I recently switched from a warehouse environment to an office based one, I knew that I would need to keep an eye on what I ate due to my metabolism slowing down as I wasn’t expending as much calories as before.
So I’ve kept a food diary, logged even the fat content to make sure it’s not too high, and have recently started doing 40 minute work outs every day with one day for rest, which expends 325kcal, yet I go on the scales, and I’ve gained weight, my average Calorie intake is around 2000. I’m now 86kg but I want to target 75 kg. What am I doing wrong?
Have you noticed any other changes? Are your clothes fitting looser, do you have more energy, are you sleeping better at night, has your mood improved?
I started the exercise two weeks ago, the food diary I’ve been doing since beginning of March, but on my rest day, like today, I didn’t eat much in the morning and got a bad headache, on the positive side, I feel less bloated, but my clothes feel tighter, especially my Jeans.
One thing that really helped me is weighing myself every morning. Every morning, first thing after waking up is have a pee, and then get buck-ass naked on the scales. Sometimes the number is up a bit, but you get a feeling about how much it can vary. (And then I made a spreadsheet to record the numbers).
Most diet books tell you to weigh yourself once a week, but I find that the amount of weight one can lose in a week is comparable to just regular ups and downs. Daily weigh-ins give a more detailed picture, so long as you don’t panic just because you’re up half-a-pound from yesterday sometimes and get enough measurements to see the trend line through the noise.
Other than that, I agree with Helena that 2000 Cal may be too much. People vary a lot on their metabolism and 2000 Cal per day is meant to be an average.
You don’t say what sort of workouts you are doing. If you’re going for bulk, then your workouts are likely adding muscle weight, while your dieting is likely mainly taking off fat. If you quit working out (other than walking/running), you’ll likely lose weight, but at the cost of muscle. So yeah, you basically need to reduce your intake if you’re going to continue to work out. My opinion, of course. I lost 40 pounds last year, but paid a price for it. I’m now back in the gym to put back the muscle tone that I lost.
The calories you are burning in exercise are nowhere near the calories you have stopped burning at work. In a sedentary job you may be only burning say 40 calories an hour above your BMR. In a moderately vigorous upright, moving job you would be burning more like 140 calories. So changing jobs gives you a net excess of 800 calories a day.
Your 40 minutes session every second day will come no where near making up for this. However your BMR should be almost 2000 calories even if you did absolutely nothing. What is the composition of your diet?
Stop eating bread and bread-like foods. Only have a large chicken breast salad with a non fat dressing for lunch.
Only drink water and lots of it. No sugar drinks including fruit juices. No cake, cookies, candy or cheese. No dairy except 1% milk or non fat yogurt. No eating after 7 pm.
Its mostly a pie hole problem, but walking at a fast pace on an elevated treadmill will help if you do it at least 3 times a week for at least 30 minutes. Also do some ab and dumbbell work on the other 3 days of the week. (Plenty of you-tube workouts to choose from.)
I weighed myself on January first of this year and I was at 175 pounds. (An increase of 15 pounds since high school.) I followed the above routine and have dropped 15 pounds in under 4 months. I’m at 160 with body fat at about 18%.
Lastly, get a full year write on type calendar and hang it on the bathroom wall above your digital scale. Weigh yourself every morning after you poop and write your weight on the calendar. This “weigh in” will hopefully be an incentive to eat right (and less) that day.
“You’re not hungry, you’re thirsty. You’re not tired, you’re dehydrated.”
OMG! I’m not the only one? Spreadsheet and all. It was so enlightening. It also made me very aware of how certain foods (even eaten in moderation) will cause me to be bloated or retain water for a day or two. If I was only weighing weekly and I ate one of those foods the night before, I would be disheartened to find I was up. Now, I know, it’s the particular food.
measured how? most people have a highly distorted view of what a “portion size” means, so they eat what they assume is a portion of Food A, look up the calories per portion, and fail to notice they actually ate five portions. Unless you weigh everything you eat you’re probably quite a bit off.
Also, you mention recording fat content and trying not to eat too much fat-bad idea. Low fat diets have been show to slow down basal metabolic rate and low-fat diets also make people ravenously hungry so they over-eat. Low carbohydrate diets have neither of these downsides, and since humans have a ridiculously low dietary need for carbohydrates (very close to zero grams per day) there is no nutritional downside to cutting back on carbohydrates.
The most efficient workout for weight loss is to do heavy weight-lifting. Not light weights for toning, but body-building type exercises. Skip the aerobics stuff. It’s good for your heart but if you can only work out 40 minutes a day you’re better off doing weight-lifting. Muscle is very calorie-hungry.
I’ve moved to weighing more often than weekly as well, in my case partly because of a reason which doesn’t affect our OP: liquids retention right before my period. I’ll be losing… losing… losing… ok, let’s go on maintenance for a while… ok… ok… wtf where did those 4!!! kg come from? And then two days later I find out where. It’s even scarier when the extra kg appear in the middle of what had been a nice steady loss. Since my periods are currently irregular, I’ve made the scale my warning system.
