Any ideas?

[organism]

Hi everyone. I'm making this post because I'm desperate to lose weight at this point and have no idea where else to turn.

I'm 17, 5'8" and weigh 208.5lbs. I'm desperate to lose weight, and by that I guess I mean burn off fat. I don't really want to get big and bulky and build muscle like most guys try to do, I just want to get rid of all the fat on my body (within reason)

Basically, for 3 or so weeks, I've consistently been "working out," almost nightly, taking off every couple of days just to get a rest (So 5-6 days a week, depending on how I feel) However, I've yet to see ANY results.

I've been running, walking, using the elliptical, doing taebo and other exercise DVD's we have around the house, and resistance training. When I run or walk, its generally for 30-45 mins (I use these iFit chips for my treadmill that has Jillian, the trainer from the biggest loser, giving tips and changing the incline/speed throughout the exercise) or I just turn on the treadmill and turn the speed up or down. I've tried starting an HIIT "program" where I walk for 1 minute at 3mph, sprint for 30 seconds at 9-10mph, repeat - for about 10 minutes, and it's painfull to do and still brings no results. I also do tons of different resistance stuff with weights. My dad has a pretty nice weight set in our workout room so I do alot of different stuff to work everything.

I've also changed my diet. My mom taught me some stuff she learned from weight watchers, and its doing nothing for me. I'm drinking tons of water, I'm eating my fruits and veggies, I'm eating my protein, and nothing has changed. It's not like because it's healthy im over eating, I'm eating normal. Still no changes on the scale. I guess my waist looks a little slimmer, my mom says she notices a difference, but I'm not seeing anything, and the scale doesn't lie.

I don't understand weight loss I guess. I've read that you're supposed to cut calories and burn off more calories then you eat, but how am I supposed to burn off 1000+ calories a day? (I don't really count calories or any of that) Each time I exercise I only burn maybe 300 calories if I'm working hard, so how do I work harder to burn off MORE calories then I eat?? It doesn't make sense to me..

So PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE if anyone can tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to do it right, that would be a godsend. If I'm not doing enough I can always push myself harder. I'm determined; I need to lose this weight. I'm tired of feeling bad about myself and being too nervous/self conscious. I can't stand myself and it's only getting worse as I keep working my ass off to change and get nothing in return. /sob story

 

[KaraCooks]

Hey there and welcome.

First of all ... BREATHE. Weight loss doesn't happen overnight. Some people take a month or so to see a real change when they first get started ... give it time. If you're working out hard and efficiently (and it sounds like you are), you will see results. Be patient.

Secondly ... exercise is important for all kinds of reasons and will aid in weight loss, but 80% or more of losing weight is about what you eat. If you eat more calories than you're burning, you won't lose weight. Period. There's no way around that. And most people simply cannot exercise 1000 calories a day off of their bodies ... not unless you plan to spend multiple hours working out every day and most normal people can't do that.

It's all about eating. You say you don't count calories - my suggestion is to start. You don't have to do it forever, but at least for a week. Sign up with one of the free food diary sites online - fitday.com or dailyplate.com - and start logging everything you eat. And I mean EVERYTHING. Even if you lick the spoon while you're cooking. After a week, you should have a good handle on where most of your calories are coming from and if you are eating too much. It'll give you a basis to work from in seeing where you can cut back.

Another thing - lift weights. Yeah yeah yeah .. you don't want to get bulky. Got that part. But lifting weights isn't going to make you bulky. You have to work your ass off to bulk ... and eat more calories and load up on protein. What lifting weights will do is help you to maintain the muscle you have and build strength. It will help increase your metabolism not just for the period you're working out (the way cardio does) but for the periods you're at rest as well. Lifting weights is a really really good way to kick up your fat loss and help reshape your body.

I know others will chime in here with advice as well ... so stick around and keep posting.

 

[leecordova]

First of all, do you have a target weight that you want to achieve? It's a lot easier to measure results if you have a goal. Second, I agree that you have to start counting your calories. You say you eat "normally" but what does that mean? How many calories does eating normally entail? Get a food journal and write down everything you eat and drink. I mean absolutely everything. Do this for 5 days and you may surprise yourself with how many calories you're consuming, and where they're coming from. Your diet may be what's holding you back.

One last thing--it takes time to lose weight. Right now, your body is adjusting to all of this activity. Consistency is the key to weight loss so keep at it.

