Why the f*** can’t I lose weight? I’m doing everything right

[Sorryagain]

Postmeno, 55, want to lose half a stone. I don’t like my weight. I’ve always worked out, done lots of heavy-ish weights and eaten healthily but in the last month I’ve really upped weights a lot. I’ve also

• kept to a low calorie count (20% off my TEE - track food most days. Try to keep to 3 meals but some days I do graze but not over cal limit
• upped protein most days to around 100-120g a day
• upped walking to try to do 7.5-10k a day
• added at least one HITT class onto 3 days weight training
• drink more water (my weakness)

i don’t drink, I eat v little sugar and almost no white stuff

the scales have moved by 1lb! I’m so fucked off.

I know post meno it’s hard but this is ridiculous.

I feel stronger, though, and I sense more muscle definition. But I don’t believe muscle will weigh more and keep me at this weight

thoughts? It’s v un motivating

No you appear patronising. I’m merely saying that 1000 calories or less is unhealthy and unsustainable.

The studies in longevity have men in them. Men do better with fasting and calorie restriction. There are studies that show for hormone health and bone health women should not under eat and they need muscle mass for bone density. It’s really that simple.

The studies on longevity do not recommend 700-1000 calores. We just need to eat a bit less as we get older. Many people become sedentary and eat more so this is addressing them.

If you are not very active then no you won’t need as many calories. If you’re slight and short then you’ll need less than a tall woman. But I am arguing with posters who suggest 700 calories and a few oat cakes for lunch!

This made me wonder too. 9st 2 lb is not very heavy even for somebody of 5ft 2. Probably a half starvation diet would be needed to get below that once you are over 50 and finding it difficult to lose weight.

👏

OP, you are a healthy weight, and with all the resistance training I bet you look amazing!

All myself and other posters want is for vulnerable people reading here not to be influenced. We’ve had people suggesting 700 calories and less, just eating lunch, not eating any complex carbs, etc etc.

This is dangerous advice and I won’t apologise for pulling people up on this.

Again, disagree, as there were literally posts telling op to stop weight lifting and dropping calories unhealthily low, with several posters saying the had to eat at approx 1000 cals for maintenance

Exactly.

Really quick scan of the thread - these comments stand out:

*basically you have to eat like a bird

You are stuffing your face with far too many kcal

5"2 and eating 1350cal a day is TOO MUCH.

It’s actually shocking how little an older woman needs to eat. No wonder so many are overweight. What we think of as “normal” is far far too much

1350 cals at 5ft 2 is way too much

Just eat less and move less

Try just one meal per day at lunchtime and at most a small plain yoghurt in the evening. No sweet things at all. This will work.

You need to eat around 500-1000 per day!

Try to stick to under 1000 calories - less if you can*

Not just menopausal women talking about their own bodies - this is all advice offered to the OP. I didn't even look for the posts advising her to stop weight training but there were plenty of those too.

I certainly hope the OP takes no notice of comments like this, but I don't think it's reasonable to assert that nobody will. It isn't finger wagging to say that posts like these ones are seriously fucked up.

And and in terms of posters being influenced:-

’I am going to emulate minimal eating and fasting in the week’

I detailed what I thought was skewed in that poster’s interpretation of the thread and I’m not interested whether you agree.

When I went through through the thread and realised there were at least two posters advocating not just giving up weight training but actually not moving at all - the 'eat less move less' comment plus another similar one - I don't know how you could interpret that as anything other than prizing thinness above all else. It's literally advice saying you should eat as little as possible and take no exercise in order to reduce hunger so that you can starve yourself.

And as for people on WLIs eating sub-1k cal diets, I think that's also pretty fucked up. The 'what I eat on MJ' threads where some posters are surviving on one or two protein shakes a day and upping their doses to levels of total appetite suppression are really scary. People can and do have disordered eating whether they're obese, normal BMI or underweight and it's not OK at any level. Maybe there will be very specific circumstances under which a doctor will supervise a patient doing a VLCD for medical reasons, but people deciding to lose weight by reducing intake to almost nothing and using injections to do it aren't losing weight in a healthy or sustainable way. The injections can and do form part of healthy weight loss and I think they're life changing and incredible, but that doesn't mean that they aren't being misused in some cases.

The OP is not vulnerable and everyone here is an adult.

If someone suggested to me to eat 700 cals a day I’d just laugh.

You don't know who is reading the thread and who might take on the bad advice.

That's great for you, but there are plenty of adults who are vulnerable to pro-ana rhetoric for all sorts of reasons. Not everyone can laugh it off. It's fair enough for people to counter posts that recommend 700 calories a day and to say it's a really bad idea.

I wouldn’t interpret that as prizing thinness I would interpret it as having an aversion to exercise - which is surprisingly common on MN.

I don’t know the threads you’re referring to so I can’t comment. Perhaps you’re spending too much time on them, I’m simply responding to this one.

A short burst of a slightly reduced version of OP’s current diet kick start her weight loss and achieve her goals won’t do her any harm in the context of her current regime. I’ve done it and I’m fine and I even put a disclaimer that it shouldn’t be tried with a history of ED.

These kinds of threads can attract outliers on the over and under eating scales and I’d just ignore them personally just as the OP seems to.

I cannot agree with you about injections being “incredible” I think they’re deeply damaging, and the only people who should take them are obese or diabetic. But they’re not actually good for them either.

