Doing the plan now for over 5 weeks nothing is changing?!

You are eating at your maintenance calories. Drop your weekly calories.

junfanjeetkunedodevon8873 wrote: »

yirara wrote: »

What Tom says. You've found your maintenance calories. Congratulations. Now you only need to eat less. All the other things you did, a bit extra exercise, eating healthier or drinking more water (no need for that, tea and coffee is also good for hydration) don't lead to weightloss. How good was your food tracking? How did you determine your calorie amount?

I used the app and logged everything that went past my lips. where there was a barcode , I scanned it, where it was a meal prepped from scratch, I selected one from the various options to choose from and made sure I selected one of the higher calorie counts rather than the more modest results...

Sounds like logging accuracy can be improved.
If you're making food from scratch, you need to weight and log the individual ingredients, not just select a generic entry for the dish in question from the database.
Scanning doesn't guarantee accuracy either, make sure you check the database entry against the nutritional label.
Are you using a food scale?

junfanjeetkunedodevon8873 wrote: »

yirara wrote: »

What Tom says. You've found your maintenance calories. Congratulations. Now you only need to eat less. All the other things you did, a bit extra exercise, eating healthier or drinking more water (no need for that, tea and coffee is also good for hydration) don't lead to weightloss. How good was your food tracking? How did you determine your calorie amount?

I used the app and logged everything that went past my lips. where there was a barcode , I scanned it, where it was a meal prepped from scratch, I selected one from the various options to choose from and made sure I selected one of the higher calorie counts rather than the more modest results...

Since you've been diligently logging and have not lost weight in five weeks, the most likely cause is that you are inadvertently using bad entries.

It's possible we might be able to spot some bad entries if you change your Diary Sharing settings to Public. In the app, go to Settings > Diary Setting > Diary Sharing > and check Public. Desktop: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/diary_settings


Unfortunately, the green check marks in the MFP database are used for both USER-created entries and ADMIN-created entries that MFP pulled from the USDA database. A green check mark for USER-created entries just means enough people have upvoted the entry - it is not necessarily correct.

To find ADMIN entries for whole foods, I get the syntax from the USDA database and paste that into MFP. All ADMIN entries from the USDA will have weights as an option BUT there is a glitch whereby sometimes 1g is the option but the values are actually for 100g. This is pretty easy to spot though, as when added the calories are 100x more than is reasonable.

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov

Use the “SR Legacy” tab - that's what MFP used to pull in entries.

Note: any MFP entry that includes "USDA" was USER entered.

For packaged foods, I verify the label against what I find in MFP. (Alas, you cannot just scan with your phone and assume what you get is correct. Note: scanning is mostly only available with Premium these days.)

For recipes, I create my own in the recipe builder. After you've been doing this for a while and have a sense for how many calories are in meals, you could occasionally select someone else's recipe, but for now never trust someone else's recipe in the database.

So much good advice above. Weight loss is about the calories, eating the right number. The right number is anything fewer than you're burning, but not so low it's hard to stay the course.

The weight trend you see on average on the scale over 4-6 weeks is the most useful estimate of your actual calorie deficit. (Women of relevant age should average over whole menstrual cycles.) Not losing weight, no deficit.

Calorie calculator or even fitness tracker estimates are inferior guides, compared to real life multi-week individual average results.

With a parallel goal of getting stronger/leaner, slow fat loss is your best strategy, especially if you have relatively little in total to lose. Eat a little less than you have been, go another 4-6 weeks at that consistent calorie level. Assume that if your weight has held steady for 5 weeks, eating 275 calories fewer daily is likely to have you losing 0.25 kg per week. That will show up in the weight trend over several weeks, not immediately.

In the abstract, HIIT is not the best modality for your strength/leanness goal. (HIIT is way oversold these days, both for weight loss and for fitness.) Traditional weight lifting is more effective and efficient for that goal. Sure, if you don't like lifting, a higher-rep lower-weight thing like HIIT can be one possible substitute (just slower and less effective).

As PAV observed, HIIT - or any exercise - that is exhausting, can be counter-productive. If we drag through the rest of the day, we burn fewer calories in total than expected. The touted afterburn from HIIT (EPOC, excess post-exercise oxygen consumption) is arithmetically pretty trivial in practice, even though the percentages look dramatic. HIIT has higher risk of injury (from poor form at high speed, especially as one fatigues).

Don't get me wrong, high intensity work has its place, but it's not the be-all/end-all that some sources will claim. Elite athletes don't do buckets of ultra-intense exercise at every workout. Why would us regular duffers want to do so?

If you're literally weight stable over 4-6 weeks, high odds you've found maintenance calories. Eat a little less, and don't overdo exercise.

Best wishes!

In the original post, the volume of water consumed spiked along with workout frequency. Personally, when I did both together, my weight went UP due to additional water being pulled into the muscles, both to combat the exercise effect as well as simply because I was likely under-hydrated to begin with. Over a few weeks this excess water weight began to taper off as the body got used to both the workouts and the idea that I wasn't living in a desert.