I’m here to seek advice as to how I should go about solving this problem, but first let me explain exactly what I’ve been doing and the results I’ve observed.
I’m a 5’8 male, recently home from college and have been making great strides in improving my health. I haven’t drank alcohol in three months, and have worked my way into an extremely consistent, affordable, and easy to follow diet in an attempt to lose the belly and back fat that has been plaguing me for the last few years.
I’m a relatively experienced weightlifter with a decent amount of muscle. (Enough that drunk people at the bars used to ask me if I take steroids, which I don’t.)
Over the past two months I have tracked some things to make spotting progress on this weight loss attempt easier for myself. Here is what I can tell you for certain:
I bike 1.8 miles to and from the gym at least five days per week and train intensely, starting off with a 15-18 minute treadmill walk (some days recently I’ve tried running) increasing in difficulty slightly daily, (I started out burning 120 calories on the treadmill but have increased at a steady rate to where now I’m doing 200 calories in the same time) followed by weight lifting intensely, to failure, before I go home.
I also have a fitbit, and ensure I do at least 10,000 steps per day, although I average 16,000 per day.
Every day I eat practically the same thing. I meal prep on saturdays for the week, either chicken breast, ground turkey, or salmon for protein and then frozen mixed vegetables. I never use any cooking oils, fats, or other ingredients.
In my chicken days, this comes out to 480 calories from the chicken, and 120 calories from the vegetables, so 600 calories in total.
In my turkey days, the turkey is more caloric, coming in at 670 calories, or 790 calories in total.
For salmon days, its 764 total, For tuna days its 640 total.
I also drink a protein shake daily, which contains two 30g servings of pure unflavored whey protein isolate (200 calories) two cups of frozen mixed berries (140 calories) and a serving of greek yogurt (200 calories). This comes out to 540 calories total.
So even on my most caloric day, I’m only consuming 1330 calories.
My fitbit calculates that I’ve been burning an average of 3632 calories per day.
This means that I’m in a 2302 calorie deficit.
Even if I did no exercise at all, I would still be in a calorie deficit of around 1000 calories.
I weigh myself every day at the same time in the morning after I use the bathroom. When I started this experiment, I weighed 207 pounds.
Through the first few weeks this dropped down to 198 pounds, which I assume is due to the loss of excess water weight and glycogen stores, then the loss slowed until around 196.5 pounds, which is the average I’ve been weighing in at for the last month.
This is where my frustration comes from, as essentially every source of advice that I’ve gone to about this has basically said that “if you aren’t losing weight, you’re not in a calorie deficit”
Except I am absolutely 1000% sure that I am not only in a calorie deficit, but a pretty hefty one at that.
If anyone has dealt with anything like this before or has any suggestions or advice, please let me know.
Also, just as a side note as I’m sure people will say this, I’m being very conscious of my health during this process. I feel very energetic, I’m not constantly hungry, I’m still functioning extremely well mentally, and I’m still eating an incredibly healthy amount of fruits and vegetables which I know most low calorie diets do not.
