Please Help!! Advice needed

Working on gaining muscle allows you to burn more calories because it takes more to keep your body going. I worry that eating so little may be effecting your metabolism, but I'm not a doctor. Take it with a grain of salt. It sounds like you're really dedicated, and it takes a lot of consistency over time to see results. Just know you're not alone, and you already sound like you're kicking *kitten*. Maybe track a performance goal- how fast can you finish the 3 miles? Do you see a change in how hard it feels from when you first start- that kind of thing

Are you putting your food on a digital food scale and logging it in grams and ounces?

What do you mean by 'cheat day'. Do you know how many calories you ate on these cheat days? to me a cheat day means I will go over my normal limit for weight loss but I try not to go over my maintenance calories. When I am not tracking the calories, like going out to eat, I don't eat another meal for that day. I also don't eat my goal for losing 1 pound a week. mfp has me at 1550. i usually eat between 1200 and 1300 for the day when I go out with my mother and can't track the calories.

But if cheat means eat whatever you want i could easily clear the 3858 calories that you have listed as a deficit. I don't really like the term 'cheat' day because cheating implies that you can do something wrong and get away with it. You can't cheat yourself. Instead, I call them informed decisions. I still decide what is going in my mouth and I make the decision to accept the consequences of my actions.

You don't need to share anything
But you do need to track everything

Really there's not much point in engaging in tail chasing!!!! 😛

You are not seeing the result you expect based on your tracking.

But your tracking is severely incomplete ("1/7=15%=cheat day=unknown)

So you really have no way of knowing whether you're seeing exactly the results you should be expecting!🤷‍♂️

The "fox" above, tame or not!, laid out a pretty cogent reframing of the cheat day concept. Do you want to have a maintenance or overage day? Go ahead and have it (or it may happen naturally anyway because you went out with friends or what have you). It is a choice you get to make and it is not free. It is part of your weekly and monthly average.

When I was starting out I found it easier to have overage meals and overage days that took place organically (out with friends for example) as opposed to being pre planned.

And to me the most powerful decision I made was that the next meal was back to normal, i.e. there was no "free for all till tomorrow"

Doesn't mean it's the end of the world if the next meal is not back to normal. But there is a subtle mental difference between chosing something for the taste or other (in)tangible benefits in spite of the extra calories vs stuffing one's face as a reward for starving the rest of the week.

How about estimating your caloric needs as sedentary at goal weight and spending some time constructing your daily eating routine as that individual at goal weight 5 years from now? Should still be a good deficit and it may help you develop a very valuable outlook towards the rest of your loss and maintenance

More than likely you will actually have more calories at that time (in five years) because you will also be more active. But it is a nice thought experiment. Because you won't be doing cheat days at maintenance , will you? Especially not as rewards for depriving yourself the rest of the week.

So no need to go through the drama of weigh your food (you should) and select correct entries (you should) and make nutritious food choices (haven't heard of too many people getting hurt by doing so).

Just log as accurately as you can so then you can review your data --- which you aren't doing yet for at least 15% of the time!

And then revisit the results in a few weeks.

But give some thought to future maintenance eating. It changes your perspective in terms of the choices you make.

Cajuncutie46 wrote: »

I think I figured out my calorie burned was wayyyy off. I was going by what my smart watch was saying. Did more research and found that it could be very inaccurate. So maybe I'm not burning as many calories as I originally thought. But I must say I think some of you are kinda mean I would think some would be more understanding but I guess when weight loss comes easier for most than others it's hard to understand the struggle 😌

Sorry you feel some are being mean, but there have been thousands of posts like this over the years (I’ve been here off and on for 9) and they are remarkably similar, so some folks feel like they are on repeat.

There is a saying: You can’t outrun a bad diet. Or take a bunch of steps. Losing weight is almost entirely based on calories in, NOT EXERCISE. You exercise for the health benefits not the calorie burn to lose weight. You have to get the diet part right first, then use the exercise to get in shape.

It sounds like you are focusing on the calorie burn too much. I’d throw it out, focus on the diet and getting that right. All the other problems will work out.

I hope that isn’t mean and that it makes sense!

There's many ways to lose weight.

One way is to eat the least you can while you move the most you can. This always failed for me. No matter how much I lost (and it was never all the way to normal weight), within a few months I would be back at my former weight.

About 10 years ago (2014), I went into another "weight loss" thing. Within months I was ready to give up. Not because I was not losing weight but because I was losing too fast. And I was doing things that I KNEW I could not keep on doing for life.

