I'm desperate!!! Need an advice, please!!!

Give it time... Honestly i was like you and all ov a sudden the weight just fell off... Not litterally but you get my drift...

It might also be muscle weight! Be patient! I have been on here since Oct08 and i tell you its taken a lot of working at!

Keep up the good work! :flowerforyou:

Hi,

What you may find is you've hit a plateau, which would mean you need to 'scare' your body into losing weight again, I find that dropping about 150-200 cals per day will do this, or you need to change your exercise, your body can get used to the same exercise and it can stop being effective, so what I do is alternate weeks one of running a route that is uphill and the other week running a route which is pretty flat but cross country so I'm still working very hard as the ground is soft!

You should also not rely too heavily on scales, measure yourself too - whilst building muscle you can actually still be losing fat, and as muscle weighs heavier than fat, you may be getting slimmer without realising it because the scales can't differentiate between fat and muscle.

The easiest way to do this is to get a 'skinny' item of clothing, i have a pair of size 6 jeans that I use, if they fit I know I'm maintaining (I'm on a maintenance diet now, as I've lost all my baby weight) and if they start to get a little snug, I know i've let myself go a little, so cut back or up my excercise (the later is the one I prefer to do as I LOVE food).

Good luck, don't give up.

Kez xxxx

The best way to come over a plateau is just to be patient. Don't change a thing and don't panic. It usually takes a week or two but you'll eventually come over it.

It is simple mathematics, if you eat less calories then you spend, your body will use your reserves (fat) to fuel your body. Your weight does not depend only on your fat. You might have gained a little muscle or your body is suddenly keeping a little more water (wich hapens to me quite often). Even if your weight is not moving, the fat is still burning

It's frustrating to have to wait powerless but it will come to a end

I found this great article on anther site. It makes sense to me.

Explanation for the 'whoosh' effect

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Here is a post from another board which is an explanation of the ‘whoosh’ effect. I had read something similar a few years ago. This was written by Lyle McDonald, who has written several books about body-building, fat loss, ketogenic diets, etc.
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Fat cell water content and fat loss

Ok, finally stickying this stupid post with some very minor modifications.

It's something I've mentioned over the years, an assertion that my exercise physiology professor had made wrt: fat loss.

Note that under normal conditions, fat cells contain ~90% triglycerides and ~10% other stuff where other stuff includes some water, the cellular machinery that makes all the stuff that fat cells make and a couple of other things that I'm forgetting right now. Basically, fat cells do not normally contain much water.

He told us that, after triglycerides were removed from the cell, that the fat cells refilled with water in the short-term, eventually the body dropped that water and the fat loss 'became evident' (a goofy way for me to try to describe when the fat loss actually shows up on calipers, one of those dumb Tanita scales, or visually).

If nothing else, this gives a plausible mechanism for the non-linear fat loss that is so often seen. Folks will do everything right for weeks with no results. then overnight, something happens and the scale drops a bunch. Many diet newsgroups and forums refer to this as a 'whoosh' which often follows a stall.

A couple of empirical data points in support of this: people who use tanita scales have often reported that it will tell them that their BF has gone up right before a 'whoosh' occurs and a big drop. This suggests something goofy is going on with water balance.

Another is that fat often gets squishy (suggesting a change in what's in there) prior to a drop in skinfolds/ improvement in appearance.

I looked for research on the topic for a decade to no success. I made up my own plausible mechanism having to do with glycerol levels in the fat cell (glycerol is hydrophilic); if fatty acids were being lost at a greater proportion than glycerol, this mght explain how water is attracted into the fat cell. Except that, usually, glycerol and fatty acid are released in about the proportion you'd expect (3:1 FFA:glycerol).

edit: For what very little it's worth, Colgan mentions something similar in OPtimum Sports Nutrition, something about the body 'tracking' glycerol to keep track of fat stores. It's possible that the research on this is just pre-medline. Or he and my teacher just pulled it out of the old *kitten*.

A couple of years back, a paper came out showing an increase in water content of visceral fat with dieting. First semi-direct data I've seen. I don't recall the mechanism being mentioned but I may not have ever read the full paper.

Well, somewhere something is wrong. You could be over estimating calories, under estimating exercise calories, stressed (can cause a big weight stall or even gain), have thyroid or sugar or hormonal imbalances, etc, etc, etc. I would start with the basics: Are you gaining muscle and losing fat hence inches lost (but not necessarily weight)? Are you absolutely sure about your calorie intake? If so and you are eating your exercise calories, I might cut out a few of those for a week and see what happens then. I don't lose when I eat all my exercise calories.

Hang in there though. What you are doing has to be doing something, even if the scale doesn't show it!

When I joined this website, I got into Week 4 with next-to-no difference on the scale. Really discouraging. But I realized that I didn't have any other option except to stay on course.
The other choice...Quit? Because doing nothing at all would mean that I would continue to gain weight, feel sluggish, lower my self-esteem...
So that's what worked for me. I realized that the only way I'd ever be successful was if I stayed the course. And even if the needle on the scales doesn't move, there's something very gratifying about feeling like you're in control of what you eat, how you burn calories...

Eventually, it really does pay off. What I've found is that I've learned so much about the connection between my personal well-being and the types of food I eat. And I'm elated about the fact that some of my long-term (negative) eating patterns are falling away.

Hang in there! Your hard work and dedication absolutely will pay off, not just in the short term, but throughout the rest of your life.