I wouldn’t interpret that as prizing thinness I would interpret it as having an aversion to exercise - not the specific comment I quoted in my previous post @Mirabai - that 'eat less move less' snippet was from a comment advising the OP to give up exercise solely in order to be able to eat as little as possible. A later comment said the same thing.

Yes, the comments I picked out can be described as outliers from undereaters whose advice should be ignored, but I still think it's fine for me and other posters to challenge them anyway as there turned out to be quite a lot of them. So many that I think the word 'outliers' is quite a stretch!

I should have put my paragraph about WLIs in a separate post rather than the one quoting you as that was in response to different posters and I merged them together.

It’s not fair to imply that that’s the whole heft of the thread though. You can take those posters to task individually rather than dragging everyone else in.

While anorexia is a serious mental illnesses, its incidence is nothing like the scale of the public health challenge of obesity. There are far more seriously overweight and obese women on MN than anorexic. And we also need to factor in the normies in the middle.

Like I said here @mirabai from a quick scan of the thread, here's a selection of comments that stand out. These are the kinds of comments I have been arguing against; I have at no point said that everyone on the thread is saying this stuff but that there is a lot of it on here - and there is!

I don't know what the prevalence of obesity has to do with it because it's not advisable for obese people to adopt disordered undereating habits in order to lose weight either unless in specific circumstances under medical supervision. So it's not as if we can justify telling people to eat extremely low amounts on the basis that this will counter obesity levels; it won't. And all of this 'advice' has come up on a thread where the OP isn't even overweight anyway!

Why would you laugh?

Ever heard of Fast 800?

Thank you. My sister started massively under eating and running to get back 'into shape' after having a baby in later life. She ended up a skinny size 8, but her hair went really brittle and straggly. She cracked a rib after going on a fairground ride and found out she'd weakened her bones. It took her years to get back to healthy eating, and she still has issues with food.

The crazy thing is that she was a perfectly healthy bmi to begin with, and she's an intelligent teacher. Sometimes perfectly 'normal' people can get sucked in to disordered eating when they get bombarded with these messages. I'm glad that there are people on here that will keep countering them.

And as I said there’s nothing inherently wrong with much of what you’ve quoted as long as it’s short term and means to an end.

A short term diet in the context of normal eating habits is not actually disordered eating. You’re not distinguishing between the two.

I find it takes a long time for weight loss to show on the scales, even when I can see inches gone. It’s disheartening but don’t give up.

I disagree that those comments are advocating a short-term regime; a lot of women are saying explicitly that this is how middle-aged women need to eat to maintain.

And for those who are suggesting it as a short term thing - crash diets are fairly universally recognised as a bad idea and something that for most people will lead to weight regain. People drop to extremely low intakes and the weight comes off - but they lose muscle mass doing so, and the body fights to get back to where it was. Only when people put the weight back on, their body composition and metabolism have been compromised and it's harder to lose the next time, and the next and the next.

I understand that you've said you have done it to lose weight and never regained which again, good for you. But it's very widely accepted that for 95% of dieters, they regain the weight plus more within a couple of years of doing any kind of diet, especially a crash VLCD which are the most harmful (and a 1k or less calorie intake is a crash VLCD). It's how the weight loss industry sustains itself, most people get stuck in a lose-regain cycle because they do something that's unsustainable going forwards and compromise their health in the process. Congratulations that this doesn't apply to you personally, but looking at the general population, it's usually the case.

Really sorry for what your sister went through; diet culture is so pervasive and damaging. From girlhood we've all had messages that being thin is the most important thing, and I'm really glad that now there is more counter-information out there encouraging women to consider bones and muscles too, not just a number on the scales or dress size label.

A few people are, but not the majority.

I don’t regard what I have done as a crash diet I only lost a pound a week which is gentle and easy to keep off.

Something like the 5:2 is widely used and regarded as healthy and sustainable long term but I tried it for as short time and the fast days feel too much like deprivation to me. Equally I think keto is unhealthy (I actrually agree with Delatron that complex carbs should always be eaten as part of a balanced diet).

So different strokes for different folks. Most dieters regain weight however they lose it so it’s a moot point how they do it. I think that’s just part of the overeating culture and a general reluctance to overhaul unhealthy dynamics. I do think this exaggerated fear of weight loss and lower (but normal) BMIs fuels overweight and obesity - which is a far far bigger problem in this country than under-eating.

I don't have a fear of weight loss, people losing weight or having healthy BMIs, not at all. I do have a fear of women being told to starve themselves into osteoporosis and to eat a calorie number that will leave them hungry, miserable, under-nourished and in a state where their body is breaking down its own lean muscle tissue. So people telling an OP with a healthy BMI that she's eating 'far too much' on 1350 cals and should drop to 500-1000 really is problematic in my opinion. You think it's fine so I guess we will never reach common ground!

And I don't believe the answer to obesity is anorexia. I don't think we'll solve the problem by insisting it's fine to advise people to eat dangerously low amounts, even if they're obese. I think weight loss is hard and complicated for all sorts of reasons, obesity is multifactorial and that it makes people miserable and unhealthy but I can't agree that the solution is to find a different way to be miserable and unhealthy. I think there's a middle ground, but that we see it very differently so I guess I can't carry on arguing!