Never ending plateau

Often when people stop losing weight, it's because they have become careless about weighing and recording everything they are eating and double checking that the database entries they are using are accurate. Estimating quantities is often wildly inaccurate.

You may be overcounting the calories you burn with your exercise.

You may also have a slower metabolism than the average person, so need fewer calories to maintain your weight. Try cutting a few hundred calories off your daily goal or increase your daily exercise, if you can.

It's also possible that health issues (i.e. thyroid) or medications are interfering with weight loss. Talk to your doctor to get your thyroid checked and to see if your meds cause weight gain or water retention.

You want to look at weekly calories that way the number will encompass all of your calories for the whole week. You never eat the exact same amount of calories every day so that’s why figuring daily calories as far as how you will progress or not is going to be accurate .

If you add up your weekly calories at this point that will be close to your maintenance number. You take seven days worth and divide by seven and that is going to be your daily amount you want to shoot for on an average minus around 500 per day. Also many times when people lose weight, they slack off on their counting, so you want to double check that also

I have had many plateaus and a reverse diet has helped. Increasing my calories and doing weight lifting. Then doing a cut phase. Our body adjust to low calorie and we can’t just keep on cutting.

While there are a few situations where a reverse diet DOES make sense, I am not sure that it does in this case. The expected deficit based on the original post is approximately 124 Cal a day (1910 x 7 less 12500). That's very small. And without a full picture of how absolutely accurate and consistent the OP's numbers are, one doesn't really know what their deficit was over the past few months. But all evidence points to being closer to maintenance than anything else, at least on balance.

Given that there exists sufficient weight to be lost, that their weight has been relatively consistent after their initial losses, and that the deficit they've been aiming for appears small... I would lean towards aiming to create a larger deficit through a combination of increased activity, very consistent and careful logging, and taking advantage of more satiating for less total calories options that would allow me to reduce caloric intake a bit more!

mdns21935 wrote: »

I know everyone is on the fasting frenzy craze right now. But you have to remember the longer you make your body go without food, the more your body kicks in into starvation mode.

If you have some research-based evidence for that, I'd definitely like to see it. I wouldn't do intermittent fasting because I'd find it unpleasant enough to be counterproductive, but others here eat that way, are satisfied with the tactic, and are succeeding at weight loss. Yes, it's trendy right now.

The studies I've seen comparing calorie restriction alone vs. intermittent fasting at the same calorie intake have shown similar results between the groups. The research in this area is somewhat new, so maybe less definitive than we may eventually see, but that seems to be where we are now.

The implication is that if the goal is weight loss, intermittent fasting is not appreciably better than calorie restriction alone, nor is it appreciably worse. In other words, my understanding is that there's no evidence for the part I bolded, at least so far.

I grant, I don't know what you mean by starvation mode, but the usual meaning of the term in the blogosphere is some mythical effect where people can't lose weight when severely limiting food intake, or the body "holds onto fat".

Of course, if a person severely limits food intake for more than a short period, there are physiological responses to that, mechanisms the human body has probably developed through humans surviving many famines over the course of human history. That can be things like slowed hair growth, slightly lower core body temperature, less spontaneous movement, immune system suppression, etc. That's not a good thing.

People using sensible weight loss methods, including reasonable forms of intermittent fasting, are unlikely to see major impact in that way on weight loss, though there's some evidence that our calorie needs could be somewhat reduced long-term compared to people who've never lost weight.

If anyone wants a good summary of the science behind this, the first few posts in this thread do a good job of summarizing that.

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1077746/starvation-mode-adaptive-thermogenesis-and-weight-loss/p1

If you have sound counter evidence, please share it so that we can give new folks more effective advice.

It is more beneficial to your body to eat smaller meals, more frequently throughout the day so that you keep the sustainability going. Making sure you are eating high protein low fat is the most important. Also switching up your exercise routine. When your body becomes used to doing a certain routine, it’s no longer excited. Also be sure that you’re keeping track of not just your weight but also your measurements. So many people make the mistake of thinking. The only important number is the one on the scale. If you do a little research, you can actually see people that lose weight and gain body mass because they have more lean muscle rather than adipose tissue. But their weight may actually go up. Be sure you’re tracking your measurements to have an effective, and reliable weight loss source.

I mentioned that exercise myth on another thread: Switching workouts for calorie burning reasons isn't necessary.

For other readers, exercise doesn't stop burning calories when you get used to it. If it did, elite endurance athletes wouldn't be needing to eat thousands more calories daily than us regular duffers. Heck, even highly active regular people here burn more calories than the rest of us, doing exercise they've done for a long time. I've done about the same workouts for 20+ years, and they still burn calories. In a few forms of exercise, we can be more efficient in our movements as we gain better technique, but that calorie difference tends to be quite small.

Yes, as we get fitter, the same exercise feels easier. That's inherent in the definition of "fitness". We're able to do more and do it more easily because we're less physiologically exhausted, basically. The same work still burns about the same calories at the same bodyweight, though.

Just no
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nope... that pretty. much works for me.. way better than counting calories ... maybe a person by person thing.