I’m at a loss on my weight loss

Lietchi wrote: »

pony4us wrote: »

Just me, I have pots and pans either on the counter or stove, not at the table. I got the feeling that the family was sitting at the table for dinner. I'm too old school I guess.

Not sure if it's old school versus 'new school', more cultural I think? I've always had family dinner with my parents at the dinner table, with pots and pans on the table. It's that way for most families I know.

But that's going off-topic a bit much I guess!

Yeah, we do buffet style instead of serving dishes. Just leave the food on the stove/counter, everyone gets a plate. My family wouldn't care if I sat down and started weighing stuff, I guess it depends on the family.

Hi OP.

Generally aside from illness, there seem to me to be 3 main reasons for not losing: miscalculating your intake, plateauing, or gaining muscle (which is heavier than fat).

(snip)

Consider your workouts as well because if you're gaining muscle faster than you're losing, that can make it seem like you're not making progress when you are. Keeping measurements can help with figuring that out a little better than the scale.

Muscle mass gain is slow. A very good rate of muscle mass gain under ideal circumstances would be 1-2 pounds of new muscle mass gained per month, so half a pound a week at the high end. "Ideal circumstances" includes a calorie surplus, i.e., weight gain, not a calorie deficit. That doesn't mean no one can gain mass in a deficit, but it does suggest that the gain rate would be substantially slower than half a pound a week.

On the flip side, half a pound of fat loss per week would be about the slowest rate most people might consider satisfying, and a rate that slow could potentially take several weeks to show clearly in scale weight, amongst normal daily multi-pound fluctuations of water weight and digestive waste in transit.

The sad but nearly inescapable conclusion is that no realistic rate of muscle mass gain will outpace any satisfying rate of fat loss. Muscle gain will rarely be the explanation behind a scale stall.

Sometimes people believe otherwise because strength gain can be quite fast at first. That initial strength improvement comes from better recruiting and utilizing existing muscle fibers ("neuromuscular adaptation", NMA). Until that source of adaptation is getting mostly tapped out, the body has little impetus to add new muscle fibers.

On top of that, one may see improved muscle definition before mass gain, from some combination of water retention in the muscles for repair (a sort of "pump"), and loss of a small overlying subcutaneous fat layer that's hidden the muscles previously.

I can't tell you how much I wish muscle mass gain were easier and quicker. Sadly, it's not.

The ultimate result is your weight measured over weeks of time. I wouldn't worry as much about the preciseness of your measurements in your case, due to the external factors, and the understanding that it makes you want to give up.

I'd keep doing what you're doing but just add an additional "handicap" like in golf. Set your goal calories at 200 or 300 less than you have now, every day, and then see how that affects your weight over weeks of time.

gizzzo wrote: »

Lietchi wrote: »

You're the one who mentioned tracking 'religiously' in your opening post

When I said religiously I meant encoding every meal.

Lietchi wrote: »

I'm not saying this to blame you: you are obviously free to not track as accurately as as you (theoretically) could. But you then need to conclude that you're working with most likely inaccurate data.

I do not prepare my food. I have my househelp do that

You see I had these choices:
1. not weigh and not log at all
2. weigh the food then use MFP to enter the food name. I could just use unverified or verified.
3. weigh every ingredient, enter the exact recipe.

So I chose #2 because I thought it struck the right balance between zero accuracy but zero effort and maximum accuracy but maximum effort.

I guess my mistake was to put so much trust in the "verified" foods. But isn't choosing #2 with verified foods much better than #2 but with unverified foods?

Unfortunately verified doesn't mean that much, just that a number of people have 'upvoted' it. Probably more likely to be right/close but still no guarantee. Better likelihood for individual ingredients to be correct than if you choose entries for entire meals/dishes, since a dish can be prepared in different ways, different proportions of ingredients, different amounts of cooking oils,...

But the thing is: what is your goal? Do you want a precise number, or do you just want to lose weight?
For me precision matters because I'm a data geek and I want to compare my intake to the TDEE my tracker gives me. But if weight loss is the only concern, the accuracy of the absolute number itself is less important.
Whatever food tracking option you choose, the trick is just to be consistent in your method and then adapt your intake based on your results.

