I was extremely discouraged last week because I had been exercising HARD and eating only about 1600 calories a day for an entire month, and I had only lost 1/2 lb. in all that time. So I just said "whatever," and Saturday I didn't bother to calorie-count any food portions and I probably ate 2500 calories or more. Sunday was even worse; I'll bet I consumed 3000 calories for the day easy - 7-11 apple fritters, Ghiradelli caramel-filled chocolate bars, french fries, pancakes with extra syrup, grilled cheese sandwiches, peanuts, extra helpings of whatever, etc. Needless to say, I didn't exercise the whole weekend, either. Who cares, anyway?

I had determined to start anew again this morning however - this time on a 1300 calorie/day diet! By George, I'd make something happen! In part because my wife just started Weight Watchers two weeks ago, and she seemed to really be fired up about it, and here I was, abandoning my diet and stuffing my face like a hedonistic glutton.

I needed a new starting point if I was going to clamber back on the diet bandwagon, so I weighed this morning (not because I wanted to, that's for sure). I was 188.5 Friday morning before my indulgence meltdown, and I wouldn't have been at all surprised to have climbed to 191 considering my wild weekend romp. I grimly stepped on my digital scales. They read.....188.0???

How could I not exercise and gorge myself for two days and come out lighter than when I started!? I've heard others say to those stuck on a plateau to "up one's calories" to shake things up, but I always thought that was dubious advice at best. There has to be a calorie deficit, yew know. Now, however.....

I might add that I measured my waist as well this morning. It went down by over 1/4 inch from last Friday. Maybe I should spend the entire week binging.

That's why people kept giving you the advice to up your calories! You can't always make sense of these things, if you try you might lose your mind

I'm not sure how tall you are but I do believe most guys try to eat around 2000 calories a day when dieting. Maybe you should play with your calories about, 1600 might be too little for your body. I normally try to eat between 1500-1800. I'm a 5'6 woman who works out 5-6 days a week.

You're trying to correlate weight to behavior on too short a time frame. Your body doesn't work on a daily or weekly schedule.

Say you start a job and they don't pay you at the end of day one - or day two - or day seven - so you quit. Then you get a paycheck in the mail.

Do you conclude "Hey what happened, I quit and THEN they paid me, that doesn't make any sense! Or do you realize that the pay schedule was every two weeks and you didn't hang in there long enough to get that first paycheck, and the paycheck you got after quitting was for the days you did work?

Unlike most jobs, you're probably not going to get paid on a regular schedule with weight loss. You could see gradual weight loss every day (but this isn't likely), you could see a paycheck every week (also possible but not a guarantee), you could see a paycheck every six weeks, or you could get paid randomly (but it's always for the work you did, just not neccesarily the work you did yesterday).

Don't try to correlate weight to what you've done the day or even week before. Your body may not cooperate. Just have faith that if you eat less and move more, eventually you're going to get that paycheck. If after six weeks, you still haven't seen a pay-off, then you may have to find a new job (find new ways to get the weight loss), but don't jump to that conculsion after day 3, 7, 14 or maybe even longer.

I like kaplods explanation. I know you're frustrated, we all want to see fast results. I get it. I personally feel finding a plan where you do not constantly feel deprived is key for me to make it "stick" I also generally lose weight in chunks I am not sure why but its what works with me, as long as I generally maintain the losses I am not happy with my progress. Don't binge but maybe if 1600 cals and the amount of exercise you were doing are making you feel deprived or exhausted, re-evaluate and find a plan that feels more resonable to you so that even if the weight is slow to come off you aren't heartbroken?

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Waiting a month to basically see no lost weight is not what I would call jumping to conclusions. Though I can't explain my sudden diet breakthrough, a 1/2 lb. weight loss after a month of dieting/exercise is, I think, an acceptable weight loss rate for few dieters. I know it's not for me, and I don't think I'm being unreasonable. I'll certainly take what I can get, though.

My 1600 calorie amount didn't make me feel particularly tired or exhausted. I had plenty of energy for workouts and such. Otherwise I would agree that it was too low. But I guess everyone has a moment when they have unexplained weight loss/gain for no obvious reason whatsoever, and I'm not talking about water-weight. If anything, all the tons of carbs I consumed over the weekend should have made me retain gobs of water. They obviously didn't.

How tall are you?

And FWIW... 1/2 lb. weight loss is perfectly acceptable for a LOT of us. I'm in this to be fit and healthy, not to be so thin you can break me in half.

If this is a lifestyle change, it's for LIFE. There is no end date to being healthy. What's the rush?

This is worth reading again.

Maybe all the carbs is your real issue?

Are you eating healthy meals or are you eating crap food and staying within a calorie range?

Sugars are the real issue either directly or indirectly in the form of carbs. The more you reduce them and replace with protein, the better you will be. It sounds like your doing enough exercise, so feed your muscles protein and not feed your body carbs which you need to burn off. You don't have to burn protein off

On a completely different note there is evidence to support the idea that occasional binge days do actually assist with weight loss. It is the idea of calorie cycling which many people use and advocate because it doesn't allow your body to get into a set pattern.

I personally find calories to be complete nonsense but that's just me . I personally can't stand calorie counting and would much rather focus on eating healthy filling food without worrying whether or not I go over a certain number of calories. It can be really defeating which I think is what the OP has experienced. I personally think a 1/2lb in a month is something that most people attempting to lose weight would find hard to swallow.

If what you are doing isn't working for you try something else. Calorie counting is not the end all and be all of weight loss it just happens to be the most prevalent idea. Everybody is different and not all calories are created equal so I think exploring other theories and doing research could be beneficial.

Hi, I completely understand how confusing and fustraiting this can be. You work so hard for little or no results.

