New User - Having weight-loss troubles

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Kyupen

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Hey Everyone,

New user here. Looking for a support forum for my weight loss and hoping to find it here :)

A bit about me:

I'm a 24 year old female from Australia. Been trying to lose the pounds since October 2017 after a terrible time getting my measurements for my wedding dress. I have until July 2018 to get in shape and hopefully feel good about the photos of my wedding day, however my weight-loss journey so far has not been very successful. I suffer from Poly-cystic Ovarian Syndrome and its so hard to stay motivated when you just don't see the scale budge or you get that sudden hit of fatigue.

I have been overweight for most of my life, having tripled my size around the age of 12. I'm an active person ( i go to the gym about 4-5 hours a week, take part in sports such as soccer, and do about 30 minutes of walking per day). I currently weigh in at 89Kgs (196 pounds) and have been using a food diary for about 4 months.

Im hoping to find others with similar issues so that i can understand what has worked for them. Hoping something eventually clicks and the weight starts to fall off.
 
Welcome to the forum :)

I would suggest you start a thread in the diary section and post your food diary there so we can see where you may be going wrong. It is also where you will receive the most support.

ps. I will move this thread there for you :)
 
Welcome to the diaries Kyupen and congratulations on having found the person you want to spend the rest of your life with! I hope we'll be able to help you a little on your way.
Best of luck, LaMa.
 
Hi, Kyupen & welcome to the forum. PCOS makes it very hard to lose weight. Are you calorie counting? What would a "normal" day's eating for you look like?
 
Hey everyone,

I have been calorie counting since the end of October. My daily intake averages between 4,200 - 6,000 kilojoules (usually on the lighter end) and I do at least 1-1.5 hours of exercise everyday.

Typical meals for the day are:

Breakfast - Chobani yogurt - coconut (170g) - Im not a breakfast person, and use to skip it before i started dieting. Weekends i struggle and tend to just wait until lunch to eat.
Lunch - Heinz Vegetable, chili lentil soup with pepper (300g)
Dinner - Variety, makes up most of my daily intake but always includes steamed vegetables (on average, this makes up between 2000-3000 kilojoules).

I dont snack, i drink between 2L-3L of water per day, and when I want something sweet I make myself some tea (and then proceed to forget about it).

I have done my best to remove pasta, bread and rice from my diet (only having it on some occasions) and increased my intake of grilled chicken and salads. I incorporated weight training about 2 months ago.

Not sure what i'm doing wrong here, but my most recent health checkup showed I had no deficiencies or health problems (ie no thyroid issues) other than my PCOS.
 
4200-6000 kilojoule would be around 1000-1400 kcal. That is a very low amount for such a long period of time and should normally have seen you lose weight at least short-term. Especially with all that activity thrown in. My best guess is that you ought to have been eating 50% more and still losing weight. What does your doctor say?
 
There really is very little reason to suspect that the laws of thermodynamics don't apply equally to everyone. PCOS is one of those things that has cause - effect confusion. It's difficult to pin down whether PCOS is a symptom of weight or weight is a symptom of PCOS, but the two seem to interact in a manner such that one exacerbates the other. Hormonal balances certainly affect the ability to mobilize fats/lipids and insulin resistance can result from unbalanced diets and inactivity. These factors may impact your basal metabolic rate and make it more difficult to maintain a negative thermodynamic balance but even people with low metabolic rates burn a significant proportion of the basal calories burned by people with more normal rates. You can't gain or maintain weight if you burn more than you eat. That's basic physics and pretty much all I'll claim to know. All the rest is an experiment of one with surmise based on anecdotal 'evidence'.

I too was cleared by a doctor's physical, but I had some further testing done by a compounding pharmacist and he identified several levels that were not in the optimal range. Vitamin D and B supplementation was recommended as well as selenium and iodine. He also recommended something further that would have required my physician's prescription that was not forthcoming, but could be impacted with exercise and nutrition. I'm not sure what impact the supplementation actually had, but I'm making progress.

I'm going to further suggest that the quality of food provided by the manufacturers and growers is laced with hormones, insecticides, mercury, sugar, salt, artificial colours and preservatives. A lot of the nutrition is removed by the processes to raise and deliver the goods. I believe that your best chance is to focus on quality and variety in your foods to ensure your body has the building blocks it needs to manufacture the chemical balance it needs to function and produce the hormones to restore health. Another significant factor I don't see discussed enough is the impact of adequate sleep on weight control.

I don't eat optimally, but pursue variety and make an effort to ensure a good portion of it is quality nutrition. I don't believe the calories claimed by cardio machines and don't trust calorie counting on the input side. What works for me is maintaining a nutritional baseline with of an oatmeal breakfast with blueberries and yogurt, eating a bit slower, rarely eating past satiety, not eating when I'm not hungry and getting plenty of sleep. I make sure I get a reasonable heart rate workout that is a consistent basis for calories burned and, even if it's not necessarily accurate, can discriminate between levels of activity from day to day. More activity is traded for the ability to access a greater quantity, translated into variety of foods to help ensure brain/body chemical balance and general well being.

