Need help losing 10 pounds

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tlcjen12
tlcjen12 Posts: 15 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
These last 2 months all I keep doing is fluctuating. I want to lose 10 pounds and haven’t been able to. Any tips I would appreciate it. I work out 4-5 days a week about 35-40min before going to work and mon-Friday I walk for lunch a mile. I eat healthy and track all my food. I’m just lost and starting to lose hope.

Replies

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,444 Member
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    What's your current height/weight/age and calorie goal? Quite honestly, if you haven't seen loss in 2 months, you most likely have found your maintenance calories for your current body weight, and need to cut a bit further. Tightening up logging - if feasible - might help sort things out.

    For sure, working out lots and eating healthy are good things, but they don't guarantee weight loss. Fat loss is all about getting calorie intake below calorie expenditure on average over a period of time. I stayed obese for over a decade while training pretty hard 6 days most weeks and even competing athletically, eating mostly health food (just too darned much of it).

    Best wishes for finding a solution!
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,449 Member
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    Yes, what AnnPT77 says. Tighten up your logging. One other thing: how often do you weigh yourself? If just once per month you might have hit high points on the scale as body weight constantly fluctuates due to fluid changes, food in the intestinal tract, lots of other things. Plus other things such as empty scale batteries, non flat surface, different clothes, different time of day weighing.
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 7,613 Member
    edited April 1
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    Also, checked your expectations.

    I lost a ton of weight. The first few months it came off fast, then slowed. The last ten pounds took forevvvvver.

    Are you “expecting a pound” a week? Are you actually recording a net loss over two months, but frustrated it’s not a big visible spike on the graph?

    Even if you’re only losing half a pound a month, that’s progress. Accept it.

    And have you recalibrated your calories to take into account prior weight loss? MFP generally doesn’t do that automatically (although once in a random while it does for me🤦🏻‍♀️). Go in and check your settings. The less you weigh, the few calories you get.

    If you’ve truly clocked for two months with zero loss, then as @AnnPT77 says, congrats, you’ve found maintenance. No bad thing, that. Some people struggle to find it, plus you haven’t gained during those two months, which is a win.
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,746 Member
    edited April 1
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    actually fluctuations are normal and my very first internal question when I first saw your post was: "2 months of fluctuating in a down or an up direction?".

    have you plugged in your numbers into a weight trend app? are you weighing daily, weekly, or monthly?

    Not saying that it can't happen to be getting no-where. That's sort of the point of maintaining!

    But I *am* saying that losing 10lbs in a YEAR is something I've done. And it actually helped me A LOT when it came to maintenance given that before that year I had lost considerably more during the two previous.

    While 10lbs in a year looks like standstill until you look at the numbers and graphs, still, it does make a considerable difference to how you move and feel as you progress towards the end of the year. And, frankly, since I wasn't doing / eating any differently than I was planning on doing while maintaining... I was fortuitously happy to have that extra time during slower weight loss to explore strategies and gain confidence in being able to manage maintenance.

    I realize that that's different, of course, with someone who had much less to lose. But don't dismiss the idea of drifting downwards as opposed to sharp spikes and weight changes. Flatten the wave (of your weight graph) is a good motto to have...

    More importantly though: "I'm lost and starting to lose hope"... I don't know how many lbs you started wanting/needing to lose. But you really do need to look at things and see which of the things you do are promoting long term weight management and which aren't.

    The way you wrote your post suggest to me that you've sort of structured your "weight management" as "all the stuff I do between morning and end of work", leaving untouched and unmodified the rest of your day, your days off and the weekend.

    Weight management is the result of the totality of our actions throughout our week.

    The implication of that if we need to lose weight is that we also have to find a future modus viventi that is copacetic with both weight management and all that we continue to want to do.

    If I was continuing to want to go to eat at all you can eat buffets two or three times a week--sometimes daily... then I wouldn't be able to maintain. i.e. some things may have to be modified to encourage the you you want to be.
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 7,613 Member
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    So, if you “lose hope” that also implies you’re going to give up and go back to old habits.

    Wouldn’t it be frustrating to regain lost weight when you’ve at least found maintenance?
  • tlcjen12
    tlcjen12 Posts: 15 Member
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    Hi everyone thank you for all the input. I do workout on sat or Sundays depending how I feel. I have adjusted my calories intake and I even go below what is recommended. I drink only water and I make sure my protein intake is met every day. I’m not trying to lose hope it’s just frustrating when you’ve worked so hard and come to a stop. I want to continue and I will. I’ve always battled with my weight after having children. I’m thinking I might just need to actually join the gym and use actual equipment. I workout at home and use weights and bands and maybe I just need the gym now. Who knows 😂 but I know I won’t give up
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,746 Member
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    have you addressed the fluctuation of weight to see whether it is indicating a continuing, albeit slower than expected, loss vs actual no change?

    If you're already at a good expected deficit/low calories in and not particularly overweight I would not necessarily go the larger deficit route even if it means slower perceived / actual progress.
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 27,981 Member
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    There are mistakes that people commonly make that cause them to not lose weight that we might be able to spot 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

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