 

[ajcurl]

You mentioned Jillian. I listen to her radio show religuosly! I'm not dissagreeing with the above posts but, I agree with Jillian when she says "building muscle and loosing fat aint gonna happen" or something to that effect. I have personally experienced this. In 3 months I lost 35 pounds from riding my bike 20 miles 5 times a week and weight lifting! On a side note, I am an ex bodybuilder, so I did very effective movements and ate a lot of protein. I kept a close watch on my arm and leg measurements. I lost 3/4 of an inch on my bicep, however my quads grew a little because of the biking. And for the first month I didn't loose a whole lot! So, hang in there. You are probably building muscle and don't even know it. It's not a bad thing either, because the more muscle you have the more fat you burn!

 

[organism]

First of all I'd like to appologise that this took me so long to respond. It means alot to me that you all took the time to respond and I feel kinda bad it took me this long to respond, haha. What happened was, my dad found a virus on our computer and in trying to fix it, my dad messed up and completey reset the computer, deleting everything. After about a week of him not caring to fix it (we had no internet) he decided to call my uncle, who's a wiz at computer. Uncle took the computer for another week, and by the time we got it back, I'd forgotten about my post on here entirely.

Secondly ... exercise is important for all kinds of reasons and will aid in weight loss, but 80% or more of losing weight is about what you eat. If you eat more calories than you're burning, you won't lose weight. Period. There's no way around that. And most people simply cannot exercise 1000 calories a day off of their bodies ... not unless you plan to spend multiple hours working out every day and most normal people can't do that.

Well, I think I'm eating decently. I'll get on one of those sites you mentioned and log everything so I can give you a deffinate number of calories I take in per day. Something thats wierd though, is I've boosted up my workouts, and I'm still seeing no change. Let me rephrase that, I saw a slight change, and now its stopped.

I've been doing a combination of elliptical and treadmill, about a half hour of each. I go 4 miles total and burn around 700 calories now. Maybe 3 days ago the scale said 202.5, now it's back up to 209. I don't know what I'm doing wrong because I thought pushing myself harder should be giving me better results. Apart from my changed schedule (school started) I havn't really changed my eating habits. I'll try and break things down to make it easier for you to give advice.

-Breakfast is cereal and skim milk-220 calories.
-Lunch is normally something like half a sandwich, some cottage cheese, grapes/apple/carrots/whatever fruits or veggies we have-hard to guess but I'd have to say something like 500 calories.
-Then for dinner it varries; some nights my mom feels like making something healthy, other nights she orders a pizza or some other garbage food (I've told her that I'm dead set on losing weight, and she says she wants to too, but always reneges on her part. It's really hard trying to do something when I'm the only one in the house wanting to do it and my two overweight parents don't seem all that supportive. Actually, instead, my mom gets upset with me because of my not getting results. She's yelled at me several times now over god knows what telling me that I'm pathetic and don't listen to her.) I guess an ideal meal would be something like grilled chicken that I cut up and put in a salad with a piece or two of corn on the cob(no butter)-another 500-600 calories? Then throughout the day I probably have a small snack like a fiber-one bar or another piece of fruit. Idk. So probably a total calories would be 1300-1400?

I'll start one of those food journals and update on that once I get it going.

With my schedule though, I don't think that I'm eating correctly. I wake up at 6am to eat breakfast, then go all day with nothing, until I get home at 3pm and have lunch. In between there is school, and I have no time to eat. Teachers don't want you eating during class, apparently it's "disruptive." So I'm worried that in between there my metabolism is doing nothing (Am I wrong in thinking that? I thought you had to eat a bunch of small meals to keep your metabolism going and surely going from 6am to 3pm is not good, but I don't see any way around it.) Then I do my homework and when my dad gets home at 5 we go for a drive for about an hour (trying to get my liscense). Then normally we have dinner around 6 or 7pm, and then at about 9-10:30 I "workout."

Another thing - lift weights. Yeah yeah yeah .. you don't want to get bulky. Got that part. But lifting weights isn't going to make you bulky. You have to work your ass off to bulk ... and eat more calories and load up on protein. What lifting weights will do is help you to maintain the muscle you have and build strength. It will help increase your metabolism not just for the period you're working out (the way cardio does) but for the periods you're at rest as well. Lifting weights is a really really good way to kick up your fat loss and help reshape your body.

