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.

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Booze Free August, anyone?

Booze Free August

Hi all. I’m now 4 weeks into my Noom journey and am down 15lbs. When I started 4 weeks ago (SW340lbs) I couldn’t manage 1000 steps a day. Now I’m up to 5000. It’s a huge achievement for me!

The food I’ve been eating has been great and I don’t go hungry. However alcohol just ruins my nutrition! I don’t often drink more than once a week but that once is enough to wreck me!

In order to really focus on weight loss I’ve decided I will drink no alcohol for the month of August. Even just a couple of drinks sees my progress stall and has me feeling easily fatigued from poor sleep. So let’s see what happens! You’re welcome to join me for accountability if it’s something you want to try too!

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Question about how much I can eat

So I originally thought I was "moderately active" because I do about an hour of biking every day with 10 minutes of ab exercises. However, I lead a completely sedentary lifestyle otherwise, so I changed my activity from "moderately active" to "sedentary" on the weight loss app I'm using and the amount of calories I can eat per day went from 1900 to 1500. With the exercise I do, 1500 feels like far too little to be eating, I figure I'll be eating that much once I lose some more weight but I'm around 195 lbs now and trying to lose 1 lb a week. Just want to make sure I will still see results if I maintain a diet of around 1850 calories (which I'll reduce with the more weight I lose).

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Marine Corps Marathon 2020 – Virtual Race???

Marine Corps Marathon Medal Monday!🏅 I’ve been really struggling with marathon training the last few weeks. All the races I wanted to run this year are cancelled or virtual. I hesitated to sign up for virtual races because it’s not the same. But you gotta work with what you got. So I registered for the ... Read More about Marine Corps Marathon 2020 – Virtual Race???

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Can someone help me out?

Female, 5'7" and 308 lbs

I started 75Hard last week in an effort to take control over my life and foster some good habits. Yet, I've somehow gained weight despite following the tenets: two 45 min workouts (one of which must be outdoors), a gallon of water a day, and I stuck to 1800-1900 cals a day which is a 40% calorie deficit for me. I tracked calories diligently on MyFitnessPal. Not one mistake. Super proud of myself thus far. Healthy, consistent habits are more important to me than the weight loss so I feel good about everything... It's just that when I weighed today for my weekly weigh-in, I was UP(!) .4 lbs. HOW CAN THIS BE?!

Does anyone have any insight?? Could such a large deficit be harming me (effed with my metabolic rate / starvation mode)? Could it be that I've put on muscle and it weighs more than the fat I've lost?(Seems like something someone with less extra weight would deal with, not me just yet.) Could it be water weight? (It should be noted that this is not period related, as I just finished.)

Thanks for the help in advance. I appreciate it. I'm pretty disheartened, feel defeated, and I'm unsure how to proceed.

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24F 5'6" | SW: 189lbs | CW: 143lbs | GW: 135lbs

Seeking advice, motivation, encouragement...anything really.

Over 2 Years into my weight loss journey and I have hit a wall. I was on a roll during the first month of COVID lockdown leading up to a goal I set myself for June first. I had gotten down to 138lbs and was working out consistently 4 times a weak, tracking CICO, etc. Since then, I've had a panic attack that resulted in the ambulance being called, been rejected from every internship I applied to, gone through an intense session of final exams for my masters program, and unexpectedly lost a friend in a car crash. The grief and stress of it all is crushing me. I can't seem to get back on the wagon. Every time I feel like I am making progress, I get knocked back down. This has lead to a steady weight gain of about 1 pound each week. I NEED to pull the brakes on this thing but I have very little energy and no motivation. Some of my old binging habits are slipping up again and I have no idea how to stop the bleeding and just get on track. I guess what I am hoping for is some motivation to get back to it. I know that I am still in healthy weight range, and am going through grief, but I am afraid I will just slip into all of my old habits. What are some techniques you all use? Any encouraging stories? This community has been so helpful in the past and reading your journeys is inspiring but I need an extra push.

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Last year, I told myself I'd weigh 52 lbs less if I lost 1 lb a week.

