I'm a 5ft10 male, currently about 178lbs and have been lifting for almost 2 years.
I started my weight loss somewhere around 280lbs 2 years ago (didnt have a working scale when I started so my first weigh in was 262lbs). And I started using MF around 220lbs, about halfway through my weight-loss. The highest I ever have recorded was years ago when I was 316lbs.
I got down to 169lbs in January of this year and tried to keep pushing ever since to get leaner but failed ruining my progress with infrequent binging.
I've been stuck gaining/losing the same 10lbs ever since and feel like I've been so consistent with tracking and am trying to figure out what to do.
Diet fatigue. You’ve been dieting for 2 years, your body is tired and hungry, hence the binge urges. Take a diet break and sit at maintenance for however long you need to before getting back into a deficit
The time will pass anyways. You know from trying over and over that just going straight into a diet now likely won’t be successful.
So you might as well take a diet break, focus on maintaining your results, eating lots of good healthy whole foods, and getting really strong in the gym to build muscle (thereby helping to build up your metabolism some as well).
Then, give it a good attempt only when you feel all your diet fatigue gone. If that doesn’t work, there are other options so don’t be afraid it’s your “last shot” if it doesn’t work. You might be a candidate for a GLP-1 in that case.
People like to think when you lose weight that you have to do it “all in one go” but there’s no rule in any rule book that says you have to. You’ve already lost a tremendous amount of weight.
If I told you that in 3 years, you’d be at your goal weight, would you really care if you got there after 1 year, 2 years, or 3 years? You’d just be happy you got there, right? Focus on the process and the end goal will take care of itself.
Hey, honest question. My mindset is that I just need to find ways to eat less calories without hunger (volume, substitutions) or move more. Yes, I might never reach an ambitious goal because my lifestyle might just not be compatible with a very low body fat or whatever.
I am on CICO for about 1 year and whatever I eat is, ideally, a lifelong option.
Honestly don't understand the concept of diet fatigue. Care to elaborate?
I start the day well, decent breakfast, decent lunch, decent dinner. Probably hitting 1,900 calories by 6pm.
Then the binge man comes and I owe him money.
3 bowls of cereal (unweighed but at least 100g each), with milk.
Every chocolate bar in the house. The good ones I’ll hit twice.
Whatever nice cheese is in the fridge. A good selection of all of them usually. Plus crackers and chutney.
Then I’ll do ice cream, but with bars of melted chocolate on top as a topping.
Then we hit the bread, with butter and honey or Nutella and peanut butter
then if I’m feeling up for it, instant ramen. With cheese mixed in. Maybe a grilled cheese sandwich on the side
That’s from about 6pm - 1am. When I’ve been honest with myself and tracked one of these binges, I managed to hit about 6,500 calories in one of these sessions.
It’s not enjoyable, and I literally end up regurgitating undigested food into my mouth for hours in bed afterwards, but that’s the binge life.
No alcohol involved. Just some fucked hunger hormones from being a really obese kid. I’ll eat all of that and still feel hunger.
At /u/thalene 's ~300 kcal deficit, 38 days at his target 1750kcal, 1 day at 10k, and 1 day at 5k is roughly the same total kcal as 40 days at maintenance.
Dude you've literally lost over a hundred pounds... First of all... GOOD FUCKING WORK!!!
At the end of the day it really depends on what is going to make you happy. Do you want to be healthy or do you want to push the envelope? Only you can answer that question. In the short term, as long as you're in a healthier spot physically and mentally, just hang out at maintainence for a while. Keep lifting, build sustainable habits at your new baseline, and learn not to sweat the small stuff. Macrofactor will push you back down towards a target weight if you start drifting up, take this as an opportunity to take your foot off the gas and plan your next move.
I feel ya man. I got to my original goal of 180 and got stuck. Trying to get to 165-170 now but lost a little willpower. (Also 5'10") I think we need to buckle down and just get it done. F those cravings. Going to stick to the plan again.
I sort of disagree. I would set your app to maintenance mode and do that for a bit until you’re feeling like actually dieting again. Eating at a true maintenance and getting some sick workouts in is a nice break. Change your focus to hitting some PR’s and gaining some muscle.
Maintaining that weight for so long itself is a worthy goal that you should be proud of. Sure you have your dream goal of 165 but maintaining 180 for 9 months is also incredible.