Now what I am about to share may come as a surprise for you, but I can only speak from personal experience.

What has worked best for me not calorie counting...it's unrealistic to count calories for every single meal that you eat for the rest of your life and it doesn't work anyway. It's not just about calories, it's about what types of calories they are. Making sure you are eating natural, whole foods is much more important for your health and weight lose. I highly suggest staying away from processed foods full of sugar and wheat. Even our so called healthy foods that are low calorie are full of junk like corn syrups and wheat products; these are the things that result in us not being able to lose weight. Stick to whole natural foods. Lean meats, veggies and fruits. Don't eat pre-packaged, processed foods. For more information about this way of eating, do a search on the paleo diet plan....pretty interesting stuff.

As far as your work out. Don't kill yourself doing hours of cardio everyday. Focus on strength training and interval work 3 times per week and enjoy playing outdoors.

I hope this helps. Don't be discourage, if what you are doing is not working for you, don't be scared to try something new.

Lulu

I would attribute this to the Scale Gremlins. Their ways and means are strange to us, but we are in their thrall nonetheless.

How often were you weighing over that month of hard exercise and 1600 calories? If daily, then looking at all the numbers together could help - you can see if you've been bobbing up and down around the same weight, or if you've got bigger fluctuations that can be attributed to all sorts of things. If you're only weighing monthly though, it's entirely possible that your 188.5 wasn't a particularly accurate reading for some reason - just had a big drink, haven't had a poo today, accidentally ate too much salt recently, or whatever. If the 188.5 was artificially inflated somehow, and then deflated, as it were, over the course of the weekend, you could quite conceivably then factor in the weekend's excess and come up with a 0.5lb loss. More data needed!

You're losing inches though, so it's all good. Those Scale Gremlins can't touch your tape measure!

Most people would agree with you, and I strongly suspect it's why most people fail. They don't consider the rate of weight loss they can acheive success, so they define what's happening as failure and give up.

At your weight, half a pound a month is actually quite a good loss, whether you define it so or not. I've lost all of my weight at an average of less than 1 lb a month (it's just now starting to average closer to 2). By most definitions (including the definition I would have used in the past) I have "failed" off every one of my 105 lbs. I'll take this kind of failure over the success I used to have (because I thought I was failing and I would quit, not realizing I was succeeding, but my definition of success was wrong).

We're taught to see success as failure, because we don't know wht success looks like. We label anything less than 1-2 lbs a week (every single week) as failure (and we're dead wrong).

In my youth, I could always lose quickly (8 lbs a week wasn't unusual - and I'm not talking about the first week - I'm talking about three and four months into the weight loss I could still lose an average of 5 lbs a week and lose 7-8 lbs on a good week), but when the weight loss slowed to the point that the payoff didn't seem worth the effort I was putting in, I would quit (whenever weight loss slowed to less than 1 lb a week - and it always did, I would give up, because I would think "at this rate, I'll never be thin, no matter what I do - and if I'm going to be fat anyway at least I'll get to eat what I want).

"This time," when I started my best efforts were only yielding one pound per month of weight loss, and I complained (whined really) to my doctor that "I should be able to lose at least 2 lbs a week like a normal person," and my doctor let me have it, telling me what "normal" really was (not losing anything, or losing for a short time and then regaining). He pointed out that 1 lb a month was extraordinary weight loss, because 98% of people trying to do it, don't. They quit before the three month mark.

So if hardly anyone accomplishes it, why aren't we considering 1 lb a month as extraordinary success like my doctor does? Is he the idiot, or is it the rest of us who think that being in the top 2 or 3% isn't good enough.

"This time" is the only time in 41 years of dieting that I've had long-term success (and it's by far the most weight I've ever lost) and I've done it at an average of less than 1 lb per month (it's only now started to speed up, averaging a little more). And the difference is in the attitude.

In the past, I fought to "succeed" and eventually I would quit, because I could never quite measure up to my own definitions of success.

Currently, I diet "backwards," I decide what I'm willing to do, and do it - and accept whatever that brings. Then when I'm ready to do more - I do it - and I accept whatever that brings. Weight loss is the reward, not the goal (because I don't have control over the scale, I only have control over what I eat, and how much I exercise).

From the start, I decided to only make changes I was willing to make, whether they resulted in weight loss or not, and I would trust that the changes were doing good things for my body, even if it didn't show on the scale. For the first two years, I lost nothing at all (but I kept off the two pounds I lost accidentally as a result of sleep apnea treatment - the doctors predicted I would, but I thought they were nuts, because I'd never accidentally lost weight in my life - and I've been dieting since kindergarten).

I think we've learned to depend on weight loss as the "reward" and when our body doesn't cooperate, we decide we've failed - and that's not necessarily true.

I think we also think we "deserve" a weekly weight loss, and when we don't get it, we feel betrayed (and that "what's the use" thought crops up).

I'd highly recommend you consider joining TOPS. In it, you will see what "normal" weight loss really looks like. When the weight recorders announces the net loss (or occasional gain) of the group - devide that by the number of members who weighed-in and you'll see what normal weight loss is.

Last week our group did phenomenally. We lost a net 28 lbs (25 members weighed in, so just over a pound) and it was a record-breakere. The usual average is around a quarter pound (and sometimes there's a gain).

And our group isn't a bunch of slackers. We've even won weight loss recognition for the state (I think it was for most consistent losses or most weeks without a net gain I'm not sure of the exact award).

We think that a month of no weight loss is a sign that we're doing something wrong - and it could be, but it isn't necessarily - especially if you're under 250 lbs or over age 35 (and if you happen to be both, sorry you might only get to lose 1/2 a pound a month).