Why am I not losing weight?

[BintanMan]

Afternoon all,

I've just come back from a nice 18-miler during my lunch break. I'll best honest - I wasn't going to go at all after weighing myself yesterday. Basically I am about the same weight I was before I started - 17st. This is the start of my 4th week 'proper' cycling, going out four times a week and slowly building my mileage up to 85 miles last week (long 27 miler Sunday). Ok so 27 miles doesn't seem like far, but to me it was a good slog especially in a westerly headwind for the WHOLE RIDE. It felt great afterwards though.

Ok let's get to it - weight loss. My biggest vice is sugar. I can go without butter and fats generally. In fact I hate butter in sandwiches. I gave up Coke totally and pretty much drink tap water. I still take 2 sugars in my coffee and probably have 2-3 cups a day. I like to think my diet is balanced - breakfast can be either cerel with a banana or dry toast with tinned tomatoes with brown sauce or porridge. Lunch can be a wrap or sandwich (tuna salad my fave) or Rivita with homous. Dinner is usually pasta because the kids love it. I tend not to snack, but if I do it's usually more Rivita. I crave chocolate but resist.

On rides I have noticed my heart rate has stopped fluctuating so much. It used to settle around 150-160 but now I've seen it come down to 135-140 on flat. The 27-miler my HRM said I burned 1600 calories (2hr10min. My 18-miler today it said 700 (55 minutes). This is a typical mid-week ride.

What adjustments can I make? I will admit my clothes fit better and I feel fitter running up and down stairs and I feel less tired in the evenings.

Thanks in advance,

Bin

 

[SquareDaff]

I'm no exercise/cycling guru but I do know that after only 4 weeks you're likely to be still changing body composition (i.e. losing fat and gaining muscle mass). Your diet seems much healthier than mine and you do about the same distances. I've just started to notice that the waist on my trousers is starting to feel a little big. And ultimately that's all I'm really bothered about. I feel fitter, my resting heart rate has plummetted and I'm losing weight in the area I know fat usual collects (on me anyway). Whether my weight fit's in a certain column on some beraucrats "Are you obese" chart doesn't really interest me as I know they're generalisations and not really worth the paper they're written on. Just keep at it and the benefits will come!

 

[tyred]

Be careful with breakfast cereals. Some can be ludicrously high in calories, and not always the ones you suspect.

It will take time, and you've only being doing this for three and bit weeks if I read your post correctly.

Someone smarter than me will explain all the numbers but I think you need to budget 50 calories a mile for normal cycling. In order to lose weight, you need to eat less than you burn, it's as simple as that in theory, but, as I know only too well in practice, it can be difficult. The other thing is that as you build up your cycling, your muscles will build and that weighs more than fat. It's possible to become very lean and still weigh enough to put yourself into the obese category on the BMI scale. The fact that your clothes fit better suggests you've made some progress imo. The fact that you feel better is more important than anything else.

 

[amaferanga]

Are you using a calorie calculator and weighing your food? If not then you should. How many grams of porridge do you have? How many slices of toast? How many grams of pasta? What do you have with the pasta?

Also, take the calorie estimate from your HRM with a HUGE pinch of salt. 27 miles in over 2 hours is very unlikely to burn 1600kcal. If you assume you're burning 500kcal/hour cycling then you probably won't be too far off (it may be an underestimate, but its very unlikely to be an overestimate).

 

[Panter]

I struggled in exactly the same way as you have done.
The only solution (for me) is very, very careful calorie counting. Buy some decent kitchen scales, and carefully log everything you consume, and also the exercise you do.
As long as you burn more than you put in, you'll lose weight.

I very nearly jacked the whole thing in myself a few weeks back after exercising hard for a week, eating very little, and actually gained weight!
It's only be meticulous logging of everything that you identify the problem (in my experience.)

There's lots of free websites that you can log everything on and if you're lucky enough to have a smartphone there's plenty of apps that will sync your data with their relevant website, immensely useful for logging calories when out & about.

The problem when you start cycling regularly (and for ever after

) is that you get immensely hungry and your body will try to compensate for that with extra hunger.
Good luck! and stick with it. Get it right and it WILL work

There's a very useful, and motivational weightwatchers thread at the top, maybe get involved with that?

Once again, good luck

EDIT: Cross posted with amaferanga

 

[JamesMorgan]

The key equation is energy intake < energy expenditure. Your cycling activity is excellent and will increase your fitness (as you are noticing), however, unless you are monitoring your energy intake you may not lose weight. Eating a well balanced diet is important for your general health but if you eat too much food you won't lose weight. Someone recently did an experiment showing that counting calories but eating only junk food was just as likely to lose weight as doing the same with a balanced diet. I can understand that lots of people don't want to spend their whole time getting obsessive about counting calories, but it is surprising how easy it is to eat over 2000 calories a day. I suggest you try to keep a food diary for a week in which you count total calories consumed. Pay particular attention to food high in calories (especially bread, pasta, rice, cereals, cheese). Alcohol and sugar are also big offenders - ideally cut out both completely.

