Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic, but I’ve been working out for an hour+ a day, 6 days a week for the past month and I haven’t lost any weight. I’ve changed my eating so I take in less than 2200 calories a day.
I do 45min-1hr cardio (bike) which says I’ve burned 500 calories and then I do a series of reps on the weight machines, mostly chest and then some crunches.
I weigh exactly the same. Is it possible in this short time I’ve built up the muscle mass to compensate for the fat loss or am I simply being too impatient?
So, it is possible to trade muscle for fat while working out and to gain weight while losing fat.
Your guide should be something OTHER than the scale. How do your clothes fit? Are you cinching up your belt an extra notch?
Also, how is your workout going? Are you doing the same routine on the bike every day? If you don’t change the resistance or time, your body will adapt to your bike session and will be burning the fewest calories possible during the workout.
If your gym has personal trainers available, have them talk you through what your goals are and how to achieve them. They will be the your best source of info. Not only can they see you and talk to you but they are familiar with the equipment in your gym.
There have been three times in my life that my weight has gone way out of spec. I have lost 30 + lbs on each of those occasions.
I have noticed that the weight did not begin to make a difference until about five weeks had passed. Since so much time had been invested before the results were seen, it was lots harder to fall off the wagon. So do not give up now! I bet you are about to see some real changes.
So can I increase the resistance and decrease the time, then switch back to longer time and lower resistance? Will that keep “tricking” my body to burn the max calories? And how often should I switch?
If you don’t have much weight to lose, every single pound is going to hang onto you till it has no choice but to go away.
Then you could also be like me: I have another 140 pounds to lose (lost 60 already) and I’m averaging about a pound a week (maybe even a bit less than a whole pound). I work out faithfully (usually burn 700 calories per workout), but I refuse to starve myself so that’s why it’s coming off so slowly.
You could very well be building muscle so fast right now that you’re slimmer but not lighter. Take your measurements. Measure everything: thighs, calves, ankles, arms, wrists, neck, midriff, plus the usual stuff. Some months I lose very few pounds, but I lose inches, so those months I just assume the fat got replaced with muscle.
Don’t give up! In 6 months you will be utterly amazed at the difference you see!
Stay off sugars*, and fats. Eat lighter meats like Chicken or fish, and drink more water than you can stand. You’re going to have to go through a change, and you will be tempted to eat too much or poor foods, but it will pass, and the new style of eating will be enough.
Also, watch portions. Eat only what you need. Look at your dinner plate. You should be able to see some surface. If it’s covered in food and it’s not Thanksgiving, you probbaly have too much.
And to second SnoopyFan’s words: DON’T GIVE UP! Keep going, it will happen!
Watch for hidden sugars (and calories for that matter). Lots of foods are high in sugars that you may not realize.
need age, weight, height and occupation to draw further conclusions.
Track weight over longer periods of time. Also, you might have been gaining 5-10 pounds per year, and the first step is stopping the upward weight gain before a drop off comes.
Imagine your weight as a graph over time…it goes up, up up…and it has to level out before trending down.
Takes about 12 cals per pound of body weight to sustain life daily.
Find clothes, belts and photos and use those for comparison in addition to the scale.
Realise that the first 20 minutes or so of cardio won’t burn fat, so one 90 min session is better than two 45 min sessions if that is the aim.
One less slice of bread a day makes a difference.
Refined carbs are a no-no.
A variation on what pilot141 says. As you get fitter you should be upping the resistance and/or cadence so you do more work in a given time. That is you should find for the same perceived effort you should actually burn more.
And try the personal trainer thing too, did wonders for a friend of mine. Good luck.
Remember that a pound of fat has 3600 calories. So you have to burn 3600 calories more than you take in before you’ll lose one pound.
My guess is that your eating is keeping up with your working out. It’s so easy to eat a little extra or mis-estimate portion sizes.
Also it’s a myth that you have to workout in the fat-burning zone to lose fat. You can lose fat by doing any amount of exertion. Or by doing no exertion at all (like David Blaine). The fat-burning zone is just the level of exertion at which your body is getting most of its energy from fat at that moment. If you work out at a different exertion level, you’re getting energy more from available carbohydrates or glycogen. If you use up your available carbohydrates during your workout, then when your body needs energy at a later time, it will use your fat stores. If you use glycogen, your body will later convert fat into glycogen to replace what was used up.
One thing that can make a difference is how strenuous your exercise is. The Post Exercise Caloric Expenditure (PECE) can be up to 50% additional calories if you work out strenuously. So if you go for a leisurely hour walk and use up 400 calories, you might not burn any additional calories after the workout. But if you run really fast and burn 400 calories in 20 minutes, your body might use an additional 200 calories during the recovery after your workout.
