Calories vs. Exercise

There's no way to know whether or not your calorie budget is reasonable unless you open your diary. In general, though, someone as close to their goal weight as you are should set their weight loss goal to one half pound or less per week. That's to minimize the muscle loss you'd see on a more aggressive calorie deficit. Obese people can get by with high deficits because they have so much more fat to lose, relative to their muscle mass.

The muscle soreness answers your second question: your muscles are inflamed and retaining water as a normal part of the post-exercise recovery process. It's common for water retention to temporarily halt or slow down weight loss for a while after a new exercise program is started. This isn't the sort of plateau you need to worry about, though, as it's self limiting and will balance itself out in the end.

I don't know what to do about the soreness other that what you've done, other than take an OTC pain killer.

Several times a week I do 45 minute of yoga after my cardio. I am significantly less sore when I get this portion of my workout in!

For the muscle soreness, eat more potassium. I eat a couple tomatoes a day just for this and it really helps

I only walk, although I do it for an hour, 3 days a week. Maybe 4. For me, the biggest factor in weight loss is calories. But I have a lot more to lose than you perhaps if you only have 9 to go. I have lost 21 and have another 20 to go. I think everyone is different and if something worked for you, maybe go back to it. I will say that I have gone 2 weeks with no loss, to suddenly drop 2-3 lbs. Weight loss is not linear and not the same each week. It looks like this is your first month so you might need to give it time.

I exercise more so I can eat more. For me the only time I gain weight is when I don't get my exercise in. I don't change my eating at all, I just exercise more and I usually lose 1/2 to 1 pound per week which is fine with me. I'm not in a race to lose weight, I'm changing my way of life. I like food too much to starve myself to lose weight so I eat the foods I want in correct portion sizes and I just get more activity in my day when I eat more calories than suggested which is usually every day

I don't think you are doing anything wrong, in particular.

Unless the rest of your daily activities have changed, I would recommend setting your calorie goal to 1200 as long as your daily routine is the same, and then just consider the exercise as creating more of a calorie deficit. I don't trust any of the calorie counters as being totally accurate, so I don't generally take this into consideration, as I believe they are over-estimated.

I agree with the others, your muscles are probably inflamed resulting in some water retention. And, the soreness will go away in time. If you became THAT sore to cause this amount of pain, I would seriously consider backing off on the intensity and slowly working up to it.

How long have you been working out 3-4 days a week? Your body needs some time to adjust, I would just be patient and keep working hard.

It is impossible to know what's wrong without knowing how many calories you are burning during your workouts. If you are burning a lot more than 300 calories per week (which is all you've added to counter your exercise), it is possible you are hitting starvation mode. Here are some steps you may want to take:

1) Get a heart rate monitor for your workouts and calculate how many calories you are burning. You just need a monitor that will tell you your average heart rate over the course of your exercise time, though there are some cool ones that have a bunch of neat functions for different kinds of training if you are interested in that stuff. I use this site to calculate calories burned and have had great success with it: http://www.braydenwm.com/calburn.htm

2) On your workout days (or at least during that same week) eat back all of the exercise calories that you burn. This may seem contradictory, but it is what will help your body avoid setting itself into starvation mode. If you've followed MFP's guided wizard to set your calories per day, your weight loss deficit is already calculated in, so any further calories burned from exercise should be eaten back.

Let me know if you have any questions.

extreme soreness - make sure you are hydrated and not consuming alcohol. white willow bark is a decent pain killer.

2. Exercise doesn't do a massive amount for weight loss in general, 50 years ago you would have been laughed at if you even suggested it.

Great point that isn't talked about a lot.

I would say it depends on what you are doing for working out. Are you doing exercises that burn fat such as aerobics or are you lifting weights?

If your building muscle via weights (Even if it's just to tone up) then it's gonna slow the weight loss as the body changes and the density of the tissue (Fat vs muscle) gets added on. (Muscle weighs more than fat.)

My guess is your not seeing the same dramatic drop in weight as your adding muscle and that process is slowing the weight loss.

Your calories are too low. Not knowing your size, you should probably be somewhere between 1400-1500 or so. Your body needs fuel and you can only get that from good food. On days you exercise or work out, you should at least eat 1/2 of the calories burned. Carbs for cardio and protein for muscle building. You also want to incorporate strength training to your workouts. Muscles burns more calories. Not saying you have to do bench presses or anything. But a day or two of light weights or resistance in junction with a day or two of cardio should help you. Lastly, you need to be drinking lots of water. Water keeps you cool and hydrated and helps metabolize the fat and remove it from you system...and keeps you detoxified. It will also help with the muscle soreness. Potassium is great for that as well. You can also try apple cider vinegar...1 tsp with water. It helps with blood circulation, has numerous vitamins and can also help in weight loss.
Good luck.

I swear you took the words right out of my head. I have more to lose than you do, but MFP set my calories at 1200/day because of the sedentary lifestyle I had when I started. I have since been exercising 3-4 times per week burning at least 400+ calories at each session for a month now. I lost 4 pounds the first week but since then.. nothing. In fact I keep going back and forth between 165 and 159. I bought into the "eating back my exercise calories" idea, but I realized that I was already eating at 1200 calories before starting any of this and eating an additional 400 calories on work out days leaves me stuffed and sleepy and feeling awful. I'm not losing inches, pounds, or seeing any other results. So, I went back to just eating 1200 even on work out days and still... nothing. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. I'm very interested to see what ends up working for you from the advice you've gained here.