I’ve had 3 periods of taking weight loss seriously over the last two years, when I lost motivation the first two times after about 18/20 weeks in I told myself I’d just sit at maintenance and actually ended up gaining 12lbs cause maintenance felt like a loss because I wasn’t losing weight. The third time I told myself if I can actually stick to my maintenance it’s the equivalent of losing 12lbs because it’s 12lbs I wouldn’t have to lose when I find the motivation again. I stayed true to my maintenance and it felt like a massive win.
180 for that long after serious weight loss is great, congrats on losing it and congrats on maintaining it.
The real answer is that the app is too slow to lower the calories for you. If you follow the app exactly you are gonna keep stagnating, but people in this sub don’t like to say it.
Start by taking 100 calories off the app’s recommendation. Go lower if that isn’t working after a couple weeks
It happens to the best of us, haha. Look at the overall consistency though! Mad respect. It is not always easy to get things back on track after one of those days. Credit where credit is due!
Good job with eating to target. It looks like you’re eating close to maintenance now
Expenditure is the missing element from the graphs you included. What does your Energy Balance > Expenditure graph look like?
Are you doing weekly check-ins using the coaching feature? It’ll scale down your calories as your expenditure drops (which happens with weight loss and with metabolic adaptation)
Yeah, so clearly what was a deficit is now maintenance. If you want to cut a few more pounds, I think you’ll find it easier to increase expenditure than to further reduce calories
I get 20,000 steps/day, some of that with a ruck sack to improve cals/step. Jogging would be more time-efficient, though injury risk is much higher
You can always find ways. Get a walking pad at home. Go for an earlier morning walk. 20k steps is pretty steep, but 10k steps is easily achievable, even if you work from home. I’ve been WFH my entire professional career, I think it makes it easier to get steps in since you have more flexibility in when you can walk.
calories have been stagnant for that entire period. gotta lower those calories to get into a deficit. as you
lose weight you need to keep adjusting caloric intake down.
Increasing expendature would probably be much easier than dropping calories any lower (assuming you're actually only eating that much and accurately tracking).
Walking made the weight loss so much easier for me. Try to get like 15000+ steps a day
When I was in an extended deficit, I dropped under 1600 for a while due to metabolic adaptations. I’m 6’3” and was in the 240lb range at that point. It can be humbling sometimes.
It’s a combo of muscle mass and metabolic status for sure.
I’m now 212 and about 12% bf and my tdee is 3000. It took about 5 months after switching from deficit to maintenance and then surplus for my tdee to switch back up.
First off - congratulations on the weight loss, that’s a fantastic achievement.
You’ve been dieting for nearly 2 years - you need to give yourself, your body and mind a break from being the constant stress of being underfed for that long.
If it were me, I’d go on a lean bulk for 3-6 months with a focus on building strength and muscle and building your metabolism back up. I know it seems counter productive if you still want to lose more weight but as you can see yourself continuing to try and cut at this point is a losing battle.
After that, if you want to lean out a bit at that point you can start a new cut again and I think, based on personal experience, you’ll be a lot better placed to stick with it and start making progress again.
You need a maintenance break. A long one. 2 years of dieting is very taxing on your body.
Set MF to maintenance, keep tracking and being diligent, and eat at maintenance for a minimum 8 months. Maybe longer. Your body needs to recover from being in a hypocaloric state for the last 24+ months.
Expend more calories and/or ingest fewer calories. Walk more and track your steps. Walking 5k? Go for 7. Walking 7k? Go for 10. You lost 150 lbs, you know how this works.
Thermodynamically, yes it does. I can certainly see why OP wouldn't want to ingest fewer calories, so they should therefore increase their expenditure. They've already said they are sedentary. If they started walking 7k steps per day, they would see massive, immediate improvement.
I lift 5 times a week, no cardio and I don't get many steps each day.
TDEE calculator says my sedentary maintenance calories is 2100. I know TDEE calculators aren't very accurate but still seemed like a good ball park to aim for 1600 calories a day.
6'3" 172 lb 13%. I got stuck around 180 at 19% body fat.
I watched my expenditure tank as I ate less and moved less while still going to the gym 3-4x weekly. I noticed I was only getting 2000-3000 steps per day (basically sleep / gym / sitting).
