frustrated - 8 weeks only down 2lbs

Hi there! I am not an expert, but here are a few things that come to mind:

1. Perhaps increase your calories to a small or moderate calorie deficit. This will be much more sustainable over the long term. If the goal is to have a healthier weight forever then adjusting your mindset to "it's a marathon, not a sprint" could be helpful. Easier said than done, I know!

Keeping the deficit moderate has the additional benefit of not messing with your metabolism. When one's metabolism adjust over time to a new lower calorie intake, that person would need to eat even fewer calories to continue to lose weight. A different approach would be to keep a mild deficit, and focus on eating more protein and building muscle, since that burns more calories at rest.

2. Focusing on adding more protein to your diet is a great way to get the most our of your calories. Protein takes more energy for your body to digest and keeps you feeling fuller longer, and supports muscle growth. Chicken breast, leafy greens, and even adding a protein shake daily can help with this.

3. While cardio is fantastic for losing weight quickly, I recommend focusing more on strength training. Since muscle burns more calories at rest, this is a great way to maximize the work you are putting in. Also, as we age, losing weight tends to become harder and part of that is due to muscle loss.

4. You are likely already doing this, but weighing your food and making sure you track everything is important. Dressings, cooking oils/butter, and drinks can add up. Weighing your food will give a more accurate calorie range over measuring by size.

5. Finally, changing your body takes time!

do26jo wrote: »

hi, i hate to admit it but I am a long term "weigh and measure" person. i have done it all, WW, low Carb, South Beach Diet, etc I have boxes and boxes of old diaries when we used paper. i have always been an exerciser so that is not a problem. I do not eat processed foods and this time around I have been eating some fruit and high-fiber carbs, very little.. I have been known to eliminate entire food groups for years at a time. i can be very disciplined, but one deviation and the weight usually comes right back. i have been losing and gaining the same 20 lbs for at least 40 years. my metabolism is probably whipped. when I let myself "go", it is usually equivalent to most people's strict days. I will be happy with losing 1-2 lbs per month if that is all I can get. so I guess at that rate I am right on track. i know I have been building some muscle, I can feel it. so not sure if that could be countering the weight loss as well. I am only 5'1.5. I appreciate your comments, I agree with what you have said. I was hoping there was something I was missing. Sometimes I just lose weight, but most of the time I lose nothing. and again this spans over 40ish years. Starting with MFP is just a new way for me to keep track, but tracking is not new to me. There are some years I just get tired of it and try to maintain without tracking, and I do pretty well, but I wanted to make a conscious effort to lose some pounds on the scale this time around. I did not want to be so strict as to never eat any carbs, because that is hard to sustain. I prefer to live a healthy disciplined lifestyle, just sometimes want to drop a few lbs along the way. thank you again for your comments!

To be completely frank (maybe even brutal), and maybe also being dead wrong . . . reading between the lines, I'm wondering whether some of your past extremes may have compromised your current muscle mass. That's IME extremely common in our demographic, given some of the weight-loss diet weirdness of the past. But it's also reversible, and within our control, when it's happened.

The good news is that it's not really possible to permanently tank metabolism. Recent research suggests metabolism is pretty stable from 20s into 60s **, and for a person who's been active I think the decline thereafter could be relatively gradual. Adaptive thermogenesis - consequences of extreme dieting history - is real, but potentially can be reversed, too. ****

** https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34385400/
**** http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1077746/starvation-mode-adaptive-thermogenesis-and-weight-loss/p1 - read the first few posts from the guy who started the thread.

As an aside, I don't personally find carbs to be a special problem for weight management (in maintenance I'm eating well over 200g of them most days, and it was 150g+ during pretty fast weight loss, though my calorie goal is higher than 1200 then and especially now).

If there's some long-term gradual muscle loss in the picture, protein is really vital, and there are some hints in research that protein is especially important as we age, and suggestions that it can be better to spread it through the day when older (though that last is in debate still). See, for example:

https://www.jamda.com/article/S1525-8610(13)00326-5/fulltext

From a logging perspective it's good to hear that you have helpful experience. I'd observe that - if you're not used to it - the fact that MFP's database is crowd-sourced can introduce some extra challenges. The food database entries mostly are input by regular MFP users, and some are more meticulous than others, to say the least. Caution is advised. The threads about logging that I linked above will say more about that, if that's relevant to you.

Muscle mass gain, as I'm sure you realize, is really - sadly! - quite gradual in our demographic. Fortunately, strength gain can be much faster, and that's very useful in daily life. It's also possible to see increased muscle definition before gaining much in the way of new muscle fiber. (Loosely, that's from artifacts of the muscle repair process, possibly some glycogen depletion from calorie deficit, the beginnings of subcutaneous fat loss . . . ).

I'm a little bigger than you are (5'5"), but far from being Amazon-big, so I can empathize with the challenges. In one twisted sense, I think I did my self a favor by mostly staying fat for two or three decades, rather than yo-yo dieting via fad diets like many of our peers. (I don't recommend staying fat as a lifestyle: Steady at healthy weight is much, much better!)

I'm cheering for you to succeed at loss - definitely worthwhile IMO - and in muscle/fitness improvement. Patience, plus analysis of methods and results then adjustments- that can work. It's kind of like a fun science fair experiment for grown-ups, in my world . . . with potential for quality of life improvement.

Best wishes!

AnnPT77 wrote: »

tomcustombuilder wrote: »

You didn’t mention your weight so let’s assume you’re not an overly small person.