In any event, keep up with the workout. You have to remember that losing weight is not a one time event. You can’t lose the weight and then go back to your old habits. Keep working out and watching your diet. If you want to lose more weight, work out more, eat less, or do both.
I’m doing Atkins, so your diet is probably much different from mine, but one thing that makes a HUGE difference for me is water consumption. If I don’t drink enough water, I lose at a snail’s pace. (I drink about two quarts a day and will up that as my exercise increases.)
We all know that we should drink water, but I think most of us think of it as something that’s vaguely healthy, like not having too much caffeine or laying off the salt. I know I did, which is why I didn’t really take it seriously early on. It helps to know specifically how it works. Basically, your kidneys need plenty of water to function appropriately. If they don’t have it, the liver takes over part of their job. Since it’s doing that, it can’t metabolize fat. That’s an oversimplification, of course, but it’s better than “because it’s good for you.”
And, as Small Clanger said, refined carbs (sugar, white flour, etc.) aren’t good for you. They’re practically non-food, plus they mess with your blood sugar and insulin response. (Insulin controls fat storage.)
Realise that the first 20 minutes or so of cardio won’t burn fat
Why? (I’ve never heard this and I’m interested in why this is.)
Atkins works wonderfully for some people and terribly for others. OP, if you’ve never tried it, give it a shot! You will either get sick as a dog or you’ll feel better than you ever have. It has cured a LOT of physical ills for people I know.
That it does. Just remember if you try it that you will probably feel like crap and have cravings for two to five days (it was two for me), and you probably shouldn’t work out during that time.
[slight hijack]
I feel good enough now that even if I weren’t losing weight (which I am) I would at least stay away from refined carbs completely. I just feel so much healthier, have more energy, etc. YMMV, of course.
[/slight hijack]
Depending on your metabolism and body frame 2200 calories per day is going to support about 185-215 lbs of body weight in an average man doing moderate exercise aged 30-50 years.
What do you weigh and how tall are you? People often think they need a lot more calories than they do. Actual human calorie needs are usually going to be between 10-12 calories per lb per day on average, for a 30-50 year old man doing moderate exercise. There are people outside this calorie range with higher and lower metabolisms, but they are relatively few.
Fat has to be moved out of storage and into the bloodstream before it can be used as fuel. This takes time and oxygen–although increasing the amount of oxygen you can take up can reduce the time–so the first few minutes of an aerobic session run off glycogen and protein.
HOWEVER, if you’ve already been exercising, the fat’s already in your bloodstream, and all the cardio you do will burn fat.
As for the OP, you’re probably not building a significant amount of muscle on 2200 calories a day. But your low-intensity cardio, benches, and crunches really aren’t that good of a fat loss program. Take up heavy multi-joint lifts and interval training, and you’ll see much better results.
The first 20 mins aren’t the ‘optimal’ time, but just livng life when you are calorie depleted burns fat. Blinking your eyes burns fat if your are depleted of energy and fat needs to be tapped as a resource.
SnoopyFan OK I know it’s more complicated than that as filmore started to go into. But my understanding is for the first nur-nee-nur minutes you will be using up the glycogen already in your system. I would find a cite but I gotta be off in a sec’
My personal experience is that for years (yup years) I ran for ~20 mins every weekday and although it kept me fit(ish) I didn’t get any thinner. When I cut down the running and switched to longer workouts at weekends, bingo. Now with that and the one less slice of toast* trick, my waist is shrinking and I’ve got cheekbones again.
*I feel a book coming on, the ‘one less slice’ diet!
Just popping in here to mention tow things. One, don’t trust the machines to tell you how many calories you’ve burned. They are notoriously wring from things I’ve read in Shape and fitness.
And I know Small Clanger and Ultrafilter cleared it up, but 20 minutes is actually a good workout and I think there’s a study out there that shows it is close to being as effective as more time. For some reason it kicks your body into burning more fat even after you’re done. It’s really all about heart rates. I shall see if I can find that study for you because I might be phrasing it wrong.
It’s not really all about heart rates. Heart rate correlates well with oxygen uptake (the real quantity of interest) and is a heck of a lot easier to measure.
There are some hormonal aftereffects to an aerobic workout that are interesting. Let me do a little digging and see what I can find.
After a month of workouts described, you definately should have lost some weight by now, if a)you weight had not been changing prior to last month, b)you reduced calories and c)your workouts added to rather than replaced prior physical activity. The amount would depend on how fat or thin you were, but you should have had some loss by now either way.