I do do a few weight lifting things, but I'm not sure if I'm doing the right amount. Generally I do certain parts of the body a certain night, for example, one night is arms, another is legs, another is core; rinse and repeat. I do bench press, and a few other things I can't think of the names of, like to workout biceps, pecs, trapezious, deltoids, and forearms. My dad has a little excercise book that came with his weight set that has different workouts that you can do and a description of how to do it correctly as well as the areas that it works.

I know you'll probably tell me to go to the sticky's for advice on how to do weight lifting correctly, but I've got one question. With my goals in mind, that is, to not get bulky, should I follow the women's guide to weight lifting, rather then a mens? I know it may sound wierd to say, but I don't really want a "man's" body. That is, I want to be slim yet a little defined; not a massive six pack and arms the size of a normal persons leg.

So yeah, could you tell me if I should follow the women's guide to weight lifting that is sticky'd or can you point me in the direction of a thread saying what resistance exercises I should be doing?

First of all, do you have a target weight that you want to achieve?

Well, my when I asked my doctor a few weeks ago at my checkup (the thing you need before school starts) he looked at some chart and said for my height, age, all that stuff, that I should be around 130-140. Those numbers sound great to me, but honestly if I could get down to 160 or 150 even I would be happy as can be.

In 3 months I lost 35 pounds from riding my bike 20 miles 5 times a week and weight lifting! !

Excuse my french, but how the hell did you ride for 20 miles in 1 go?? If I'm lucky and work my ass off, between eliptical and treadmill, I can only get up to 4 miles a night!

Also, I'd like to say that my mom has hypothyroid, meaning I may too? I'm trying to get her to take me to the doctors to get me tested, because I feel like I am doing all of what I should be doing to be getting at least some results, but I haven't gotten anything, still. Testing positive for it would be a relief for me, because I'm at a loss. I feel like I'm killing myself after I'm done working out and like it's all for nothing, so testing positive might mean I'm doing things right but the problems with my body are causing the lack of results. By all means it's never good to find out you've got something like hypothyroid, but if it means I'm doing things right but my body is holding me back, then I'd feel much better.

Also Also, I was wondering what I can do to enhance my excercises.

I've been doing about an hour and a half a night.

Thats:

~5 minutes stretching and getting in the "mindset" - Haha, yes, that's probably not normal but it helps me.
-30 min's on treadmill at 3.5.-4.0 mph (2 miles) ~250 calories
~5 minute break
-30 min's on elliptical with changing resistaces (I do a programmed workout on the elliptical) (another 2 miles) ~400-450 calories if I go as hard as I can
-Then I do some resistance weight training

Thank you

 

[KaraCooks]

No problem about the response. I'm glad you got your computer fixed.

Ok, this is probably going to be a long response, but I want to make sure I cover everything.

Well, I think I'm eating decently.

If I had a dime for every person who told me they "think" they're eating well and really aren't, I'd be able to pay off my car. Most people have no idea what they're really eating - either in terms of calories or nutrients. Most people really don't understand clearly what "healthy" is actually - no one is ever really taught anything beyond the food pyramid, and sometimes not that.

I'm glad you're going to register and log your food. I think you'll be surprised by the results.

Ok, given what you describe as your meals:

-Breakfast is cereal and skim milk-220 calories.
-Lunch is normally something like half a sandwich, some cottage cheese, grapes/apple/carrots/whatever fruits or veggies we have-hard to guess but I'd have to say something like 500 calories.
-Then for dinner it varries; some nights my mom feels like making something healthy, other nights she orders a pizza or some other garbage food

There are SO many variables here. What kind of cereal? How much? How do you measure? Sandwich - store bought or homemade? What goes in it? Mayo or butter? Full fat cottage cheese or lowfat? Dinner is the big one there - most people don't realize that a single slice of pizza from a delivery place is over 250 calories. For example, one slice of a medium pepperoni pizza from Pizza hut is 290 calories. So unless you're limiting yourself to one single slice, you're probably getting a lot more calories than you think.

The problem is that most people guess about their calories. Most people vastly underestimate their calories - and I include myself in that group. I know that if I don't actually track and measure what I eat, I will easily consume 2500 calories in a day without even thinking about it.

With my schedule though, I don't think that I'm eating correctly. I wake up at 6am to eat breakfast, then go all day with nothing, until I get home at 3pm and have lunch. In between there is school, and I have no time to eat. Teachers don't want you eating during class, apparently it's "disruptive." So I'm worried that in between there my metabolism is doing nothing (Am I wrong in thinking that? I thought you had to eat a bunch of small meals to keep your metabolism going and surely going from 6am to 3pm is not good, but I don't see any way around it.)