The short answer since you seem to be plenty active is you need to lower weekly calories. I’m thinking you’re taking in more than 1,200 consistently day in and day out.

Usually it’s an issue with only recording those days of 1,200 or you’re being inaccurate with counting overall.

I remember at about 60 I noticed it was getting increasingly harder to lose at the same calorie amount. This is usually from lower NEAT and to a certain degree, age related metabolic slowdown. The only remedy is lower calories if you’re still active with an exercise program

Fat loss is a product of a consistent weekly calorie deficit over time. Sometimes losing the weight is the easy part and maintaining that loss is where the real challenges are

Excellent point. There's a thread here where people share their ideas for reversing that subtle trend. Not all ideas will be workable for everyone, but there should be some that are doable for most people.

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10610953/neat-improvement-strategies-to-improve-weight-loss/p1

I think the general public has no idea that NEAT is even a “thing” and go to the gym for a half and hour and then think that’s how most calorie are burnt.

I think the biggest problem here is unrealistic expectations.

You have only 15- 20 lb to lose and you have lost 2lb in 8 weeks - that seems fine to me.


Maybe you can tighten logging etc and increase the pace a bit - but if you continue slow and steady like that, with your amount to lose, there doesnt seem much wrong

Are you on any medication? I am 61 and I gained some weight due to medication I was taking that also made it extremely hard to lose it. I have always been fit and active. I eat a very healthy diet. last year the same thing happened to me. 1.75 lbs in 4 weeks. I was so discouraged.

paperpudding wrote: »

dvdiamond11 wrote: »

Are you on any medication? I am 61 and I gained some weight due to medication I was taking that also made it extremely hard to lose it. I have always been fit and active. I eat a very healthy diet. last year the same thing happened to me. 1.75 lbs in 4 weeks. I was so discouraged.

But as with OP the problem might be more unrealistic expectations.

If you don't have a lot to lose and you lost around 1/2 lb per week over 4 weeks that seems perfectly fine and not something to be discouraged about.

that is a very slow loss and I’m sure OP would like to step things up. I seriously doubt she wants to spend 2-3 years to lose the weight.

She is only in slightly more than a 100 per day calorie deficit. There is plenty of room to accelerate things very easily

A year minimum to lose 13 lbs with no hiccups 20 lbs a lot more. I was mistaken thinking the numbers were 20-30 lbs. There is room to improve the numbers easily. If someone is happy with such slow results then that’s up to them and perfectly fine.

paperpudding wrote: »

I think the biggest problem here is unrealistic expectations.

You have only 15- 20 lb to lose and you have lost 2lb in 8 weeks - that seems fine to me.

Maybe you can tighten logging etc and increase the pace a bit - but if you continue slow and steady like that, with your amount to lose, there doesnt seem much wrong

Yes, with only 15- 20 lb to lose, do change your weekly weight loss goal to a more appropriate half pound per week, which is what you are losing anyway.

Dieting is stressful. Undereating makes it even more stressful. Stress can lead to increased cortisol, which can make you retain water, masking fat loss on the scale.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/dietary-restraint-and-cortisol-levels-research-review.html/

...a group of women who scored higher on dietary restraint scores showed elevated baseline cortisol levels. By itself this might not be problematic, but as often as not, these types of dieters are drawn to extreme approaches to dieting.

They throw in a lot of intense exercise, try to cut calories very hard (and this often backfires if disinhibition is high; when these folks break they break) and cortisol levels go through the roof. That often causes cortisol mediated water retention (there are other mechanisms for this, mind you, leptin actually inhibits cortisol release and as it drops on a diet, cortisol levels go up further). Weight and fat loss appear to have stopped or at least slowed significantly. This is compounded even further in female dieters due to the vagaries of their menstrual cycle where water balance is changing enormously week to week anyhow.

And invariably, this type of psychology responds to the stall by going even harder. They attempt to cut calories harder, they start doing more activity. The cycle continues and gets worse. Harder dieting means more cortisol means more water retention means more dieting. Which backfires (other problems come in the long-term with this approach but you’ll have to wait for the book to read about that).

When what they should do is take a day or two off (even one day off from training, at least in men, lets cortisol drop significantly). Raise calories, especially from carbohydrates. This helps cortisol to drop. More than that they need to find a way to freaking chill out. Meditation, yoga, get a massage... Get in the bath, candles, a little Enya, a glass of wine, have some you-time but please just chill.

laqwm72 wrote: »

I had used MFP to lose 130 lbs a few years ago counting calories. After losing my husband I just wasn’t able to put the effort in and have gained about 80 lbs over the last 2 1/2 years. I started back counting calories for about 2 weeks and was very frustrated to find it didn’t work for me. My sister went to see her Dr and was put on a low carb diet. I decided to give it a try after doing a bit of research and found that now that I am over 50, it is normal that doing what I did before to lose weight may not work. Low carb is definitely working for me. I would suggest talking to your doctor or maybe a dietitian or nutritionist to get some suggestions for yourself. Best of luck to you.

I think this is a very reasonable idea, but want to point out that depending on where someone is located, the term "nutritionist" can have different legal requirements. In many parts of the US, for example, any random person can call themselves a "nutritionist" without any special educational or experiential credentials at all. Some may have some kind of certificate from as little as a few-hours online course, or something like that.

Before relying on someone's dietary advice, check out their education and experience. Here, "registered dietitian" is a stronger sign of qualifications, but that may not be true everywhere, either.