Grrr....Why is this weight loss so difficult?

[ChooksChick]

What everyone else said is true- for each cubic inch of muscle weighs 4 times what a cubic inch of fat weighs- and it burns 3 times the calories at rest to maintain!!

Keep it up- you'll see a big difference soon, but pay no attention to the scale!

Pay attention to how your clothes fit and how your energy level feels!

BTW- take pics so you can track your progress. There is such a subtle difference daily you may not see what changes are actually happening. A pic taken in the same clothes, the same time of day, in the same position will tell a true story.

 

[pdsavage]

Its the inches you lose that counts...not the weight....

 

[JennsPeeps]

Try tracking your food intake for a week on a site like calorieking.com or sparkpeople.com and see how your nutritional balance looks. Are you getting enough calclium and calories for someone your age & weight, and are your carb/fat/protein ratios good? I don't know how old you are but if you're under 18, you should chat with your doctor about weight loss attempts. People who are still growing have different nutritional needs than people who have stopped growing.

Good luck. Remember that this is a lifestyle, not a diet.

 

[sbs]

Also make sure you are watching the size of your portions when you eat,that can make a difference. Keep up the great work, you will see results!

 

[raroo]

My sister bought a great book called "body for life" by Bill Phillips. You basically just eat a carb and a protein 6 times a day, and you get a free day once a week. The book is full of recipes, all completely normal stuff. She has lost 20lbs since February. Went from 180 to 160, she looks absolutely incredible, and says she basically owes it all to finally knowing how to eat. She exercises lots too. It really is a good book, makes things very straight forward and simple. No calorie counting, no dieting. The free day is the best part. If you feel like a Blizzard on Tuesday, you just say to yourself, "I can have it on Saturday."
Here's how the book describes it : There are two physiological benefits to purposefully eating extra once a week: it boosts fat burning and helps you control your appetite. You see, when you make a significant change in your eating habits and cut out the junk food, the saturated fat and the high amounts of sugar, it may set off that thousand year old code inside your brain telling you to eat more.
Sensing the change and not knowing there isn't a famine around the corner, your body may begin to limit production of a hormone called "leptin". Leptin is one of many feedback systems your body needed to help keep it from starving in the old days. Strong leptin production equals a strong metabolism. Diminished leptin production, on the other hand, makes your metabolism go down and your appetite go up. This is not what we want!
I'm trying it too, to be healthier, and it is so fun planning my free day.

I actually think I have shed a few inches too since trying it.

 

[Chickerdoodle13]

Thanks guys! It is frustrating, but I will certainly keep at it. I'm hoping to go to the gym 3-4 times a week at college as well. I have definitely slacked off in that department semesters past! It's nice having my mom go with me though.

As for my food intake, I think I do pretty well. I already have to watch my carbohydrates for the diabetes, so I've gotten good at that. I don't so much watch the fats as I do the types of carbs. For example, a 30 carb piece of fruit is a lot better than a 30 carb piece of bread. I have to have between 30-45 carbs per meal and I usually have a 15-30 carb snack between lunch and dinner. I eat quite a bit of fruits and veggies and my carbs are usually whole grains. Every once in a while I will get chinese or something not so healthy to eat, but I usually eat more of the chicken and veggies rather than the noodles. I also try to stay away from diet sodas and I drink water with crystal light flavor packets in them. I don't really drink any caffeine or alcohol.

I am working with my endocrinologist to lose weight, but a lot of it I have to do on my own. She has been very encouraging though. I think my shirts may be fitting a little looser, but its hard to tell. I grew up always looking at the scale, so its difficult to get away from that! At college its great because I don't have a scale and so I'll go for a month at a time not looking at my weight at all. My goal is to lose around 50 pounds at first, but it would be nice to lose 100 all together. 100 pounds would take me to a very lean weight and I may not be able to get all the way down if I gain enough muscle, but I'd certainly like to try. More weight loss equals less insulin too, which will in turn help my ever present hunger.

Thanks for the encouraging words though!

 

[saddina]

"I already have to watch my carbohydrates for the diabetes"

That will sometimes give a slower start too. Good news is once your body starts adjusting to the workouts the need for insulin may decrease, start checking before and after workouts and you'll see good things in the numbers.

On non gym days you may wanna give yoga a try the streaching and flexing will help you recover from workouts faster.

 

[thebritt]

Are you able to chat with your doctor? I would think that, being a diabetic, you may face different challenges than a person who isn't? Safety first! No matter what, the exercise can only be a GOOD thing...Keep up the good work!

!

 

[Wifezilla]

I exercised for an hour a day, 6 days a week for 2 years and never lost a pound. This is NOT unusual.

"There was a time when virtually no one believed exercise would help a person lose weight. Until the sixties, clinicians who treated obese and overweight patients dismissed the notion as naïve. When Russell Wilder, an obesity and diabetes specialist at the Mayo Clinic, lectured on obesity in 1932, he said his fat patients tended to lose more weight with bed rest, “while unusually strenuous physical exercise slows the rate of loss.”

The problem, as he and his contemporaries saw it, is that light exercise burns an insignificant number of calories, amounts that are undone by comparatively effortless changes in diet. In 1942, Louis Newburgh of the University of Michigan calculated that a 250-pound man expends only three calories climbing a flight of stairs—the equivalent of depriving himself of a quarter-teaspoon of sugar or a hundredth of an ounce of butter. “He will have to climb twenty flights of stairs to rid himself of the energy contained in one slice of bread!” Newburgh observed. So why not skip the stairs, skip the bread, and call it a day?

More-strenuous exercise, these physicians further argued, doesn’t help matters—because it works up an appetite. “Vigorous muscle exercise usually results in immediate demand for a large meal,” noted Hugo Rony of Northwestern University in his 1940 textbook, Obesity and Leanness. “Consistently high or low energy expenditures result in consistently high or low levels of appetite. Thus men doing heavy physical work spontaneously eat more than men engaged in sedentary occupations. Statistics show that the average daily caloric intake of lumberjacks is more than 5,000 calories, while that of tailors is only about 2,500 calories. Persons who change their occupation from light to heavy work or vice versa soon develop corresponding changes in their appetite.” If a tailor becomes a lumberjack and, by doing so, takes to eating like one, why assume that the same won’t happen, albeit on a lesser scale, to an overweight tailor who decides to work out like a lumberjack for an hour a day?"

http://nymag.com/news/sports/38001/

It's no so much what you do but what you eat. For every 50g or carbohydrates (regardless of the source) you eat it is the equivalent of 1/4 cup of pure sugar.

Use a site like www.fitday.com to track your carbs for one day.