Whole buncha issues here.

First of all, eating multiple times a day does nothing to keep your metabolism going. The whole concept of eating multiple times or eating and snacking is to keep people from starving themselves all day and then binging when they do get around to eating.

Ok, that said, I am having a hard time believing that you go to a school where you don't have a lunch break. Are you really saying that there is NO time between 6 a.m. and 3 p.m. that you are given to take a break and get something to eat? When I went to high school (granted, back in the days of dinosaurs) we were allowed to have a lunch break.

I do do a few weight lifting things, but I'm not sure if I'm doing the right amount. Generally I do certain parts of the body a certain night, for example, one night is arms, another is legs, another is core; rinse and repeat.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Your body does not work one muscle at a time, so don't exercise it one muscle at a time. Full body movements - squats, lunges, pushups, chinups, presses, dips, all of those kinds of full body and compound movements are what you want to be doing. Working out only your arms or only your legs is a waste of time and can cause you to build imbalances in your muscles.

I know you'll probably tell me to go to the sticky's for advice on how to do weight lifting correctly, but I've got one question. With my goals in mind, that is, to not get bulky, should I follow the women's guide to weight lifting, rather then a mens? I know it may sound wierd to say, but I don't really want a "man's" body. That is, I want to be slim yet a little defined; not a massive six pack and arms the size of a normal persons leg.

It doesn't work that way. You can't get "bulky" unless you work your ass off to do it. You don't get "bulky" lifting weights properly and reasonably and there is no "girls way" vs. a "guys way". People who know what they're talking about understand that lifting weights is lifting weights - male or female both do it the same. You lift using your full body or compound movements. You lift heavy to build muscle and strength. And you don't waste your time with BS "girl" stuff like lifting light and using lots of reps. That's not weight lifting, that's just more cardio and endurance.

READ THE STICKY. You'll learn about weight lifting and won't have these false ideas going around in your mind.

Lifting weights properly will give you the look you want. It will help you burn fat, and build that lean and fit look that you want. Yes, you'll build some muscle ... but you're not going to become some muscle bound, bulked up, steroid freak just by doing proper compound weight lifting.

Excuse my french, but how the hell did you ride for 20 miles in 1 go?? If I'm lucky and work my ass off, between eliptical and treadmill, I can only get up to 4 miles a night!

You cannot compare walking to riding a bike. That's like asking someone how the hell they drove 100 miles when you only walked 5. The loop around the lake here is 12 miles and I rode it just last week at a leisurely pace. No sweat. A lot of very serious bike riders will do 50 or more miles in a day. Don't get effort and distance confused. Distance has no meaning except in relation to your own abilities.

Also, I'd like to say that my mom has hypothyroid, meaning I may too?

Don't beg trouble. It's highly highly highly unlikely that you have thyroid issues. Everyone wants there to be an easy answer - "oh I'm genetically programmed to be fat" or "oh I have thyroid issues" or whatever.

There's a saying in the medical profession - they call it the Zebra Rule. It says if you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras. Until you've determined 100% by actually counting your calories, monitoring your nutrients, and doing effective working out (not just "killing yourself" w/out knowing what you're doing), you can't just jump straight to looking for zebras (thyroid issues).

Also, I was wondering what I can do to enhance my excercises.

Several people have already told you want you can do. Read the sticky posts. It'll teach you a lot about what you need to be doing. More weights, less treadmill and elliptical.

I know .. I know. You're young and you want everything to happen NOW. It doesn't work that way.

Read the sticky posts.
Log your meals online and start learning about what you're eating.
Start off eating around 2500 calories a day and work to get 1g of protein per pound of your goal body weight - for you, around 140g per day.
Skip the starchy food - only eat whole grains, oats, etc.
Make sure you're eating some healthy fat every day (olive oil, avocado, nuts and seeds)
Lift weights. Then add cardio as necessary to burn more calories.

If you educate yourself - READ THE STICKY POSTS - you'll be in a good place to lose the weight you want to lose and be healthy your entire adult life.

 

[Cord the Seeker]

I don't have anything to add that Kara didn't cover, so all I will say is:

yeah, listen to Kara.

Oh, and read the stickies.