*** Big Fat Weight Loss Thread ***

neoboy said:
It's getting almost demoralising constantly bouncing off the 100kg line back to around 103kg, the hunger just goes through the roof and that's with modest calorie deficit and me consuming close to 200% of my recommended fibre intake and plenty of water.

I really need to change something or come up with different strategy because I've failed to get under the 100 for 4 months now.
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How long have you been dieting? Sometimes if you've been doing it for a while you just need some time off - prolonged dieting makes everyone feel terrible eventually, which is why it can be hard to diet further if you still have fat to lose - and to have a short diet break to dissipate the stresses dieting imposes on the body.

Also this may sound counter intuitive but sometimes people find smaller deficits lead to more hunger and thinking about food than aggressive deficits. Take a couple of weeks off and eat at maintenance then try alternating blocks of 4-6 weeks of a bigger deficit with a 7-10 day diet break. It doesn't need to be 7 days a week either - you can be aggressive 6 days and have a day of normal eating if that helps adherence. Additionally I don't know what your diet is like but picking foods high on the satiety index (e.g. potatoes score more higher than rice) or just upping protein intake within your calorie budget can help too.
 
Merlin5 said:
Stick with it, 5 stone reduction is amazing. From what I've read, excess fat surrounding vital organs under the abdominal muscles can cause the stomach to swell. So that might be why and I guess we have to continue to reduce what we can't see.
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The body stores adipose tissue either subcutaneously (under the skin) or viscerally (around the organs) - general diet truisms:
- when you diet a greater proportion of the latter needs to come off before you see more of the former, and the stomach/chest tend to go before places like the love handles, lower back etc.
- people always think they have less fat to lose than they really do to get to a given %
- the less muscle mass you have, the more dieting results in you looking like you're just getting smaller rather than seeing things like abs and muscle striations; two people 175cm tall at 10% body fat will look wildly different if one is 75kg and has a decent amount of muscle mass from training, and the other is 60kg and doesn't.

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Somnambulist said:
How long have you been dieting? Sometimes if you've been doing it for a while you just need some time off - prolonged dieting makes everyone feel terrible eventually, which is why it can be hard to diet further if you still have fat to lose - and to have a short diet break to dissipate the stresses dieting imposes on the body.

Also this may sound counter intuitive but sometimes people find smaller deficits lead to more hunger and thinking about food than aggressive deficits. Take a couple of weeks off and eat at maintenance then try alternating blocks of 4-6 weeks of a bigger deficit with a 7-10 day diet break. It doesn't need to be 7 days a week either - you can be aggressive 6 days and have a day of normal eating if that helps adherence. Additionally I don't know what your diet is like but picking foods high on the satiety index (e.g. potatoes score more higher than rice) or just upping protein intake within your calorie budget can help too.
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About a year now, I think one thing I didn't consider though is that my maintenance calories estimate might be too low to begin with. I just got them by quickly looking at an online calculator back then and stuck with 3000 figure.

Got a Fitbit few weeks back and actually looked at all my stats today, according to that my average daily calorie expenditure is between 3400 and 3550 per day. Days when I run and work, I've pushed past 4000 and I know that's probably overestimating but I think I'm running a larger deficit than I thought.

With me not being as chunky as this time last year, I imagine the body is getting more hungry the closer I get to the target. I'll try adjusting calories to the level of activity that day rather than same figure daily and running a low 10% deficit to see how I get on with that.
 
Somnambulist said:
The body stores adipose tissue either subcutaneously (under the skin) or viscerally (around the organs) - general diet truisms:
- when you diet a greater proportion of the latter needs to come off before you see more of the former, and the stomach/chest tend to go before places like the love handles, lower back etc.
- people always think they have less fat to lose than they really do to get to a given %
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Thank you for the info. Just to clarify, do you mean that if I continue dieting, any fat around the vital organs will go before I see 'pinchable skin' reduce? I hope that's the case because I want my stomach to deflate. My subcutaneous fat really isn't that much I don't think. I can pinch 2 inches of fat at the front and about 1 inch round the sides/waist, is that a lot?

ic1male said:
I'm well impressed @Merlin5

Have you not had a single gain since you started (as a weekly weigh-in rather than daily)?
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Weighed myself today and gained a pound. Was 12st 7 today but was 12st 6 last thursday. Amazing, doesn't take much to gain does it.
 