Finally your body will resist losing weight - it does this by making you feel hunger. This is a good sign, however, if you don't feel hungry most of the day the chances are that you may not be losing much weight.

EDIT: Cross posted with lots of other posters!!

 

[numbnuts]

Throw the scales away, (well don't look at them,) and do longer rides 30 miles plus then you will notice a weight loss, short rides are OK to keep you in trim, but for weight loss high mileage counts well it works for me

 

[coffeejo]

Muscle weighs more than fat so if the scales say the same but your clothes fit better, then rest assured that you're doing all the right things.

 

[srw]

Here are some rough guesses as to your calorific intake, assuming that you are keeping to fairly small portions

Breakfast - 300 calories, unless you have a very large bowl of cereal, in which case it might get up to 400
Lunch - 400 calories, assuming you have tuna without mayo
Dinner - 400 calories, assuming you're having a healthy low-cal sauce and a medium-sized bowl of pasta
Total - 1100 calories per day

When you start calorie-counting (a good thought) you may discover that you are severely undereating. That in itself will restrict weight loss, as your body goes into starvation mode. A 17-stone man who is taking regular exercise should be eating about 2100-2200 calories to maintain decent weight loss. I recently started losing weight again after a depressingly long hiatus by starting to eat more.

The general recommendation for weight loss is to eat a balanced reasonably low-fat diet, to keep portion sizes small and to snack regularly.

 

[4F]

Muscle weighs more than fat so if the scales say the same but your clothes fit better, then rest assured that you're doing all the right things.

How does 1lb muscle weigh more than 1lb of fat ?

 

[ianrauk]

4 weeks is not a lot of time to notice weight loss.
Keep cycling regularly (push yourself) and eat sensibly and the weight will come off.

 

[BSRU]

How does 1lb muscle weigh more than 1lb of fat ?

They should have written muscle is more dense, 1 litre of muscle weighs more than 1 litre of fat.

 

[BSRU]

Afternoon all,

I've just come back from a nice 18-miler during my lunch break. I'll best honest - I wasn't going to go at all after weighing myself yesterday. Basically I am about the same weight I was before I started - 17st. This is the start of my 4th week 'proper' cycling, going out four times a week and slowly building my mileage up to 85 miles last week (long 27 miler Sunday). Ok so 27 miles doesn't seem like far, but to me it was a good slog especially in a westerly headwind for the WHOLE RIDE. It felt great afterwards though.

Ok let's get to it - weight loss. My biggest vice is sugar. I can go without butter and fats generally. In fact I hate butter in sandwiches. I gave up Coke totally and pretty much drink tap water. I still take 2 sugars in my coffee and probably have 2-3 cups a day. I like to think my diet is balanced - breakfast can be either cerel with a banana or dry toast with tinned tomatoes with brown sauce or porridge. Lunch can be a wrap or sandwich (tuna salad my fave) or Rivita with homous. Dinner is usually pasta because the kids love it. I tend not to snack, but if I do it's usually more Rivita. I crave chocolate but resist.

On rides I have noticed my heart rate has stopped fluctuating so much. It used to settle around 150-160 but now I've seen it come down to 135-140 on flat. The 27-miler my HRM said I burned 1600 calories (2hr10min. My 18-miler today it said 700 (55 minutes). This is a typical mid-week ride.

What adjustments can I make? I will admit my clothes fit better and I feel fitter running up and down stairs and I feel less tired in the evenings.

Thanks in advance,

Bin

If you drink alcohol, stop drinking alcohol, lots of empty calories and can result in eating foods full of calories. If I've learnt anything from watching weight loss TV programmes, apart from don't watch them, it is alcohol is not good for loosing weight, unless your a wino.

 

[GrumpyGregry]

Give it a year. and apply a rule of thumb, one third of your wieght loss will come via exercise, two thirds will come from reducing your calorific intake. Or as Minnie Driver once put it 'eat less food, move about more' a gross oversimplification but with much truth at the core. You have to force your body to consume itself rather than supply it with external energy. The trick is to do it in such a way that you don't consume muscle rather than fat, yes that happens, esp if exercising a lot, and to do it in a way so you replace one set of eating habits with another so the weight stays off.

Beer (and other alcohol) and cheese undo it for me, every time. In the last 10 years my weight has zigzaged from 17.5 st to 14.5st to 16st to 15st to 16.5st and is currently stuck, glowering at me, at 15.5st. But I rode one hundred miles on Saturday and ran 6km on Sunday morning despite being at least 1.5 stone above my 'ideal' weight. I look ridiculous in lycra, thin face, thin arms, thin legs, well padded rotund belly and moobs my daughter is jealous of.

 

[GrumpyGregry]

If you drink alcohol, stop drinking alcohol, lots of empty calories and can result in eating foods full of calories. If I've learnt anything from watching weight loss TV programmes, apart from don't watch them, it is alcohol is not good for loosing weight, unless your a wino.

Some where I have a link to a decent nutritionalist who claims 2 units of alcohol in 24 hours also supresses your body's fat burning system for 3 days.....

Booze is a potential double whammy.