Friggen Frickity Frick Frick

Frustration has started to build.

I started working out a little over 3 months ago… joined a gym, found a routine on here and have really stuck with it. I have faithfully worked out 4 or 5 times a week since joining and going to the gym has simply become part of my daily routine. I have been following the “Big Fat Loss” program fairly well (although I haven’t tracked it very well).

I am doing between 20 and 40 minutes of cardio per session with basic, moderate weightlifting. I try to vary my cardio routines between machines and intensity, throwing 1 or 2 “interval” days a week into the routine. Like today I did a buttkicker on the treadmill with 30 seconds @ 8 mph on the steepest incline with 90 seconds rest. I did this 7 times with 5 minutes warm up and cool down…I wanted 8 intervals but I about biffed it and I was roasted after #7.

I have become much more conscious about my diet, I haven’t eaten out in weeks, all but given up soda, eating lots of grilled lean protien (chicken breasts and pork at least 4 or 5 nights a week) and I drink water like I’m preparing for a Saharan marathon. My diets not perfect and I’ll still eat a slice of pizza and take my wife to dairy queen once a week, but all in all a drastic improvement.

The bottom line is I am eating much better, I am exercising much more (I did very little exercise before starting a routine) and over 3 1/2 months… I am seeing very little result. My “fitness” has improved, but I haven’t lost an ounce of weight in fact, probably 3 or 4 lbs heavier.

I know people plateau between peaks and valleys, but I’ve never had a peak, I’ve not seen even minor improvements to plateau at…errrrrrrrr.

Is there something I am overlooking? Anyone else with similar experiences? I’m not looking for instant results, but gosh darn it some incremental improvements would serve as quite a motivator right now.

Good for you! You’re getting fitter and healthier and doesn’t it feel good? Now, on to that nasty number on your scale… You may be eating better and exercising more, but it’s very difficult to lose weight without controlling calories.

Sure, it sounds like eating more healthfully should naturally lead to weight loss, but exercise does (despite what we’re often told) increase appetite. It’s natural, as your body needs/wants fuel to meet your increased demands. (Not to mention that people often think they’ve “earned” more food because of exercise.)

Start logging your food here or elsewhere for a couple of weeks, take a look at the calories you’re ingesting, and the answer will likely become clear, no matter how much you may prefer to continue to avoid counting calories.

Question: Did you track your daily calories?

The most simple answer is that you still haven’t a calorie deficit.

A few years ago I had an almost similar lifestyle to yours: eating mostly healthy, doing a lot of sports (up to 6 times a week). I developed nice muscles but almost lost no weight. The simeple reason was that I had no idea how many calories I ate during the day and also I ate some high calorie food like low fat yoghurt which was loaded with sugar. :-(.

Anyway, do you measure your waist line? Mayby you lost some fat, but gained muscles at the same time?

PS: pork isn’t lean protein at all…

double post

@iamsmalls… I would look at your calorie intake and your calorie burn rate… I found the most impactful thing for me was the actual count of calories eaten. My BMR is about 2500, but I tend to lose weight when I eat in the 1500 calorie area. It was pretty “easy” to eat at home and stay within the calorie range for loss for me… I travel quite a bit, and saw that it’s tough to eat lower calories on the road. I would eat a healthy, balanced (30-40-30) diet, but the calorie counts would creep towards 1700-1900 – and there, I maintained my weight… no loss, no gain.

If I stayed below my defecit line, I was losing an average of 5 pounds a week, and felt GREAT. If I stayed in my maintenance area, I was losing an average of 1 a pound a week, but that was mostly a combination of exercise and activity.

Understandable.

I will start tracking my daily intake, because I truly don’t know how many calories I am ingesting.

It just seems like it shouldn’t be this complicated. I maintained a certain weight for about 2 years without much exercise 8 months a year and an atrocious diet that included 4 or 5 sodas a day (which now makes me ill to think about). When I started exercising I simply thought that if I made exercise a habit and cut out the most egregious portions (soda, fast food, alcohol) of my diet that success would be mine.

I guess if it were easy everyone would do it…

One more question, how does the exertion of using a treadmill compare to that of an elliptical or the bike? When I hike trails (in the mountains of MT), I will get asthma-like symptoms of burning, closing airway and the only way I can replicate it is on the treadmill at the gym. I can push myself to my limit on the bike or stair climber or elliptical… but only the treadmill makes my lungs burn (the others certainly make other parts of my anatomy burn). I use the “calorie counter” on the machines as a motivator, but I am beginning to question the accuracy of them.

Its very had to get accurate results from the machine because their baseline calculations tend to be based on one particular body size. I would suggest investing in a HR monitor to understand where you fall in your target HR zone. This will help give you a better understanding of your intensity during different workouts.

Your calorie burn can be calculated a lot of different ways. Do you track your workouts on the site? If so, that can give you an idea based on your particular body stats and the intensity you log. Intensity goes back to the HR monitor. :) Some HR monitors have programs to help with that calorie burn as well.

Tracking calories has always been a huge help to me. Once you get used to what the right amounts and portions feel like, you don’t have to journal as consistantly as you might have to in the beginning. But it can be very eye opening to document those calories in vs. those calories out.

Yup, just tracking calories for a while will really help show you how much and what to eat. There may be something that surprises you in there. The tools here i find are very helpful to balance out your diet, too, which is important.

Also: Enough sleep? If not, can really prevent weight loss, even if you’re doing most things right.

First off, I may be drinking an obscene amount of milk (replacing soda at many meals). That is probably adding a whole bunch of calories I hadn’t been taking into account before.

As far as the pork, I grill pork tenderloin and nutrition facts shows that a 4 oz. serving is around 165 calories and under 7 grams of fat. That is nearly comparable with chicken.

There is a program called GOMAD where you drink a "G"allon “Of” "M"ilk “A” "D"ay but it is combined with some heavy weighlifting. It is reported to add a lot of muscle with some fat. People that do that often quit after a while to focus on lsoing fat and keeping the muscle they gained. So, if this isn’t your objective, I would cut back on the milk.

There are also some programs that prescribe eating more calories and burning even more. This sounds like what you were trying to do. Unfortunately, most people (and machines) overestimate how many calories they actually burn and you can easily eat many, many calories with very little effort.

So, as other people mentioned, yuu need to focus on a deficit while maintaining a calorie burn. Invest in fat calipers or just use a tape measure to track waist measurements. When waist measurments go down you are almost always losing fat regardless of scale measurement.

When you start losing weight yet body fat/waist are staying the same or increasing, then you may not be eating enough calories and are losing lean body mass.