Merlin5 said:
Thank you for the info. Just to clarify, do you mean that if I continue dieting, any fat around the vital organs will go before I see 'pinchable skin' reduce? I hope that's the case because I want my stomach to deflate. My subcutaneous fat really isn't that much I don't think. I can pinch 2 inches of fat at the front and about 1 inch round the sides/waist, is that a lot?

Weighed myself today and gained a pound. Was 12st 7 today but was 12st 6 last thursday. Amazing, doesn't take much to gain does it.
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It will probably be a bit of both, although once you get into the teen %’s of body fat you’re less likely to have much in the way of excess visceral fat. The body will utilise the most readily available stores of fat first and since fatty acids have to be transported from the fat cells to muscles, organs etc via the blood this means that areas where there’s greater blood flow will see fat mobilised first. Consequently it’s really up to your body as to the order of where fat goes from and you just have to be patient as it never goes from where you want it or in the order you want it to when looking in the mirror.

You can track reasonably well just by measuring a handful of places in the body every week or two, with my preference being chest (nip line), 2” above the navel, navel, 2” below the navel, widest part of hips, then the widest parts of the arms and legs (although the limbs tend not to change much between average to beach lean, body-fat wise and you have to go from beach lean to bodybuilder stage lean to see more movement there).

Re the last bit, tiny fluctuations are usually non-fat related things like food residue in the gut, water retention, replenishing muscle glycogen if you’ve had a couple of days eating off-diet etc. As said in another post, a kg of fat has about 7700 calories worth of energy in it, so if you’ve been dieting and one day you’re 80kg and the next you’re 80.5kg it’s unlikely you accidentally ate your maintenance calories plus an extra 3350.
 
neoboy said:
About a year now, I think one thing I didn't consider though is that my maintenance calories estimate might be too low to begin with. I just got them by quickly looking at an online calculator back then and stuck with 3000 figure.

Got a Fitbit few weeks back and actually looked at all my stats today, according to that my average daily calorie expenditure is between 3400 and 3550 per day. Days when I run and work, I've pushed past 4000 and I know that's probably overestimating but I think I'm running a larger deficit than I thought.

With me not being as chunky as this time last year, I imagine the body is getting more hungry the closer I get to the target. I'll try adjusting calories to the level of activity that day rather than same figure daily and running a low 10% deficit to see how I get on with that.
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A year is a long time! I would definitely have a couple of weeks at an estimated maintenance to reset and then you can have another go with a different strategy. If you’re in a deficit you will lose weight, but sometimes if you go too low things can happen that stall your progress like fatigue making you move less, your body trying to persevere more energy by limiting unconscious movement/NEAT, or it can encourage periods of over-feeding (which you’re sometimes not even aware of) which lead to weight yo-yo’ing.
 
Somnambulist said:
It will probably be a bit of both, although once you get into the teen %’s of body fat you’re less likely to have much in the way of excess visceral fat. The body will utilise the most readily available stores of fat first and since fatty acids have to be transported from the fat cells to muscles, organs etc via the blood this means that areas where there’s greater blood flow will see fat mobilised first. Consequently it’s really up to your body as to the order of where fat goes from and you just have to be patient as it never goes from where you want it or in the order you want it to when looking in the mirror.

You can track reasonably well just by measuring a handful of places in the body every week or two, with my preference being chest (nip line), 2” above the navel, navel, 2” below the navel, widest part of hips, then the widest parts of the arms and legs (although the limbs tend not to change much between average to beach lean, body-fat wise and you have to go from beach lean to bodybuilder stage lean to see more movement there).

Re the last bit, tiny fluctuations are usually non-fat related things like food residue in the gut, water retention, replenishing muscle glycogen if you’ve had a couple of days eating off-diet etc. As said in another post, a kg of fat has about 7700 calories worth of energy in it, so if you’ve been dieting and one day you’re 80kg and the next you’re 80.5kg it’s unlikely you accidentally ate your maintenance calories plus an extra 3350.
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Thank you, good post. :)
 
ic1male said:
You seem to know what you’re on about @Somnambulist. What would happen if one was to do strength training whilst in a calorie deficit?
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In conjunction with a decent amount of dietary protein you’re much more likely to minimise weight loss from lean body mass. If you’re completely new to training your rate of loss may slow as noob gains are real and you will put on some muscle (this is one of the only scenarios where you can burn fat and build muscle at respectable rates concurrently, although it only lasts a few months at most) with the caveat that muscle gain occurs at a snails pace relative to how fast fat loss can be so if the scales aren’t moving it’s not because you’re replacing fat with muscle at a 1:1 ratio.
 