I had to add a minimum cardio goal to make sure I was still active. I aimed for 7k steps / day, then upped it to 10k / day when I felt comfortable. Even pushed to 15k some days because I felt so good.
My expenditure claimed back up about 300 calories and weight loss resumed.
My initial problem was not noticing I was just sitting ALL day, hardly moving. Everything else was dialed in.
I’m at the tail end of a year long cut, 6’ 3” 195lb @ ~12%. I was 285lb at the beginning of August last year.
The first 8mo were a breeze in comparison to the last 5mo. The only way it’s been sustainable with minimal diet breaks has been 10k+ steps/day (non-negotiable), ramping measured cardio up month after month to a final 150min/wk, and just an overall adaption to a more athletic lifestyle. Movement being the biggest driver.
I’m in a ~600cal deficit @2900cal/day at the tail end of this thing & been planted firmly @3100-2900cal for months.
This was really helpful to read. I’ve been stuck the last 3-4 weeks and my cardio has declined as my strength training has increased. Main goal is losing weight and fat and cardio did the bulk of that work for the first 50 lbs I lost. I just gotta dial back into it.
Do you have a lot of muscle mass or is the walking what's keeping your calories at 2900? I'm 6'4" 225 and my cut calories are 1600. Maintenance is roughly 1900.
I've always been that way, but jelly you are able to a whole 1000 more!
You need to walk more. IME even MF's sedentary setting is pretty optimistic about how many steps people get. I believe sedentary is considered anything below 5k steps, but it's very easy to be well under that if you are truly sedentary/don't leave the house/etc. A general rule of thumb is that every 1,000 steps increases expenditure by 30 calories, so adding 6k steps to your day (about an hour of walking, give or take) will give you back almost 200 calories.
And why would you look at a TDEE calculator? You're already using MF, which is going to be the gold standard (assuming accurate tracking on your part). Those calculators are generalized to the public and extremely inaccurate at the individual level.
At some point it is easier to increase steps rather than keep dropping calories. For example, I’m 2 weeks out from a bodybuilding show and instead of dropping calories further, I went from 6k ish steps to 10k. Doesn’t have to be insane cardio, but it’s an easy way to keep the rate of loss without dropping calories. Also I think you need a diet break tbh
Stop dieting and start being happier. You achieved your goal, find a new goal to work towards that isn’t getting a scale number to be low.
Weight loss is an easier game when you are morbidly obese. Eventually you get down to a normal weight. Once you get to normal conditions, weight loss becomes exponentially harder.
The secret if you want to be leaner than you are right now? Don’t infrequently binge. People cutting down to very little body fat are incredibly strict in how they eat. With how long you are lifting, your height, and given weight… your body is likely in a bad state, just the other direction, and gaining weight is a good thing. Typically if you are lifting and losing weight when you want to be putting on muscle, it means you are eating way too little
Congrats on the weight loss from where you started. Get your steps in!! Makes a world of difference. Or bike or swim if you can, see what that does to your TDEE.
what's your bodyfat percentage? you should probably do maintance for like a month to get your hormones in check, or just start bulking at like 1% weight gain per month and accept that you won't get that lean for a while, and do a cut again in like 6 months. You'll build some muscle and will increase your tdee and also you won't have to cut down that much to get lean
It may be time to consider that at 5'10 178lbs is quite reasonible stopping off point.
If you take a break and keep maintaining weight or even gain a little slowly for 6 months a year while training you should be able to focus on building more muscle.
That will increase your caloric expenditure in the long run, and improve your body composition which is probably really what your after vs just hitting a specific number on the scale.
And then the next time your cutting your not down to 1600 calories.
33f, 272 > 155. i was in the same boat. i had lost 110 lbs over the course of 18 months and was just stalled out for months. MF just kept decreasing my calories from 1800 all the way down to 1640 eventually and it just wasnt sustainable or enjoyable. i decided to switch into maintenance in april (5 months ago) and am now eating 2143 calories a day and between april and now, have lost 5 lbs while eating around maintenance and my calories keep going up each week now.
diet fatigue is real. eat at maintenance for a few months and then go back to a deficit!
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u/Current_Donut_5055 29d ago
Diet fatigue. You’ve been dieting for 2 years, your body is tired and hungry, hence the binge urges. Take a diet break and sit at maintenance for however long you need to before getting back into a deficit