One other potential "compromise" way of tracking more accurately could be to ask your meal preparer if you could shadow them while they prepare some of the meals you eat most frequently and measure the high calorie components that go into the recipe. Enter the recipe for that meal in MFP and use that when you log.

I do something similar for my own use (though I'm generally the food preparer). The first time I make a new dish I measure everything and enter the recipe in MFP. The next times I make it I either use the same amounts, or weigh the more calorie dense components if I know they are varying. For example, when I make pad thai, I use the same weights/volumes of the sauce ingredients and noodles, but may vary the amount of meat based on what I have on hand. I would weigh the meat and update the recipe in MFP each time.

I tend to focus my accuracy efforts on the things that are likely to have the most impact. I don't worry about using generic "garlic clove" values, but I find the right brand of coconut milk in MFP and verify the values with the label. I also tend to "over estimate" values in MFP if I don't have the ability to measure/verify. If I have a margarita at a restaurant and it doesn't give the number of ounces on the menu, I query a chain restaurant margarita and chose one of the higher calorie count options from what pops up.

Hang in there. It can take some time, but you'll figure out what works for you. While a complete overhaul and meticulous weighing works to kick start some and they learn to "loosen up" over time, others find success in doing smaller changes and either sustaining or discarding them (after a reasonable trial period) as they see the impact.

One other note - if weight loss and/or nutrition are important to you, I would have an honest discussion with your food preparer. I've gone on this journey with two "assistant" food preparers. With one I found that they would either disregard or even sabotage my efforts and I ultimately learned I needed to not rely on their help with food preparation. My current "assistant" is not as concerned about nutrition as I am, but they care about and respect me, so they just needed to know what was important for me to know/control (checking before deviating significantly from the recipe, not adding salt above what the recipe calls for, measuring oils/butter precisely, and giving me my scale time to measure the things I feel the the need to weigh). This has helped me tremendously and I have not seen a slow down in my weight loss as I step away from weighing EVERYTHING.

Oh and one last note - being a creature of habit has been very helpful in reducing the amount of time I spend measuring/entering things in MFP. I eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch almost every day. That gives me really good accuracy on those meals and more "fudge factor" for dinner. But dinner is also a bit habitual, with about 2 dozen meals that we rotate through regularly. It took me a couple months, but I got all those dinners entered in MFP as recipes so I spend very little time modifying the recipes and entering new ones now.

gizzzo wrote: »

pony4us wrote: »

Sorry, but that is rude behavior.

(snip)

Bottom line I guess is more accuracy equals more effort. I thought weighing the food and identifying the food thru MFP would be a good middle ground but I guess it's not.

You don't have to weigh food in order to lose weight. You don't even need to log food.

Riverside makes a good point: Just eat a little less of what you're currently eating. Run that experiment for long enough to get a reasonable average reading on how that's working (maybe 4 weeks), then adjust again if necessary.

Weighing food gives you more precision, accuracy, and especially consistency and predictability of weight loss (on average over a time period long enough to dampen random weight fluctuations). Those things aren't essential, just maybe useful.

I'm old enough (67) to remember when calorie counting wasn't practical . . . maybe was nearly impossible, in a practical sense. People dieted and lost weight anyway. It was just less well-controlled. It still happened. My own father did it. (I'm not sure how much weight he lost, but surely multiple tens of pounds in his 60s, and he kept it off for the rest of his life, 20+ years. He moderated what he ate, watched the scale, kept things in balance that way. It works.)

You know - people have long known - that calorie intake governs fat loss, and that some foods are higher calorie compared to their nutrients (fried things, fatty meats, baked goods, soda pop, alcohol, etc.) while other foods are lower-calorie and more nutrition-rich (veggies, lean meats/fish/seafood, some dairy foods, eggs, etc.) People used to lose weight by reducing the high-calorie things and increasing the low-calorie ones, watching that until the scale dropped. That still works.

You have options. Precision and predictability is just one of the options, not the only one. Only you know what tradeoffs are best for you (in terms of practicality, predictability, etc.)