I'm new here and I am hoping that someone will be able to tell me what I'm doing wrong. I have been bouncing between 189 and 183 for 2 weeks. I eat 1500 calories a day. Try for a decent split of fat/carb/protein 28/41/31 and I exercise daily.

What's killing me is the past couple of days. Here are my weigh ins.

May 22 183.8 Calories eaten 1901 Calories burned 1427
May 23 184 Calories eaten 1417 Calories burned 1168
May 24 184.6 Calories eaten 1799 Calories burned 1755
May 25 185.6 Today

Obviously I am eating over my 1500 calories a day but I am burning a lot of calories a day as well. I use a heart rate monitor to calculate my calorie burn when I'm biking or running.

Do I need to cut back my calories? Do I need to exercise less? (please don't say yes because it is my sanity)

I know this is a long post but any insight or help would be so appreciated.

Thanks so much,
Robbie-Lynn

Your calories per day vary widely. I would try for 1500 calories per day .

Where are you getting your calories burned from? So May 22 you ate 1900 calories and burned 1427? Or did you write that backwards?

I am getting my calories burned from my Garmin heart rate monitor. I either bike on a stationary bike or run outside or on the treadmill.

That day was 1900 eaten (bad eating day kids birthday)

Seriously I am crazy hungry after I workout. I am wondering if I need to save some of my 1500 for after. Right now I add some extra calories if I'm hungry after a workout. I normally work out after supper.

Thanks for the help,
Robbie-Lynn

Hi Robbie-Lynn
Hopefully you'll be able to view this link thru MFP.
This is from a personal trainer I had look over my food journal and give me advice on what she thought was the culprit of my stall.
Hope this helps you a little

Trainer Robin

Have you tried eating more? Between your exercise and your BMR your body is burning a tremendous amount through the day. Upping the caloric intake so that the deficit between what is eaten and what is burned is around 1000 calories per day may be the ticket.

I'm estimating your BMR to be around 1630 calories per day. Maintenance for your current weight would be around 2000 calories per day. If you're eating 1500 and burning 1500 your deficit each day will be 2000 calories.

Two weeks just isn't that long. I say keep up with what you're doing for a while longer.

I just saw the post now where you said you're crazy hungry after you workout. You definitely need to change how you're eating, either when or how much.

Are you sure you're burning that many calories a day with your exercise?

Biking @ roughly 12 mph burns about 500 calories an hour give or take. Are you biking over 3 hours a day?

So that's your calories burned just exercising? How long are you exercising? Even my most intense 1 hour workouts only burn around 700-1000 calories. But on a treadmill I'm only burning around 500 and on a bike even less. If you are calculating you may be doing the math wrong. A polar heart rate monitor might help you see what you are really burning (a good estimate at least).

At 185 theoretically you burn 1850 calories a day just existing- so adding that to your workouts, if you are really burning 1850+1400= 3250 calories burned a day. Meaning you might need to eat more calories or exercise less. BUT I would recheck that math unless you are working out 3 hours a day or something?

I was pretty sure of my calories burned for exercise. I wear a heart rate monitor and have a profile attached to it that has my weight, height, age and gender. It calculated depending on what activity I am doing. Most days I run for an hour at 5.5mph, bike for an hour at 19mph or do half an hour of each.

I really wonder if I'm eating too much or too little. This is complicated. I have heard about net calories and that it shouldn't go below a certain level but I also get that I shouldn't eat over my 1500 calories per day.

It was way easier to lose weight before I decided to exercise. I really don't want to give it up because it is something just for me in my busy day.

Thank you all for your suggestions. I need to figure out how it all fits for me. Seriously I think this is the only thing missing from calorie counting on your own versus weight watcher or something where "they" tell you what to do. Lol I will figure it out and get past this.

Thanks again,
Robbie-Lynn

You can't be burning that little overall. I'm 4'11, extremely inactive due to disability, and I burn between 185 and 1570 calories depending on whether I get a very small amount of exercise in a day.

How about trying some software that calculates your entire calories burned, not just what you burn through exercise? I'm using FitDay, and while it has its quirks, I do like it. It calculates your basic metabolic rate based on your rate and general activity levels, which you can tweak (I did as I'm more inactive than your average "sedentary" level), and then you add the day's activities individually. It's got a wide library of different exercises, and if the calories-per-hour rate is wrong for you, you can edit them to create a custom exercise.

Then you can also track your foods through it, and it will calculate the difference between what you burned and what you ate. (Again, it has a few little ways which you need to learn. The main one is to enter your veg as raw, if you enter them as cooked it assumes that you added a crazy amount of salt and fat.) Most people go for 500 calories as the calorie deficit. If the figures you give are purely what you burned from exercise, you're not eating nearly enough, but they seem quite high for that too/. (Not that I'd know, my idea of exercise is when I manage to stay on the exercise bike for 1-2 min!)

After that, give it a few weeks to settle down and remember that hitting a plateau is normal. Your daily calorie intake varies quite a bit: could you explain more about that?

Are you comfortable with the diet you're on at the moment? I know high carb is popular but it's not actually the only way to diet, and indeed many authorities (including the articles on 3 Fat Chicks) feel that it's not the best option long-term. I'm not telling you to get off it, but if it's not suiting you there's no particular reason why you should stay on it. A good balanced wholefoods diet which cuts out junk is the first thing most people need to address.

You need to have a deficit of 3,000 calories to lose a lb.

May 22 you had 474 positive
May 23 you had 249 positive
May 24 you had a 44 cal positive

This means that over those three days you had a 767 positive (when you are trying to have a deficit) which means you actually gained about 1/4 of a lb from those calories.

The excess weight could be water or salt related, but you are eating to gain on that diet.

Where are you getting your resting metabolism and your calories burned estimates? Yours seem pretty low although mine is similar. The smaller you are, the less you burn day to day. I have a resting metabolism of about 1100 due to a highly sedentary job.

You can try to add muscle - which burns more resting calories, try to eat less (don't go under 1200), and try to move more to increase your resting metabolism.

Good luck!

After reading some replies I am confused - are those calories burned your total day calories - ie exercise plus resting calories?

I use fit day to calculate my baseline (1100 ish) plus activity (generally about 300-500 a day). This way I know that I am burning more than I eat.

For instance, I would eat 1200 calories and burn 1600 calories and know that I had a deficit of 400 calories (or about 1/8 of a lb) for that day.

I am super confused by your post. One hour of exercise at 185 lb can not possibly burn 1500-1800 calories, well, at least not at a 5.5 jog. If you were sprinting, doing severe intervals, spinning, you might burn 1000 in one hour. I would check your heart-rate monitor...something seems off there, unless that is your total calorie burn for the entire day (BMR)

However, your body should still be burning from 1600-2000 just as your resting BMR and then you add exercise, so you are probably burning somewhere near 2500 calories, and if you are eating 1500 a day, that gives you about 1000 deficit which means you should be losing 2 lbs a week. I agree with the person that said you need to wait awhile longer since it has been only two weeks. I have also found (I'm close to your weight), that when I restrict calories too much and exercise too hard, I don't lose any weight at all. Our bodies get really good at starvation mode, so I wonder if you might be under-eating?