Fatass here again. I came here for some advice a few weeks ago and people were surprisingly helpful, so here I am again. The reason for my post today is because I've hit a wall on losing weight and I can't figure out why. Here are the basics:
>I'm 31 >5'11 >I was 328 lbs on Feb 11th, currently 316 >been around 316-317 for the past 3 days >I'm averaging approx. 1600 calories per day >using MFP to track everything I eat religiously >I'm also doing 16:8 IF (or more like 18:6 some days) >The food I eat is healthy
>Typical lunch is 8oz of ground turkey or shredded chicken >4oz of broccoli, 4 oz of fresh green beans
>Typical dinner is again ground turkey or chicken 8oz >with like 6-8oz of green beans, 4oz of potatoes (roasted with olive oil, no butter) >and a salad with very light vinaigrette dressing
>I usually have a pear or an apple on my way home from work.
I have not deviated from this over the past few weeks.
I usually feel a bit hungry in the mornings, but it's not too bad. I drink about 128oz of water per day, and I don't feel hungry when I go to bed.
I don't work out, but I do have a fitbit, and have been making sure I get at least 5000 steps a day. I know, not a lot, but I have an office job.
This should be a huge calorie deficit, so why am I not losing weight?
Luke Phillips
Bump.
Chase Cox
Because you're losing on average 0.6lbs a day give or take.
Xavier Allen
I'm not expecting like multiple lbs per day, but why did it stop going down? It actually went up, I was at 315 on Sunday.
Landon Mitchell
Weight sometimes fluctuates and doesn't always go down. You're focusing too much on the scale. Also you're weighing yourself everyday. Try just weighing yourself once a week. I'd stop fasting too if you're not working out. Just do small meals throughout the day.
Jacob Russell
Hey, user. I was 330 lbs at age 20 (6'1"), came here, figured out how a few things worked, and lost 150 lbs by the time I was 21. I've kept it off for three years.
>I've hit a wall on losing weight >been around 316-317 for the past 3 days
Be patient. You'll have fluctuations from one day to another. You have to track things over weeks and months, not days. Your body is a fickle cunt of a machine, and it doesn't always react precisely like you think it should. Sometimes it'll hang onto wait that you think it shouldn't, or shed more weight than you were expecting. But you never get annoyed when the latter happens.
>I'm averaging approx. 1600 calories per day You should be constantly trying to push this lower and lower. Not so much or so suddenly, but enough to keep consistently weaning yourself off of the calories. The further you get and the more progress you make, this number's going to need to be lower, or it's going to take fucking forever and you might never get your end goal accomplished.
>I usually feel a bit hungry in the mornings, but it's not too bad. >I don't feel hungry when I go to bed. You're going to feel hungry throughout this process. You just need to learn to handle that feeling or, better yet, even come to enjoy it on some level because you associate the pain with all of the good progress that you're making. I'm sure that it sounds a bit untenable now, if you're still in the 300s, but this'll seem less and less crazy the lower you get.
Your diet sounds fine. I have my own dietary restrictions, so telling you what I ate won't be super helpful. The key is to just keep doing what you know that you should, no matter what plateaus or walls you hit. As long as you're taking in fewer calories than you burn, eventually, you WILL lose weight. There is no magical "mode" that your body goes into if you try to do it too quickly or too slowly. It's just a math equation.
Keep pushing yourself. Stay consistent, patient, and honest.
Elijah Moore
>hang onto wait It's too early to be this tired.
Benjamin Sanchez
That's really good progress in a short amount of time.
Like others have pointed out, the body can be stubborn. It will get stuck at a certain weight sometimes, and then start to move downwards again without you having made any changes.
I would suggest you just keep doing your program, and consider adding a 5-10 minute walk. Adding the walk will help offset the frustration of your weight getting stuck because it is a new activity to accomplish that will of course help you lose more weight.
For me, weight loss/gain is more of a mental game than anything. So I use little tricks like this to make myself feel better when I get into rough spots.
Andrew Martinez
Thanks anons. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't fucking up and going into "starvation mode" (which I've heard is bullshit, but when I stopped losing, I got worried).
I'll keep doing what I'm doing and keep losing.
To this user How low should I get my caloric intake to? I thought I was doing great at 1600. Some days it is less. My maintenance is like over 3k.
Thanks
Tyler Wright
I'm not that user, but I suggest if you're going to drop it below that, you do so via caloric cycles. Pic is my current caloric cycling, I am doing a very mild cut at the moment (approx. 214 calories below TDEE).
By cycling calories, you keep the body in sort of a confused state, and this will help break you out of plateaus or help keep you out of them in the first place. Although it does not 100% prevent plateaus, so don't think it's a magic answer.
I really stay close to this idea of keeping the body in a confused state, so I constantly flucuate calories and workouts. Sometimes I eat less than 1,000 calories per day, sometimes I eat 3,000.
