1 week later and nothing

I'm scared to up my calories becaus that's back- fired before. Ugh!

It may be because you are not eating enough calories...our bodies are picking and if it thinks we are starving it, it is going to keep every extra calorie and store it. What is your recommended caloric intake (without the exercise calories)?

you are not eating enough, you need to eat the MINIMUM of 1200 cals

:drinker:

Hi,
I'm pretty new to this site and how it works....so bear with me!!
But what struck me about your post is that you may be under-eating (or over-exercising for the amount you eat). You need at LEAST 1200 calories a day to just be able to sustain yourself!! So if you eat 1200-1300 calories a day, perfect. But then you might burn 300-500 calories on a great workout. Or lets say you only ate 1000 calories and no exercise....either way, you are sending a message to your body that you are starving. So your body will do anything possible to hold onto what it has. Not to mention it will feed off your healthy muscles and store fat!! This could be the reason that the scale isn't budging.
My advice is, eat 1200-1500 calories a day plus exercise and replace those calories with a healthy snack or protein shake.
Good Luck!!!

Change up the execising routine and the food that you are eating. Also, don't eat too few calories or your body will go into starvation mode and you won't show a loss. Everyone goes thru time that the scale doesn't budge. That is why it is important to measure yourself. Sometimes with the scale says no loss, the tape measure shows a loss.
Don't give up!!

LadyAshe - for a newbie it sounds like you nailed it right on. As the other posts said, 1200 eaten calories, minus 300-500 worked out - nets 700-900 calories and the body will go "whoa - I'm not given up any of my fat stores as I need them to keep my brain, heart, kidneys, liver, pancreas, etc...working"

I've been there before!! It SUCKS!! What I've done to make sure that doesn't happen, is excersice different EVERY time I do work out.. That way your constantly tricking your body and moving and stretching. It really does make a huge difference.

so without your numbers (I'd be better able to tell if you gave your height, weight, activity level) I can say with a relative amount of confidence, that you're probably in some level of starvation. It's common for this to happen and people not even know it, because the body adapts to it, and stops sending out hunger messages, so you may not even know it. This slows down your metabolism, making the estimates that MFP gives you not right. Which means, what should work on here, won't.

The only way to remedy this is to eat more, I would say this (and you probably won't like it). Forget dieting for two months, find what your maintenance calories should be, and over 2 weeks ramp your calories up to that amount and stay there (gotta do this slowly, maybe 100 cals a day, if you do it all at once, you'll feel bloated, full, and gross usually). You'll probably gain a few pounds doing this, that's ok, it's expected, and normal.

Once you feel confident that your body has adapted to the calories it SHOULD be eating to stay the same weight (it takes a month or so) then you can start with a deficit again, but NOT a huge deficit, one that you can handle (remember, your body will now WANT those calorie, and trust me, it'll let you know that). I can't tell you what that deficit should be because I don't have the numbers (the first line I wrote). But when I do, I can give you what I think would be a good starting deficit.

Obviously this is all just my opinion, but I've been doing this for a long time, have been very successful with it, and done more than my share of research, and know this stuff works. So if you're interested in pursuing this further, you can email me and we can go into more detail, and I can explain the mechanics of it in a little more depth.

Best luck to you!

-Banks