neoboy said:
It's getting almost demoralising constantly bouncing off the 100kg line back to around 103kg
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neoboy said:
Days when I run and work, I've pushed past 4000 and I know that's probably overestimating but I think I'm running a larger deficit than I thought.
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If I eat 4,000 cals I consider that a really bad day... Not that I don't have them, but I don't really want to go over 4,000 twice in a week. How many are you aiming for now? I'm almost the same weight as you and I aim for 3,000 a day and average perhaps 1,000 a day burnt in exercise. Doing this I'm currently loosing about 1lb a week.

Honestly, if you really want to break through that 100kg barrier, I would be aiming around 2,000 cals AND running each day. It's nasty, but I did it for a month or so (although I was up at 138kg at the time) and it shifted at a stone a month. I gradually then increased up through 2,500 cals, but was exercising more then too.
 
AndyCr15 said:
If I eat 4,000 cals I consider that a really bad day... Not that I don't have them, but I don't really want to go over 4,000 twice in a week. How many are you aiming for now? I'm almost the same weight as you and I aim for 3,000 a day and average perhaps 1,000 a day burnt in exercise. Doing this I'm currently loosing about 1lb a week.

Honestly, if you really want to break through that 100kg barrier, I would be aiming around 2,000 cals AND running each day. It's nasty, but I did it for a month or so (although I was up at 138kg at the time) and it shifted at a stone a month. I gradually then increased up through 2,500 cals, but was exercising more then too.
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At the moment I'm on around 2600-2700 a day but I was going off my maintenance being 3000 which may in fact be quite a few hundred calories above that. That would make my deficit 20% not 10% like I thought which might explain the hunger levels.

Maybe worth doing the same and eating 3000 while maintaining the exercise and activity levels, would be happy enough with a pound loss a week.

When I was North of 120kg this time last year I did find larger deficits easier as I had much more reserves to burn, so was feeling ok on 2400 calories or less, guess it really is a different mental battle getting the last 10kg off.
 
Just to check, you're frustrated your not losing weight any more, so you're going to eat a few hundred calories more a day? Or are you saying your bigger concern is now the feeling of hunger?

If the weight loss stopped, I would suggest the deficit isn't there at all, let alone be bigger than you thought, surely? Am I missing something? All this maths we do is still rather grey IMHO and the bottom line is what the scales tell us...
 
Problem is overeating as hunger even at that 2700 calories target is pretty bad, if I actually stuck with it I'd be losing considerable weight :D

Since my maintenance might be higher than I thought just try 3000 and see how hunger and weight loss goes. Plus as above from Somnanbulist, might just give me a mental break doing that for a week, even I'll I don't lose anything.
 
Any recommendations on resistance bands? I have seen so many options for the bands but unsure which ones. They do latex tubes, bands and fabric ones. I have begun walking more but want to also tone up and build up lean muscle from home and just generally get stronger.
 
Somnambulist said:
Re the last bit, tiny fluctuations are usually non-fat related things like food residue in the gut, water retention, replenishing muscle glycogen if you’ve had a couple of days eating off-diet etc. As said in another post, a kg of fat has about 7700 calories worth of energy in it, so if you’ve been dieting and one day you’re 80kg and the next you’re 80.5kg it’s unlikely you accidentally ate your maintenance calories plus an extra 3350.
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Yeah, you're right, must have been food residue or water retention. I was 12st 6 last Thursday, 12st 7 yesterday, but today I'm 12st 5, so still on track at a pound a week.
 
Nice. This is why I like daily or near-daily weighing (same conditions) and making a weekly average - fluctuations can be all over the place.

Another thing that causes water retention is cortisol btw, so lack of sleep and stress can affect scale weight too.
 
Oh yeah, my sleeping
Somnambulist said:
Nice. This is why I like daily or near-daily weighing (same conditions) and making a weekly average - fluctuations can be all over the place.

Another thing that causes water retention is cortisol btw, so lack of sleep and stress can affect scale weight too.
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Not stressed really but my sleeping times are bad. I generally sleep very deeply but I go to bed seriously late, like rarely before 3am so that's something I should change really.
 
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