jessabridge4444's Journal, 07 June 2019

I started at 284 and am now 251 lbs. I average around 1500-1600 cals daily and lose on average one pound a week. I see yesterday you only had 960 cals. Your body might be fighting to hold onto the fat when your cals are that low. You might want to eat a little more??? 

Dontcha just love it when people care enough to go in and look at your Food Diary to figure out how to help you! Great job, @shiny50! Yes, if you only had 960 calories, you might need to INCREASE them. God designed our bodies to store fat for use in times of famine. If your body is thinking, "Food is scarce -- there might be a famine coming! Hold onto your fat!!!" it's going to be very hard to lose that weight. Keep up the good work, @jessabridge4444! You're very conscientious and your efforts WILL be rewarded on the scale! 

I do love that Debbie! It could possibly be that Shiny50, but I only really go that low once a week. I will see what tomorrow brings. Maybe I just jumped the gun on my numbers and I will see that 1 pound tomorrow.  

Who knows.. It's a sick game we're playing and most people lose. I would just say watch your sodium when you're eating 50% carbs. If you're not active you're going to retain water..  

@shiny50, also that is a weekly average of 1472 cals a day. Well within a normal weight loss plan  

You are right Keyten! :-) 

I think that the absolute numbers are not all that important as there are inherent flaws with any such analysis, such as are the labels accurate, or maybe the way you are measuring is flawed (do you weigh before or after cooking for example). It's better to establish a baseline, measure in a consistent way, then adjust calories etc up or down based on those results. That way it's all about the changes you make as compared to your baseline, much easier to deal with relative numbers. Also I think that it is counterproductive to try and make judgements on a daily basis. As far as I can tell that is too granular, I've noticed a pattern where the scale seems to respond more to what I did 2 days ago but even that is nebulous. There are also natural weight fluctuations that happen even if you are in complete dietary balance which makes the daily measurement/analysis thing more problematic. This stinks of course because we would all like immediate results and have our corrections be measurable immediately. It just doesn't seem to work like that, this is more of a days and weeks kind of thing. That's what my volumes of data seems to indicate. What I've come to realize is that all this plays out over longer periods of time and to be most effective you must approach it that way. My hybrid approach is to measure every day but analyze weekly. For weight tracking I take the average weight for 7 days and compare that to previous weeks' averages. This helps to account for daily fluctuations and gives me a better overall picture of what my body is doing and therefore the adjustments I make are based on more solid data which has led to greater effectiveness. Analyzing daily was driving me mad, I was essentially chasing ghosts with what would could only be described as a overly reactionary approach where things never seemed to work like I thought they should. I also tried just weighing once per week but that was worse. It led to false conclusions, ie "I busted my ass all week and gained half a pound wtf??!!!!??" But but the truth was that particular day happened to be a day where normal fluctuations were high. Since this was my only data point it's all I could go on. This was demoralizing and is a recipe for giving up. I also treat calories/macros the same way. I measure every day but then only analyze based on the weekly average. This allows for daily caloric fluctuations but still staying in track with the plan, ie I'm focusing on calories per week instead of trying to micromanage calories per day. The averages method has been very helpful to me in addressing the most challenging part of all this and that's the mental game that is crucial to success.  

Happy to see movement down for you! 

Keep it up. Scale weight loss isn't linear. Water can replace fat triglycerides in your fat cells. You will have a woosh eventually.