Ryan Liam, the problem with that is that portion size as used by manufacturers does not equal what most people would call a portion. For example, I’ve seen little bags of chips (the ones most people would call a portion) which claimed to have 2.7 portions. You need to check your portions, not the manufacturer’s.
Everything you eat is packaged? That could cause problems, too. Your sodium intake is likely sky high and causing fluid retention issues, and you’re likely not drinking enough water to facilitate fat metabolism along with the flushing needed for all that sodium.
You should be concentrating on fresh foods, and in doing that you’ll need a kitchen scale. When I started counting calories, it only took me a couple weeks to figure out I really needed a scale. Once I did, and saw the pears (for example) I was buying were 300 grams, not 100 like in the calorie counter suggestions, I got way better at accounting for calories.
I also use MyFitnessPal for calorie counting, it has a vast list of foods that are easy to search for, ability to add your own recipes and ones from the web, plus a barcode scanner that lets you scan items directly into your diary. I can’t imagine trying to count calories by hand. By hand and without a scale, there’s no way I’d get it right, plus it would take way more than the 5 minutes a day it takes with the app.
Another thing the scale is super necessary for: pasta.
Depending on its shape, a portion of uncooked, dry pasta may be as big as my brother’s two fists together, or small enough to fit inside one of mine. The weight is the same, and the body doesn’t care which shape it has.
I see a couple simple things that could be going wrong here. First, how did you settle on 2000 as what you should be eating? Depending on your metabolism and activity level, that could be either too high or too low. There are plenty of different ways of calculating what your caloric intake should be, and plenty of tools for it online, but given that you went with 2000, which is generally that “normal” amount, I’m guessing there’s little or no research behind that number. If this number is wrong, you can have a nearly perfect diet, good exercise routine, and still not lose any fat.
Second, how did you settle on 75kg as a goal weight? It very well could be reasonable, but it too, could be too high or too low. As a general rule, unless someone is seriously obese, I’m not sure that weight is really the best measure for determining success. I’ve seen some people get disappointed when they gain weight, even though they clearly look better and have gotten stronger, simply because they gained more muscle than they lost fat.
Third, how are you counting calories? Seeing the precision you’re giving has me concerned that you’re quite possibly doing it wrong. It’s exceedingly easy to underestimate how many calories you’re eating because packaging is often deliberately labeled to be confusing, or you eat more than you thought you did. For example, maybe you have a healthy salad that only has a couple hundred calories and you put on some salad dressing that is maybe 80 calories per serving, but that serving size is small and you end up having 500-600 calories just in dressing, so you think you have a 300 calorie salad, but it was more like 800. Chances are, if you’re gaining weight, especially 6kg in 2 weeks, you’re probably underestimating.
Fourth, how did you get 325 calories burned in 40 minutes? What type of exercise are you doing, how intensely? That could also be off. Are you doing any resistance training? Cardiovascular exercise is absolutely critical, but you’ll see better gains, in terms of lean body mass, by doing resistance training too. After all, the resting metabolic rate for an equal mass of muscle to fat is higher AND you are approaching improving your body composition not just by losing fast but also by gaining lean muscle mass.
Fifth, yes it is as “simple” as calories in vs calories out, but you can’t just have a calorie deficit by eating crap and expect to see good results. If you’re eating nothing but packaged foods, besides as I mentioned above that it is often deceptively labeled, it often has other stuff in there that can mess with your body. Some different types of foods will have noticeable impact on your energy level and hunger, not to mention things like blood sugar and hormone levels. Packaged stuff isn’t always worse than fresh food; hell, it’s REALLY easy to make a delicious and calorie packed meal with fresh food, and some packaged stuff has no preservatives, sweeteners, etc. The point is, don’t JUST look at the calories, you need try to get QUALITY calories. You can get the same amount of calories in carbs from eating some proportion of candy or brown rice; I promise you, you’ll get much better results from the latter. Similarly, don’t just count total calories, but consider your macros and count those (if you don’t know what your macro breakdown should be, do research). Since you said you’re watching fat content, I wouldn’t be shocked if you’re not eating enough fat and overcompensating with carbs, especially if your calorie counting is low, and all those excess carbs are just converted to body fat.
I appreciate your help guys, so I’ll try to answer the best I can all these questions.
I went with 2000kcal as I’m not as active as I used to be, hence lower than usual average for a Man which is 2500kcal, and then I calculated my resting metabolic rate online and it said it was 1800kcal, so I just rounded it off.
I settled on that weight because it’s how I looked the best when I was in my mid 20’s, when I go over that weight I start to lose definition in my face.
I understand where you’re coming from, usually the calories I count are usually by weight, due to it not being specific enough, so if it says 100kcal for 150grams, and there are 325grams, I’ll usually do a bit of division to get the exact amount. I hope that make some sense.
I’m inclined to agree here, I usually went to the pound-stores to do my shopping and it was usually just basic food nothing in terms of vegetables. So today I bought some baking potatoes and tuna, it’s a start. But thanks man for taking the effort to help me out.
I’ve bought one, bought a scale too, but I agree a scale is absolutely necessary.
