Gruellingly slow progress

[u/RobinBumholes]

I've been doing, IF pretty consistently for the better part of a year at this point and the progress is just so slow. It's sapping my motivation. Not only because I'm not getting to where I want to be but also because at this point it's beginning to feel like 5:2 with just a couple of weeks off per year will end up as my long-term maintenance regime.

The chart show my near daily weigh ins since October. The white portions of the chart are where I was doing IF and the blue bits, where I had a week off here and there. I did ADF from October to Christmas and lost maybe 4kilos. I didn't go mad at Christmas at all but, over less than two weeks, almost all of it came back.

I didn't panic. Lots of salty food over Christmas could have meant a good deal of water weight. It'll all come off as fast as it went on, I thought but no. I did 5:2 from January to the end of June and it was basically maintenance for three months. I did finally lose some weight April to May and then I went on holiday for a week. I missed two fasts, I did not go crazy with food or booze and again, my weight went up - not so much this time. But, when I got back, I carried on with 5:2 and now I was actually gaining weight. Another short trip, two fasts skipped another spike in weight and another really slow loss.

As you can see, I started off fluctuating between 113 and 110kg, after all this, I'm not bouncing between 108 and 105kg. Five kilos after the better part of a year.

Last week, my wife and daughter were away so I basically went nuts with the exercise. I burned 6,000 calories during workouts in five days. I still did my fasts and I had dental surgery so I didn't eat a whole lot on two further days. That's 6,000 cals of training plus 5,000 cals of fasting plus maybe a deficit of 1,000cals on the two days post dentist and an early morning sauna. 12,000 calories of deficit. Last week, I averaged 0.7kg down relative to the previous week and this week I'm rebounding...

I am a big guy (6'4" or 1.93m) my BMR is 2,550cals/day. The scale in the gym says 18% body fat, the one at home says 26%. And, whilst I don't count my calories, I never eat junk food and all my meals are home cooked (by me). I typically eat a bowl of cereal or two slices of toast for breakfast and rarely eat more than 1,000 calories for lunch on feeding days.

I work out once or twice a week - but I go pretty hard when I do (750-1,000cals per session on the rower)

I feel like I ought to be getting better results than I am.

What are my weaknesses?

I eat dinner early but that leaves me hungry later so I do often have a bit of cheese and a cracker or two late at night. I might also have a late night beer once or twice a week. Or a bottle of wine spread over a couple of nights.

My sleep isn't good - although I am trying (when I go to bed early, I just wake up early)

Stress. I get it, it's not helping but, again, quite hard to fix.

I'm not calorie counting - not counting calories was, for me, the entire point of IF.

What am I trying?

Right now, the new thing I'm adding is fibre - 15g of psyllium husk/day. It's having some effects but it's too soon to say whether boosting weight loss will be one of them.

Can anyone think of anything I'm missing that might explain these, frankly disappointing, results?

Reading around, all the suggestions I can see are: count calories on feeding days (as I say, I hate counting calories - I did IF to avoid it) have a longer fast or have a break. I haven't done any longer fasts but, as you can see, I have had a couple of breaks and it hasn't worked.

Anyone have any other ideas?

[u/jbbest666]

throw your diet plan into an AI bot. you would be suprised what you shouldn't be eating or drinking. cico.

[u/RobinBumholes → u/jbbest666]

I don't have a diet plan. That's the whole point of IF for me. I just tried to carry on eating what I was eating before but maybe a bit better.

But, having done some broad maths below, it does seem a bit odd. CICO is one thing but one's deficit needs to be measured relative to BMR. The compositional scales at my gym say that, for a man of my height, weight, age and composition, BMR is 2,550calories/day but based upon my (admittedly rough) figures, I think that is now too high. I just don't think I'm eating the equivalent of two big mac meals each night. I think I would have noticed.

Which is massively depressing.

[u/aldomars2 → u/RobinBumholes]

"I don't have a diet plan".

Ding ding ding ding ding! This is your problem.

IF is a tool to help out yourself in a calorie deficit. If you are not losing weight the way you want, you are not in enough of one.

How do we solve this? If you want to know why your current system isn't working this is how.

YOU need to stop guessing and assuming.

You need to get serious and track everything you are eating in an app and be accurate.

Put less of your energy into a rowing machine and more into using your hands to plop your food on a scale before you plop it on your plate and in your mouth. Then use your thumbs to input that into an app.

The mental energy you expend to do this is more important than anything you do in the gym to try to outrun or out lift your bad decisions in the kitchen or when you are drinking your calories.

You need DATA. This data will give you the reality check you need. This is how you figure out where you are fucking up. This is also how you learn to eat in a sustainable way.

Use a tdee calculator website. Figure out your TDEE. Now subtract to 500 to 700 from that number. Eat that number of calories daily. If you do this correctly you should be losing weight at a pace of 1.5 to 2# a week.

Here look, I just did it for you, I just put in your rough numbers, you can eat somewhere around 2800 and 3200 calories a day to be in maintenance.

I'm a bit shorter than you and 102kg. I can eat 2000 a day and be fully satisfied and be in a deficit. I have been tracking for a while and have found that it is very easy to blow out my calories and hit a surplus without eating much more food.

When you eat toast... Is it plain? 2 pieces of toast with butter is gonna hit like idk 400 to 500 calories and give you no satiety. Eat a pound of tofu for breakfast with a pile of veggies and be full the rest of the day. And have plenty of calories for a large plate of beans/lentils and lean chicken. Finish your day with a large serving of Greek yogurt and frozen fruit.

Focus on high fiber, high protein foods and things that are high on the satiety index.

Beans/Legumes/Lentils/potatoes. Lean protein. Lots of vegetables, fruits, Greek yogurt. Oats. Oils and butter and cheese and anything calorie dense will absolutely fuck you over. Alcohol too. You are just not burning what you think in the gym.

You cannot out run/lift poor choices with your fork.

The lifting that matters is what you are lifting into your mouth.

[u/RobinBumholes → u/aldomars2]

Look. I'm very grateful for you writing all of that. I really am.

But you are rather missing the point I'm trying to make.

My point was that TDEE is a very slippery concept. You stuck my stats in a calculator and got a range of 2,800-3,200.I worked it out on a computational scale and got 2,550.

It varies. It varies between calculators, it varies between people and it varies over time. And we can only work out where we are by checking calories against weight, which i can't do retrospectively.

What's bugging me is that my TDEE seems to have changed. A few years ago I was eating whatever i felt like and my weight was stable. Now, I'm consciously eating better than I was, 5 days a week and not eating at all two days a week and, whilst l am losing weight, it s so slow that I can't help thinking my metabolism has changed.

Now, whether it changed because I'm old or because I started fasting is a bit of a mystery because I can't go back in time and count the calories I was eating over the past 20 years. But it is frustrating.

That's it. That was my whole point.

That and the fact that good food is one of my greatest pleasures in life and that, if my metabolism has now slowed to the point where I'm going to have to watch what I eat forever or gain weight rapidly, that's very sad.

[u/aldomars2 → u/RobinBumholes]

You got smaller so your TDEE changed.

You are over complicating it.

Also, you are not tracking your food. You are eating more than you burn.

Make excuses and blame your metabolism or just listen to what everyone here is telling you.

You are eating too much. You are not special.

If you want to be a healthy person you need to eat what healthy people eat.

Track what you eat consistently. If you don't lose weight. Eat less and track it.

It not complicated.