Caleb Green
>I just wanted to make sure I wasn't fucking up and going into "starvation mode" (which I've heard is bullshit, but when I stopped losing, I got worried). It is bullshit. If holocaust references are too contentious, then think of the folks in Andersonville Prison Camp during the Civil War. There is no person who, when you take food away from them, "just can't lose weight." There were no "starvation mode" inmates running around the camp with stomach rolls.
>How low should I get my caloric intake to? I thought I was doing great at 1600. Some days it is less. My maintenance is like over 3k. The thing is, this is really up to what you can personally take. 1600 is great for just starting out, especially for still being up in the 300s. But I would recommend going lower if you can. Always just a tiny bit at a time. 1600 last week? Try for 1500 this week. I would say 1550, but there's no sense nickle-and-diming these things. It's better to have a big goal that you always keep pushing towards, that you sometimes miss but just keep going for again next time, than to set a bunch of tiny goals and to let yourself get really pleased and satisfied with mediocre progress.
If you really want to know what I did, I went fucking crazy and ate the same thing every goddamned day. Yogurt and protein bar for breakfast, no lunch, salmon and rice for dinner. Sometimes, a few almonds. That's just under 700 calories without the almonds. That's where I ended up at, and what I did for the last five months or so. But I was always pushing myself to cut out any extra food that I could, and that skeleton of a meal plan was what I was left with after I slowly whittled everything else away over the months.
Like I said, I pushed myself really hard, and what you can do is down to really personal considerations. We're all different, and I can't tell you what will work best for you. But I can tell you that it's best to always try to push yourself just a little bit further.
Carter Morales
With that 700 calorie diet did you lose most of your muscle mass with your fat?
Jonathan Lopez
You seem to be about on track. If you're slowing down, just wait until you take a shit. I've been losing weight since January, and the biggest variances I've seen are due to my shitty scale giving different readings just seconds apart, and building up large shit logs that I don't drop that often because I'm not eating as much.
Wyatt King
this nigga right here got ice in his fucking veins
Isaiah James
>With that 700 calorie diet did you lose most of your muscle mass with your fat? Just a little bit. I'd been fat and miserable since fourth grade. No close friends, no gf, always made fun of. So I really didn't care about losing muscle mass. I just wanted to lose the weight.
I went for runs around my neighborhood every night, when it was too dark for anyone to see me, starting with walks and then jogging for longer and longer stretches of it. I went in circles around the blocks for at least four miles every single night that the weather permitted.
Maybe that helped with the muscle mass. Maybe it hurt because "cardio kills gains" or whatever. But it seemed to work for me.
John Scott
The daily cardio likely helped maintain muscle as it was regular stimulus. "cardio kills gains" is just a meme powerlifters tout because it increases increases your energy expenditure. As long as you eat the difference it does fuck all to your gains.
Jaxon Jackson
Ahh, all this time and I never knew that it was a powerlifter thing. That makes more sense now. >As long as you eat the difference it does fuck all to your gains. I guess I ate the difference from my fat. Plus, it's not like I had that much muscle to worry about losing or maintaining in the first place.
Juan Diaz
i know you are just memeing, i just wanted to mention it so OP doesn't fall for it.
Zachary Rodriguez
look what you started
Gabriel Ross
Not a meme you fuck tards. Why do we always have to play this X is a meme is a meme game it confuses so many people.
This concept makes intuitive sense. If we cycle between cut and bulk but shrink the cycle time why would we not get similar results over the same amount of time. I've just shrunk my cycles to 10 day blocks, and fluctuate within set tolerances during those blocks.
This helps me be hyper aware of how my body reacts to different foods, calorie levels, and lifting splits and make changes to adjust accordingly more quickly and accurately than others can.
More importantly, by doing gradual calorie cycling on a bulk I squeeze every drop out of each phase where as if I jump straight to 500 + TDEE I miss the tiered results coming from 200 + TDEE --> 350 + TDEE --> 500 + TDEE.
Caloric cycling is not a meme. Tiered bulks and cuts are not a mem. > read Flawless by Bob Paris > watch Bigger by thand Day by Rich Piana > watch Jay cutler's olympia prep videos
Brandon Collins
Formerly 420+ here.
Cut the fruit from your diet and supplement sugar-free metamucil.
Elijah Brown
I think the best advice I and my colleagues give to people is to not mind the scale so much. Anons mentioned it here and it really is good advice even if it feels counter intuitive. The body isnt atraight up, rigid mathematics. Weight fluctuates and varying factors contribute to that. We tend to put everything in rigid numbers, like reps and sets we want to do etc and the body just doesnt strictly work like that.
I would advise you to do some light bodyweight training every day. Nothing much, just to stimulate your body and get more of an anabolic signal going. Do your pushups, rock climbers, squats etc, a set or two not until failure will be enough for starters.
Also try not to eat the same all the time, diversify your gut flora and I would incorporate a little more fat. Eat an avocado or some nuts every once in a while.
All the best in your adventure
Wyatt Evans
> not weighing yourself every day
Jordan Wright
>Not weighing yourself and calculating %body fat every hour, on the hour
Never gonna make it, senpai.
Aaron Long
Water weight will fluctuate every day. Keep weighing yourself every day but the most important part is the weekly average.
