Seemingly hit a plateau, or did I?

[Scottr080]

Hello, first time poster.

I guess to make a long story short, in the past 18 months or so, I went from around 240 lb down to 180, and really, most of that progress was made in the past year, since COVID hit.

Anyway, things have been going pretty great, but it seems like I'm stuck at around 180 lb, no matter what I do. I bought a stationary bike, and picked up my exercise from around 3 days per week to about 5, starting a month ago, and even though I'm tracking my calories with myfitnesspal, and I'm at a 400 to 500 calorie deficit everyday, I'm just bouncing from 180 to 183.

That all being said, I'm noticing that for the first time my abs are starting to poke out, and my general shape is changing, though my weight has been plateaued for the past month. Should I just keep my head down and keep doing what I'm doing? I've been patient for the better part of 2 years, so I don't mind waiting longer, but is there a certain point where your weight will be stubborn and stay put, but your body will still transform? Ideally, I would like to get down to around 150lbs. I've read here and there about giving your body a maintenance break for a couple of weeks, and then getting back at it. Is that a valid strategy?

And for some last details, I've been doing 16/8 IF, at around 1500 calories, with an almost completely vegan diet, aside from whey protein. I've been doing everything consistently for this entire time, aside from the whey protein which I just added a couple of weeks ago. 5'9", as well.

My only form of exercise has been (DDP) yoga and cycling. Not looking to "bulk up" or anything.

Included is a picture of where I started, and where I'm at, as of a couple of hours ago.

Appreciated-

 

[Llama]

At 1500 kcal you ought to be losing weight, but then you also ought to be in a bigger than 400-500 kcal deficit. I can see two possibilities: you've either been in a large deficit for so long your body is conserving energy wherever possible (are you cold, tired, do you notice you sit very still, possibly slumped, when not exercising rather than fidgeting a bit?) or your calorie count is off. 400-500 kcal are easy to fudge. Do you weigh your food, measure in cups and scoops, or estimate? Do you taste foods before measuring, sometimes try a bit from someone else's food, count liquid calories, count the protein powder? The lower your weight gets the harder it is to lose more.

 

[Scottr080]

At 1500 kcal you ought to be losing weight, but then you also ought to be in a bigger than 400-500 kcal deficit. I can see two possibilities: you've either been in a large deficit for so long your body is conserving energy wherever possible (are you cold, tired, do you notice you sit very still, possibly slumped, when not exercising rather than fidgeting a bit?) or your calorie count is off. 400-500 kcal are easy to fudge. Do you weigh your food, measure in cups and scoops, or estimate? Do you taste foods before measuring, sometimes try a bit from someone else's food, count liquid calories, count the protein powder? The lower your weight gets the harder it is to lose more.

Hmm, what do you figure the deficit should be? I have no problem making it bigger 400-500, I just want it to be effective. Some days I actually don't have an appetite, and have to force myself to bring it up to 500, haha. There are a couple of things that I could actively cut out from my daily diet. And I am usually pretty tired, but I just have lifelong sleep issues... Which also probably don't help things. Maybe I should look into taking one of those maintenance breaks that I was reading about.

I'm actually borderline obsessive about counting calories and weighing food/etc, so that's sort of why I've resorted to coming here, because I'm just not sure what to do at this point. Everything that I do is through myfitnesspal app, which of course may not be completely accurate by its nature. The only liquid that I consume is coffee, water, tea and whey protein. I haven't had alcohol in about 3 months.

Maybe it's my macro composition? By not eating meat and dairy, so the carbs are obviously skewing heavier. All complex. My macro breakdown yesterday was 42% carbs, 29% fat, 29% protein.

I appreciate your response, thanks.

 

[Llama]

500 kcal/day should equal a pound per week, which is a very respectable rate of loss, but most people aren´t meticulous about calorie counting and in that case 400-500 kcal of deficit are often in reality no deficit at all. That doesn´t seem to be the case for you though. Looks like you´re eating enough protein and fat, in which case it doesn´t really matter that you´re also having a good few carbs. You could of course further increase your deficit but you´re already quite low for an adult man and going even lower might make it hard to still meet your nutritional needs. Better sleep would probably help, but that´s easier said than done when you´ve been having trouble with that forever. Eating at maintenance for a couple of weeks might be interesting, see if it improves your sleep (my sleep goes bad when I´m in a deficit for a long time) and gives you more energy. Don´t know that it´d help you lose more weight necessarily but feeling better for a while isn´t a bad thing in and of itself.

 

[Scottr080]

500 kcal/day should equal a pound per week, which is a very respectable rate of loss, but most people aren´t meticulous about calorie counting and in that case 400-500 kcal of deficit are often in reality no deficit at all. That doesn´t seem to be the case for you though. Looks like you´re eating enough protein and fat, in which case it doesn´t really matter that you´re also having a good few carbs. You could of course further increase your deficit but you´re already quite low for an adult man and going even lower might make it hard to still meet your nutritional needs. Better sleep would probably help, but that´s easier said than done when you´ve been having trouble with that forever. Eating at maintenance for a couple of weeks might be interesting, see if it improves your sleep (my sleep goes bad when I´m in a deficit for a long time) and gives you more energy. Don´t know that it´d help you lose more weight necessarily but feeling better for a while isn´t a bad thing in and of itself.