You may want to review and reassess your caloric input and your levels of physical activity because the numbers don't match with thermodynamics and there is likely an error in your measurements or assumptions.
 
Hale is right, Vit D levels have the potential to have an effect on your weight loss, most GPs here in aus generally won't check D level but deficiency is common, I have to supplement it a lot due to not producing it even with sun exposure and tracked by my doctor.

http://www.touchendocrinology.com/articles/impact-vitamin-d-weight-loss


you may be getting 1-1,5 hours of exercise but intensity makes a difference also no amount of exercise will make up for a bad diet.
 
I will ask about my vitamin D levels when i visit my GP next, but I would say my exercise is fairly solid (my heart rate goes above 190 every session) and my diet is the same as my family's (my mum and sister are both healthy size 8's). Its not that im not losing weight, its just that the rate at which i am losing it is excruciatingly slow (since my original post i have lost 0.1kgs). My GP has told me that its going to be really slow and continues to tell me to just focus on doing what im doing. If i had the funds to see a dietitian i would because my PT and I are at a loss as to why im not reaching my goals.
 
What is your bodyfat % and what does your exercise consist of ?

are you tracking your food in a tracking app ?

are you weighing your food ? (most people are terrible at estimating portion size)
 
Kyupen said:
I will ask about my vitamin D levels when i visit my GP next, but I would say my exercise is fairly solid (my heart rate goes above 190 every session) and my diet is the same as my family's (my mum and sister are both healthy size 8's). Its not that im not losing weight, its just that the rate at which i am losing it is excruciatingly slow (since my original post i have lost 0.1kgs). My GP has told me that its going to be really slow and continues to tell me to just focus on doing what im doing. If i had the funds to see a dietitian i would because my PT and I are at a loss as to why im not reaching my goals.
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How are your energy levels? If you can get your heart rate up to 190 for any length of time that is working pretty hard. More relevant to total caloric consumption is your average rate during exercise. Intervals at 190 might help burn post exercise.

Vitamin Bs are vital in energy availability but if you aren't experiencing a lack of energy, you probably don't have a deficiency. A slow thyroid may be a contributing factor but that reall only affects you total daily energy expenditure by a percentage factor that makes it a bit more difficult to shift the thermodynamic equation. I suspect a problem on the food input side of the equation. PCOS suggests that you can't base your consumption on what works for size 8 family members until you've made a dent in the weight.
 
I would say my energy levels are pretty good at the moment. I have days where my mental health isnt great and I tend to be less active because of lack of motivation, but my actual energy levels stay pretty much the same.

My body fat % last time i checked was 45.3% . My gym routine varies depending on how much time i have. A typical session for me is:

1. 10 minute warm up on the elliptical (burns about 120-150 calories based on the machine).
2. 45 minutes of weights ( i use all the machines in my gym, but tend to spend longer on my legs than on my arms and core).
3. 15-20 minute warm down on the treadmill (I walk at 6 speed for 3 minutes with the incline ranging between 4 and 11 and then run for 1 minute on 8 at an incline of 4 and repeat until the last few minutes where i just walk at incline 4 speed 5 - this tends to burn between 300-360 calories based on the machine).

When i have more time, i tend to focus on my cardio (because i have terrible lungs and i'm trying to get in shape for soccer season which starts soon).

Input as said before, im not sure whats wrong with it. Its getting to the point where I'm worried about everything and whether its actually helping me. Im on week 17 of my food diary (which also tracks the calories). I dont trust myself to weigh things, so i always go based on the kilojoules on the packaging.
 
Does your tracking app have the ability to show the nutritional details publicly, the would allow us to get a better idea of where changes need to be made.

your cardio for soccer should not be steady cardio, but interval training to better simulate the effort on the field, players I coach who are good at long slow cardio often struggle for fitness on the field. Also for soccer, more emphasis needs to be places on strengthening hamstrings more than quadriceps for injury prevention. your upper body and especially core is also very important for soccer so a list of exercises would help me point you in the right direction, quality of training for strength is more important than the time spent doing it, a short high quality training session is better than a long low quality session.

the cardio burn reported on machines is always more, often a lot more than the actual burn. with your bodyfat % don't eat back exercise calories.


PS. a little background, I am a qualified soccer coach among other things here in Australia and most of my time is spent either coaching soccer, coaching lifters or working at soccer as the senior sports trainer working with players not only for their current injuries but injury prevention and injury rehab. (this year will be slightly different as I have 4 month old baby)
 
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