I looked around for something, anything, to help me figure out things. Eventually I found MFP and logging. And it opened my eyes as to what I was intaking (at times thinking that I was making the "wise diet choice"). And at how little (and how much) actually exercise mattered to me. (how little?: compare myself with a glass of milk and a box of cookies to the exercise values. It's not a race I can win! how much?: by becoming and remaining very active I'm almost eating a complete meal more than I could by being less active--certainly helps with eating out!)

In April 2016 I "broke" 160lbs. In 2025 I weigh ~157lbs. My analogue scale had a dial that went from 0 to 280. The dial was going past 0, into the positive numbers, when I started using it again in 2014.

Anyway. Enough with me.

There's three pieces of information you can make use off. Your current weight level. Your current caloric expenditure. And your current caloric intake.

There's guesses everywhere. But between the three and TIME you can chart a path. Killing yourself to "be perfect" and then giving up and going off the rails is a recipe for restrict-binge cycles.

Do yourself a favor and forget about weight loss for a minute. How are you going to maintain your weight when you're 150 lbs? How much will you be eating a day?

At your current activity level there is a more than 600 Cal difference between you at 249lbs and you at 150lbs. And probably closer to a 700 Cal difference. That's more than enough to see progress over time.

Spend a month eating at your goal level NOT ON A DIET. But as your everyday NORMAL NON DIET FOOD maintenance. Try to find meal combinations and snacks that keep you happy enough most of the time. Try to fit life to that future. That is the real goal and what you need to start modeling. Not some sort of emergency diet. You've already tried that with surgery.

If you go home with 14000 steps and you weight 249lbs the TDEE figures in your spreadsheet are LOW not high. So the problems you're experiencing are probably NOT caused because of your caloric expenditure estimates.

If you're eating at your future maintenance... why would you have off days or days where you don't count? There does have to be a point where you have to fight.

The fight, for me, should NOT be every day trying to post as large a deficit as possible. Till you're sick and tired of the whole process.

The fight, for me, should be that you look for a new normal that will get you there eventually, and that you lose the concept of days "off".

Every day counts in one way or another. It is not a crime if you go over. But when you do go over you then have to decide if your choice was worthwhile enough to you, or whether you should try to change things so that you are in a position to make a different choice next time. Notice that being in a position to do so doesn't mean that you will do so. But you have given yourself the ability to have the option of doing so.

Weight management is a head game. And managing and deflecting the reasons because of which we over-eat comes into play.

I really do hope you find lasting success. But I do believe that you need to tackle and at least partially mitigate the 10% of things that are creating 90% of your problems in order to do so. That 10% of things is not going to be found in whether your daily deficit was 1000, 600 or 400 Cal. Both 1000, 400 and 600 will get you to normal weight. But the 10% that derails is what can stop the complete process.

Cajuncutie46 wrote: »

I am 51 years old 5'9 248 lbs. So to start off i have to mention i have struggled with my weight my whole life. I had baratric surgery 2 1/2 years ago. Took 1 1/2 to lose 80 lbs then what seemed like overnight i gained 50 back. So I have started trying to take my health back under control. For the last month I walk an hour on the track (3 miles) I walk on all my breaks at work. So by the time I get home roughly 14,200 steps close to 7 miles a day. I do intermittent fasting annnnd I am doing 1,000 calories per a dietician and nothing not 1lb has been lost!! What am I doing wrong! I feel so defeated!! I have to also mention i do take a lot of medication i have talked to my doctor and I'm think it safe to come off 1 that has particularly caused some of my weight gain. But any advice other than that?

Have you tried changing your physical activities? You say you walk all the time but perhaps your body is used to that. Maybe try a bike or stair climber or some sort of low impact exercises....just a thought.
I do get your frustrations though by hitting a plateau. A few years ago I lost 80 lbs and stayed there for close to 6 months. I gave up tracking and put about 60ish lbs back on over the last few years. I'm very upset with myself so now I'm back to tracking everything that goes in my mouth even gum! Started back on Jan. 2nd and have lost 16.4 lbs so far.
Whatever you do, please DO NOT give up. Keep doing what your doing, track, track track!! Also maybe keep a tally on how much you go over on your cheat days. Those numbers might be higher than you think.

What I would say is don't try to eat back all your exercise calories and call it a 1000 calorie deficit. Stick to a 1500 calorie a day diet not including exercise calories. If you log a lot of exercise, maybe add 100 calories. If you are weighing and measuring accurately, you will probably see some results.