Yeah, maybe I'll focus on trying to get better sleep. It's pretty messed up - like 5 hours per night during the week, and a little more on the weekend. But, that's a bit beyond the scope of this post.

Let me ask this, if you know: is a calorie deficit relative? Like, if my daily limit is typically 1500, but I burn 200c with exercise, so I eat ~200c extra, does it still count as the same deficit as if I had never exercised at all? The app I use actively adjusts the recommended amount of calories and nutrition, based off of the calories burned that I enter. I've attached a screenshot of my day, yesterday.

I'm sure that there's some kind of oversight that I'm making. Maybe my food measurements are off in the fitness app. I did switch it up recently.

Thanks again for the help.

 

[Llama]

Like, if my daily limit is typically 1500, but I burn 200c with exercise, so I eat ~200c extra, does it still count as the same deficit as if I had never exercised at all?

Theoretically yes, but figuring out how many calories you actually burn with any kind of precision is even harder than measuring food calories!

 

[Scottr080]

Theoretically yes, but figuring out how many calories you actually burn with any kind of precision is even harder than measuring food calories!

Damn, I thought I was doing good with the heart rate monitor thing, haha. I guess I've been taking all of these modern convenience measurements as gospel.

 

[Err2]

I have religiously tracked my calories (in & out) for over a year and have learned how easy it is to underestimate how many calories you eat while overestimating how many calories you burn. For example, my calorie tracking app says an apple has 95 calories, but when I looked up the nutrition data from the usda and weighed the apples I was eating I discovered they have between 120-190 calories. By law nutrition labels can be off 20% - and they usually are in whichever direction makes them more appealing to consumers.

Exercise calorie estimates are also wildly inaccurate. The biggest issue that many of them have is they include the calories you would have burned had you not done any exercise at all! For example, at my weight & body composition I burn a bit more than 1.5 calories per minute at rest. That means if I'm on the stair stepper for an hour, and it otherwise measures my calories perfectly, it'll claim I burned an extra 90-100 calories. And that's if it was otherwise accurate (its not). Fitbit regularly tells me I've burned 1,000 more calories than I actually have...

Another way we sometimes double count exercise calories is by telling the bmr calculator that we're very active which then estimates how many calories we burn at rest AND exercise. We then hop on the bike for our regular hour and think we burned even more when that was included in the estimate...

Also as you do the same exercise over and over, your body becomes more efficient at doing the work. When you first started cycling, your body might have been doing 150 watts to get 100 watts to your wheel. But you gradually waste less movement, your muscles themselves become more efficient so after 6 months of riding you might be doing 110 watts to put down 100...

In the long run it really doesn't matter as long as you are consistent. If you've held your weight steady for over a month at a certain calorie level and you still want to lose more, cut back a little extra. If you want to be a bit more obsessive about it, start measuring your body composition (a lb of fat is ~3500 calories while a lb of lean mass is ~700 calories). You can lose fat and gain muscle at the same time - especially when you're relatively new to that form of exercise...

 

[Scottr080]

I have religiously tracked my calories (in & out) for over a year and have learned how easy it is to underestimate how many calories you eat while overestimating how many calories you burn. For example, my calorie tracking app says an apple has 95 calories, but when I looked up the nutrition data from the usda and weighed the apples I was eating I discovered they have between 120-190 calories. By law nutrition labels can be off 20% - and they usually are in whichever direction makes them more appealing to consumers.

Exercise calorie estimates are also wildly inaccurate. The biggest issue that many of them have is they include the calories you would have burned had you not done any exercise at all! For example, at my weight & body composition I burn a bit more than 1.5 calories per minute at rest. That means if I'm on the stair stepper for an hour, and it otherwise measures my calories perfectly, it'll claim I burned an extra 90-100 calories. And that's if it was otherwise accurate (its not). Fitbit regularly tells me I've burned 1,000 more calories than I actually have...

Another way we sometimes double count exercise calories is by telling the bmr calculator that we're very active which then estimates how many calories we burn at rest AND exercise. We then hop on the bike for our regular hour and think we burned even more when that was included in the estimate...

Also as you do the same exercise over and over, your body becomes more efficient at doing the work. When you first started cycling, your body might have been doing 150 watts to get 100 watts to your wheel. But you gradually waste less movement, your muscles themselves become more efficient so after 6 months of riding you might be doing 110 watts to put down 100...

In the long run it really doesn't matter as long as you are consistent. If you've held your weight steady for over a month at a certain calorie level and you still want to lose more, cut back a little extra. If you want to be a bit more obsessive about it, start measuring your body composition (a lb of fat is ~3500 calories while a lb of lean mass is ~700 calories). You can lose fat and gain muscle at the same time - especially when you're relatively new to that form of exercise...

Thanks for the thoughtful response. It's given me a lot of things to consider. Had no idea about the calorie counter math.