So sometime around this time last year, I realized that if I lost 1 lb a week for an entire year, I'd lose 52 lbs.

The "Too Long; Didn't Read" summary is that I did not meet my goal of losing 52 lbs in one year.

No one really knows what the trigger will be to jumpstart motivation. I'd already started earlier last year with the goal to be able to run 1 mile uninterrupted, and I kinda thought weight loss would be a natural side effect. But by this time last year, I still wasn't able to run 1 mile and my weight hadn't changed at all. But the 1 yr=52 lbs thought somehow clicked with me, and I decided to focus on losing weight.

Somewhere along the way I learned that it's actually a bit of a myth that exercise alone will get you to lose weight. Exercise can help you lose weight, but 95% of losing weight is how many calories you can burn versus the number of calories you bring in. (Some would say that's actually 100% of the equation.) And Americans as a whole tend to overestimate how much exercise burns and underestimate how much they bring in through eating.

So I decided to watch what I eat and document it. There are several apps you can get on your phone for this, but I ended up using one called Loseit. If I wanted to lose 52 lbs in a year, I needed to eat less than 1700 calories a day to start with. That number would shrink as I shrunk, but that was the start. On a day where I just ate whatever I wanted, I easily ate 2200 calories. On particularly bad days, it'd be close to 3000 calories.

I quickly learned that losing weight for everyone is custom to everyone. I met people who absolutely could not cut out sugar, but they could limit themselves to a single piece of chocolate rather than the whole bar and feel satisfied. That was not me. I met people who absolutely had to have flavored drinks, but would drink zero calorie packets in water and feel satisfied. That was also not me.

I had two particular culprits that caused me to overeat: 1) I loved and craved sugar. 2) I preferred to eat until I felt satiated and full.

It took weeks, if not months, to kick the sugar addiction. Any time I tried to cut cold turkey, suddenly I had to have ALL THE SUGAR! I spent weeks slowly cutting back the sugar in my coffee and finding substitutes that somewhat satisfied the sugar addiction. I found dark chocolate peanut butter cups that I didn't eat by the bag full. I found chocolate popsicles that kinda filled the ice cream void. Nothing was a 100% perfect replacement, but the less sugar I'd manage to eat in the day, I found myself craving it less.

Like any addiction, even when I was eating the healthiest, I never could get the thought of how comforting an entire box of cookies would feel to eat.

Eating until full has always been an issue for me. I've often gone out to dinner and crammed my face full of tortilla chips and salsa and then try to eat as much of my dinner as I could. I'd do this until my stomach felt uncomfortably full, then I'd get pretty grouchy because I'd actually eaten past the point of being full. It became apparent there was a delay from when my stomach filled with food to when my brain received the message that the stomach was full. I tended to keep eating until my brain received the message, which was usually too late.

It also took weeks, but I had to train myself to eat a reasonable portion and then stop even though I felt completely unsatisfied. I had to keep telling myself that I'd feel that satisfaction if I just gave myself 30 minutes, but those were long, nearly unbearable minutes. I had to find distractions that were better at keeping my mind occupied than the thought of eating. The more I managed to do this, the easier it became to simply wait.

Even though I trained myself to wait, the thought of how great it would feel if I could just eat to fullness would continue to pop up every time I was hungry.

While I said exercise is not the main factor in losing weight, it did help by putting my body through a routine. At my best, I was having a light lunch, an afternoon snack, and then could actually wait to cook a small dinner after exercising in the late afternoon.

I made it from 233 lbs on August 15 to 187 lbs on March 10. Not only was I going to lose 52 lbs in a year, it looked like I might even lose more than 52 lbs.

Of course, then the pandemic hit and I stopped caring. Suddenly the box of cookies and that satiated feeling were a lot more tempting. So as of today, I weigh 192 lbs. I suppose I should be glad I only gained 5 lbs in the four months since I stopped caring.

Anyway, it's 6 months until my birthday. If I lose 1 lb a week, I'll be 166 lbs on my birthday. I'm actually aiming for 170, so we'll see in 6 months.

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