So fed up

[wendywoo66]

I have been dieting since 2/01/17. I have been eating about 1200 calories a day by cutting out bread and sugar. I have been eating healthy meals and making lots of home made veg soups with nothing added. I don't understand why I am not losing weight. I eat sweets at a weekend but haven't had any takeaways or anything else that is bad for me. I have been trying to exercise more and am just so confused as to why I've only lost about six pounds in two months. I am 53 and work in an office. I am going on holiday in four weeks and need to lose at least another stone.

[wendywoo66]

Does this mean that I should not eat sweets at all ?

[wendywoo66 in reply to wendywoo66]

I am willing to give it a go I can over do it sometimes.

[YellowRose55]

Hi wendywoo66

I know this will sound funny but your not eating enough. 1200 calories is too low and your body is holding onto fat and going into starvation mode. If you up your calories to the recommended 1400 calories or you can personalise it by using the BMI checker you will start to see a change.

Have a good week.

Rose

[Hidden]

You might need to eat more calories.

[Pineapple27]

You say that you are eating healthy meals.... but portion size is sometimes what causes the problem.

When I started my weight loss journey and weighed out how much I was eating and how many calories were in it, I could see why I was so large! For example, if you make a healthy salad and add an oil based dressing or a spoonful of mayonnaise, you may be adding the amount of calories in the salad all over again!

If you eat quiche (for example) or other pastry, that has HUGE amounts of calories, as does pizza (even if you only had salad with it). Always worth checking what a "portion size" is as given on food packaging. Turning back to pizza, my hubbie would easily eat a whole pizza to himself, but a portion size is usually only half or a quarter.

What do you eat for breakfast? If you are eating starchy cereal or bread, it is also going to raised insulin levels (as per Hidden 's post). Try swapping to whole milk yogurt with some frozen berries, eggs in some form, kippers 9if you like them). As well as being packed with lots of protein and other nutrients that are good for you, it will keep you feeling fuller for longer.

Finally, check out those sweeties for how many calories they contain! You may get a big shock! Again, if you go too crazy, it would be quite possible to undo all of your good efforts of the week in one sitting..... I used to eat a bag of roasted luxury nuts over a weekend - which I now know were horrendously high!

tesco.com/groceries/product... Look at this example. A 350g bag. Not huge and I could eat in one sitting. However, per 25g, they are 148 calories. There are not many nuts in 25g! That means the whole bag was 14 portions x 148 = 2,072 calories - more calories than I should eat in a whole day!

The main reason I managed to succeed at the ripe old age of 49 to lose 4.5 stone was logging every single thing that entered my digestive system and being honest with myself in owning up to just how many calories I was eating. Once I addressed that, the rest was simple!

Hope this helps. Try logging the food you eat for just a couple of days. You can use an on-line food diary such as myfitnesspal. If you can do that for two days, you will quickly identify where you are going wrong.....

Having said all of that, 6lbs in 2 months is about average. A good healthy loss is about a pound a week. I lost my weight over 2 and a half years, and on average that worked out to half a pound a week.... the main thing was that I kept on going, even when my weight went up!

You are at the danger point now (8 weeks) where most people give up on trying to lose weight. Please take it from me, it's worth putting the effort in for the massive difference it can make to the rest of your life.....

healthunlocked.com/nhsweigh...

[Hidden]

Hi I think trying to lose at least 1 and a half stone in 3 months is unrealistic if you want to keep it off. If you think about it that is 7lbs a month which is a lot to lose, or nearly 2lbs a week.

I hope you are eating breakfast (a healthy one) that will keep you full until lunchtime. You must beware, like others have said, of eating too little. If your body is not getting enough calories it will lower your metabolism to try and store them which defeats the object. So it gets a lot harder to lose weight - it's a vicious circle and it is this which leads to yo-yo dieting.

Try and limit the sweets and go for a brisk walk in your lunch hour at work.

[HubbysMissMouse]

When I first joined this site I was eating less calories than the main NHS bmi calculator was telling me to go because I was trying to go to 1200 calories which the MyFitnessPal was telling me to go to as I thought the less calories would work better for me. I was informed by someone else on the site that this was the wrong thing to do because by having less calories your body thinks you are starving it and turns the calories you do eat into body fat to be able to keep it going. Fats weigh more which is why your body ends up putting on weight when you generally try to eat less. Now I eat around the middle amount that the bmi calculator tells you to eat and I am managing to eat more and am losing weight most weeks. Good luck with all this.

[Hidden]

6lbs in 2 months is pretty good weight loss in my book! I've been sticking to calories (apart from last week, which was a bit of a blip) and I've only lost 2lb in the last 2 months. Admittedly, I am on a bit of a plateau, having lost a stone before that. You aren't going to be at your goal by holiday, but you have taken a good chunk out of it and you should get there by summer at least.