits.

Even start thinking about how you would cope with reduced gym time if life were to happen! I don't expect you would be all giddy about it; BUT IT DOESN'T MEAN THAT ALL HAS TO BE LOST. So think about contingencies!

That said: I look forward to reading more about your successes... for many years to come!

hmmm.... I need to work on that spreadsheet

I don't like the right to left and that should be something that we can change... not sure how it will affect the graph. But, it also doesn't handle lack of data for "yesterday". If you don't enter anything in the day before today your trend becomes equal to today's weight regardless of the factor. I suppose one way would be to come up with an interpolated value to fill any gaps.

hmmm

But yes, spreadsheet, happy scale for iphone, libra for android, trendweight and even weightgrapher for web based... all have their own strengths and weaknesses and are probably more useful than the Mark 1 eyeball!

PAV8888 wrote: »

I don't like the right to left and that should be something that we can change... not sure how it will affect the graph.

I just looked at the spreadsheet. The right to left works well imo. It's the same way I do my weights progress spreadsheet. Doing it this way you can simply open the sheet and see the current data you're most interested in immediately, and easily insert columns for new days. Otherwise, you'd have to scroll aaaaaaaalll the way to the right every time you wanted to view or do anything.

PAV8888 wrote: »

Pffffft: my ideal would go vertically with each day added below... because my mouse scrolls faster that way! i suppose we would then argue if the new day should be at the top, which might be a valid argument so we would have a bottom to the TOP as opposed to right to left!

In all this, I guess that we all do agree that the OP should probably start looking at longer term trends instead of just looking for daily scale drops that are large enough to overwhelm natural water weight variations, especially as she is already normal weight and will eventually get to maintenance?!?!?!?

And (even though the results are nearly identical for my current set of weigh-ins), not quite understanding the way the original formula was working I went in and just manually added a sixth line that does a weighted average of the past 10 days assuming that all days have valid weight ins entered. It doesn't properly handle the first 10 days or any subsequent blanks.

=if(ISBLANK(C4),"",if(D5="",C4,round((10*C4+9*D4+8*E4+7*F4+6*G4+5*H4+4*I4+3*J4+2*K4+1*L4)/55,1)))

I just copied and pasted the one day I typed out.

I just added that to the downloadable one. It obviously will give a bad result days 2-9, and then it's really neat to see the difference.

---

Editing to add...

I tried that formula, but too it out. I did add a simple ten-day average. There are now two graphs. One is Scale and Trend, the other compares Trend to the simple ten-day average. Just so you can tell the difference between the two methods of calculating an average. It isn't a large difference, but it might be with real data.

clairrob wrote: »

mtaratoot wrote: »

Definitely your trend of losing can be temporarily masked by routine fluctuations. I have had days when my scale weight went up SIX POUNDS in ONE DAY during a time that I actually was losing. Over a few days, my trend had a very brief uptick, but was still on the way down, down down.

Don't sweat the small stuff. It's mostly small stuff.

I put a spreadsheet up that you can download that, if you want, you can add your own data to see your trend. It's a weird one because it starts on the far right, and the dates increase towards the "beginning" of the spreadsheet. It is filled with data up to a few days ago with random numbers between 201 and 143. Put your own data in. It takes several days of data to get the trend. If you skip a number, the "trend" is the one-day weight you entered.

I actually put it together for @PAV8888. I have been using a spreadsheet like this, but on Excel, for years. There's even a graph feature on the second sheet you can see both the fluctuation scale weight and your trending weight. You can play around with the "scale factor" in the very first cell (A1) to make the "look back" shorter. Essentially it's a weighted moving average that puts a higher emphasis on TODAY'S weight than yesterdays, and yesterday's more than the day before that and so on. It's based on a method outlined in The Hacker's Diet. Check that out if you haven't, especially the section on Signal and Noise.

I will leave the spreadsheet up at least for a few more days. Make your own copy and have at it.

I love it!! I'll try it but I do think a daily weigh in for me will start a bit of an obsession and may deter me. I weigh every Friday morning and plot my own graphs and have marked my cycles for future dates to account for anomalies or fluctuations. If I can help it I want to do this as healthily as I can for my body and mind.

For sure this will work for others, appreciate it!

This is a small snip from my own data I've gathered, I love number crunching.

You can modify the spreadsheet for weekly weigh-ins.

• Go to the very right side of the data. Enter a date. If you have older data, use that. Otherwise use today's date.
• Look in the next cell to the left. It has a formula to add one day to the date in the cell to the right.
• Change that to subtract seven days instead of one day.
• Copy and paste that formula into all the other date cells.
• You now have a spreadsheet that allows a once-per-week weighing and will do the same trending calculations.
• If you do this, I'd suggest changing the SCALE FACTOR (in the very top left of the spreadsheet in cell A1) to 5.0 instead of 7.1. Maybe even smaller. You'll see less difference from a rolling average, but if you're only looking at one data point per week, looking back that far might not give meaningful results.

I added a page to the sheet for weekly weigh-ins, and I added a second graph so you don't even have to do that; just go get the current version of the sheet and copy it locally. All you have to do is change the earliest date on the upper right to the oldest weekly weigh-in data you have and then populate the weekly weights. Poof!