Monday, July 27, 2020

Please help me rule out any reasons for not losing weight, I'm exasperated

HELP!

So I took a "break" (ish) from weight loss from the end of May until the end of June and have been in a plateau ever since. Some notes:

  • According to Cronometer, I averaged a 40 calorie deficit per day from the end of May until the end of June, which I'm counting as breaking even in case I weighed something wrong or forgot to log something or whatever. In theory, though, that would have been a 1600 calorie deficit.
  • At the beginning of July, I eased back into losing. From July 1-23, I had an average deficit of 220 calories per day, starting the month at maintenance and eating at -500 later on. In theory, that corresponds to a total deficit of 5060 calories.
  • Frustrated, I decided to amp it up for a few days and go under my BMR (yes, I know I shouldn't do this on a regular basis, and yes, I do intend to eat more going forward). In those three days, I've averaged a calorie deficit of 804 calories, totalling a deficit of 2412 calories.
  • In total, during that time my measured deficit was 9072 calories, corresponding roughly to 1.2kg of pure fat.
  • I was so confused about not losing any weight that I decided to rule out any possibility of miscounting calories, so for the past few weeks I've only been eating prepackaged food that I know the exact calorie count of, so this is not a measurement error. I also don't log exercise calories. I do use a FitBit to count general activity.

Now, here's the thing: I've gained weight. Yup, gained. According to my scale, I'm up 0.8kg, which corresponds roughly to a surplus of 6160 calories. That means that either a) my body is holding onto water as though its life depends on it or b) my FitBit is off by 200-250 calories per day (about 15% error, easily >20% if you include exercise calories that weren't logged), or c) my measuring was so bad that somewhere along the way I consumed over 15000 calories that I don't know about.

Eating at a really high deficit for a few days usually clears out your digestive system and gets rid of excess water due to things like sodium intake, thereby leading to short term weight loss, which is why I did it to make sure I wasn't going crazy. After two days of that though, I stepped on the scale and fucking gained another 0.5kg. Like... WTF?????

I've lost weight with CICO on several occasions (losing about 5kg at a time) and plateaus have happened, but this has never happened - things have always evened out to the expected number eventually.

So which of these explanations seems the most likely? Am I going crazy? Am I stupid? And, most importantly, how long should I wait before entertaining less likely explanations, like PCOS, my scale not working properly, my BMR decreasing, etc.? Is there anything else I can do?

Sorry, I'm just at my wit's end. ;(

TL;DR: Racked up a 9072 calorie deficit over the course of about 2 months, and gained 0.8kg. Have ruled out error due to measuring, exercise, and so on.

submitted by /u/lifeless-lifeline
[link] [comments]

from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/2X1omhc

No comments:

Post a Comment