Your level is pretty much what I expected based on what you are saying there. Thank you for the detail. The point of what I have said is to prepare you for less miserable training, my normal rule is if you hate it drop it but with limited resources and a low start point I am afraid distraction is a better system for the moment. Only really weird lunatics like me simply enjoy doing cardio, and with the closing of assylums we are mostly care in the community now. The majority find it mind numbingly dull and use music etc.
Weight change is a tough one to guage well and I normally advise against using scales to assess progress unless you are competing in a weight class. This is not easy, especially as the first question everyone asks is 'how much weight have you lost?'
The complications are due to four main things, calorific reality, fat weight, muscle weight and water weight.
You want to lose fat, and that is really light stuff so a few pounds lost will easily be hidden behind a small gain in muscle which is heavier than fat, and a bit of water which is really heavy. If you want a really simple demonstration of how the three things weigh in compraitively put a chunk of raw lean meat and a blob of lard in some water. Both will float lard more than meat showing comparitive weight.
1 pound of fat is 3,500 calories, so losing 1 pound of fat in a week means having used an average 500 calories more than you have consumed every day in that week, 2 pounds is 1,000 calorie difference a day and in all honest as far as you will likely ever get on safe maintainable loss. You should be aiming for 1 to 2 pounds a week never more. This flies in the face of the quick fix diets telling you to lose substantially more in a week, but they aren't interested in helping you, just getting repeat business the below explains how well it works and why. I am picking on my least favourite, and worst form of quick fix diet, also the most used.
Low carb, high protein diet. How it works.
Protein, the magical food, you want weight gain, it will do it, weight loss, will do that too. Seems too good to be true, because it is. The body needs protein but only a set amount, in it's transportable form, amino acid, can degrade to become toxic ammonia in the body so excess needs to be either made safe or disposed of. To make it safe and useful the body will convert some of it to lipoproteins, a form of fat and store it for lean times. Anything that cannot be treated this way is converted to urea for safe disposal in the urine, this process uses 9 grams of water for every 1 or 2 of protein, so a lot of water gets lost when excess is high, producing instant weight loss, even though you have been putting away more fat stores. In a well balanced diet there will be some excess but very little and nothing the body will struggle with.
Low carbs diet is supposed to force the body to process fat instead of carbohydrate for energy. Reality is the body views this as a sign of lean time and will want to hold onto it's fat more tightly to ensure survival. While it will burn some fat it will be more inclined to catabolise muscle tissue, literally breaking down muscle for energy, if it is deemed non-essential it will be catabolised, and the more dramatic the carb cut the more muscle will be destroyed for survival. Muscle is very heavy due to being 75% water so there is yet more sudden weight loss.
One really good point a person raised when I pointed these parts out was how it couldn't be a case of water loss as the diet told them to drink lots of water. Without the minerals needed to keep water in the body this is simply flushed out, the removal of damaged tissue etc. will use the increased water intake to make removal safer but the overall level of water leaving the body will be higher than entering it ont his diet. Consider I drink around 3 to 4 litres of water most days, if all of this was stored I would be the size of a house by now, it isn't so I am me.
The human animal is without doubt one of the most pathetic land dwellers regarding water loss. We will die of dehydration at levels most land animals would hardly be thirsty, it is really that extreme. Small drops in the bodies water levels will only be tolerated for a short time.
The body uses many things to guage metabolism only a few are diet based. The main one is carb intake. We are designed for a diet getting most of it's calories from complex carbs so this makes sense. Prolonged reduction in carbs will send the body into starvation mode, where the metabolism will drop and you will crave sugars etc. with an all consuming passion, your body is telling you it needs energy and that you are starving to death even though in reality there is still food coming in. At some point you will give in, the alternative is hospitalisation, and few get that far, an extreme few have gone further and actually died, this diet really is that stupid.
To recap, you have lost weight, maybe a small amount of fat but possibly less than you have put back in store, broken down muscle, lost water to the level the body will start to consider itself at risk of dehydration, told your body there is not enough food coming in, made yourself lethargic and crave junk food to an extent you will almost certainly answer.
What happens next?
Water first. The body will have allowed the gradual dehydration for days or maybe a little over a week, but when it hits a warning level it will redress the balance and often hold a bit more to be safe. This will instantly increase weight causing a major psychological blow to the person dieting.
The craving for junk food with the dieter seeing the sudden weight increase means they give up and binge. The body will grab everything it can and send out a chemical thank you note for ending the carb starvation. It will then start preparations for the next lean time in the only way it knows, storing more fat than it had before, a process that has worked for millions of years.
The dieter blames the quick binge and their weakness for not sticking to the diet so starts again soon after. Guaranteed repeat business for the diet product companies, and who cares about the health of those using them when they are making money?
Using the diet above can result in seriously dramatic losses n weight but reality needs to be considered. I have used techniques to deliberately lose water to get into weight classes for a set day, it does work for that day or usually less.
The most I have lost unintentionally is 4 pounds on a night out dancing, a few days later all of this was back because it was virtually all water. For a moment let's pretend it wasn't and consider what would have needed to happen for it to have been fat loss.
The below is intentionally ridiculous, please bear with me.
Weigh in at 17:00 on day 1 showed a weight 4 pounds heavier than at 11:00 on day 2.
Was asleep from around 03:00 to 10:00 on day 2
1 pound of fat = 3,500 calories, 4 pounds of fat = 14,000 calories
Average daily consumption of calories at that time for me, due to training etc. 3,500 calories a day, around twice normal persons required intake.
This means that I would have burned around 2,000 calories within that time normally, average that ignores the fact 7 hours were sleep.
Therefore the dancing from 22:00 to 02:00 would have needed to be burning an additional 3,000 calories an hour for the loss to be fat.
The above is extreme and absurd but is used to put a point across. When you lose dramatic amounts of weight the chance of all of it being 100% fat are virtually nil. If you are thinking otherwise the shock of it going back up when the water you lost has returned will stop you continuing the diet. So even though you if your diet was well balanced you will have been losing fat all the way through including when your weight went up initially you will quit deeming it to have failed.
Above I showed the calorie differential required for losses of 1 or 2 pounds of fat in a week. There are diets where you may lose as much as 7 pounds in a week, some sensible could produce this inadvertantly. This would leave a differential of 3,500 calories a day for all to be fat, double the average required intake and totally unrealistic. However this loss could happen so be prepared for it and more importantly what happens next.
Let us assume you have achieved the maximum safe sustainable loss 2 pounds of fat in week 1 and continue to do so in week 2, basically best case scenario. That means you will have lost some lean mass in week 1 and probably at least 4 pounds of water with it.
Being uber positive again we will assume that in week 2 you lose no lean mass because youer training is perfect and the body wants to keep it all. But the water loss is not sustainable so 4 pounds of water comes back into the body, the math below simplifies this.
Week 1
Fat loss 2 pounds + lean loss 1 pound + water loss 4 pounds = Weight loss 7 pounds
Week 2
Fat loss 2 pounds + lean loss 0 + water return 4 pounds = Weight gain 2 pounds
As you can see you have done what you wanted both weeks, losing fat, but relying on the scales would make you think otherwise. What I describe could be seen as extreme but it is perfectly possible.
Eat balanced and marginally less than you need, not half measures, more like 90% of normal. Increase activity to go with this and you will either start losing body fat or prove how much you have been overeating by simply slowing or stalling the gain. Repeat this every few weeks until you are at optimum average safe loss and you will do well.
Fat is slow burning, and sustainable fat loss is equally slow. It's not what people want to hear, but everyone who has succeeded at losing a lot of weight has worked to this basic principal.
