Help! What's going on?

[tobee]

I did the 5.2 diet for a few weeks earlier in the year and lost 4 pounds, a steady 1 pound a week. Then I had to have surgery and took a month off, during which time I regained the 4 pounds. Fair enough. Then I started again with dd as my companion dieter.I've lost nothin for the first 2 weeks. While dd lost 5 pounds. Bummer for me but great for her. Then last week we both lost nothing. Then this week we both gained 1 pound. I really feel like we haven't done anything radically different at any stage. Feeling pretty cheesed off myself but keeping dd's spirits up. Any ideas? It's really hard to be so hungry on fast days and then it's all for nothing.

Are you tracking calories on fast days and non-fast days? You may well be eating too much on the NFDs.

I've tried to but I don't know how to do it when I'm out. So I guess. People said try my fitness app but, if I'm understanding it correctly, it seems very laborious to fill out everything.

My fitness pal app.

It can be laborious if you're adding up ingredients from whole dishes. If you eat the same kinds of things regularly you can create recipes and shortcuts. Or if you're going out and are able to decide in advance what to eat, then enter it in advance.

It becomes less time consuming and more habitual the more you use it. But I do think you need to do it, at least for a few weeks until you get a good idea of what adds up to your TDEE.

I think I will try to find a calorie counter that suits me a bit better. I really eat loads of different things and go out at least once a fortnight. The thing is, dieting's no fun anyway, and I feel adding the slog of compiling my own counter too much. I did is lot of filling in ingredients and calculating cals for nearly 2 years on Tesco diets and it ended up driving me cuckoo.

I thought I had a pretty good idea about what calories came to already but apparently not.

Thanks btw.

Have you calculated your TDEE? See link in the first post on the main thread.

If you're eating out several times a week it's likely you're consuming too many calories on NFDs and eating back the FD deficit.

How are you counting calories on FDs?

Most fasters find they don't feel hungry on FDs after a few weeks. But it's best to eat mainly protein and veg on FDs as that's low GI and tends to help you feel fuller longer. Experiment with how you spread the calories through the day too. I prefer a small meal at about 11:30am and then dinner at 6pm. Some eat nothing until dinner. Others have 3 small meals. Drink plenty of water and other low cal drinks like herbal tea.

Join us on the main thread too if you like, lots of advice and support there.

Hi. Just come back from holiday and decided to be more strict with non fast day. I've also started to listen to hypnosis app easyloss. Does this sound compatible? Plus I'm adding chilli to everything. Well almost. It gives me a great serotonin boast!

Hi Tobee - I also hated the slog of logging onto MFP everyday, but as a creature of habit quickly built up a list of foods I regularly ate. The biggest shock for me was when it came to portion size - I once laboriously logged in all the ingredients in a home-made lasagne (yawn, boring!); my normal portion size was a quarter, then a half of a remaining quarter and if I was feeling hungry, then I'd eat the last half quarter meaning I'd eaten half of it. A lovely lentil lasagne, all the food groups, lots of added veg to the sauce - a lovely healthy meal. MFP added up the calories and I had to double check it and then treble check it. Nope, it was right. Was amazed to find each quarter had 900 calories in it, so 1800 carries in half of it - and that was without a glass of wine. If you'd asked me before MFP, I would have said estimated maybe 750 calories for the lot. Fortunately that was the only extreme example I found, but it taught me a whole lot about what constitutes a portion.

So I kept logging on to MFP for about 3 months, then gradually stopped once I was familiar with calorific values, portion sizes, etc, but still pop into it occasionally.

The benefit of 5:2 for me is it's free - I tried Tesco several years ago but it got too pricey; also dieting 7 days a week when your daily allowance is 1300 is VERY boring, you can eat the sensible necessities but forget any extras. There's nothing like denying me something to make me crave it. By restricting calories two days a week, I have 1600 calories of food to share around the other five days. So if I want my half lasagne and eat it, then a 5:2 is the way to go.

The other thing to remember is that if losing weight was easy then there wouldn't be so many overweight people nor so many companies making such a huge profit out if it!

Sorry, didn't mean for this to be a long post - fortunately I have a 19 month old DGD insisting on attention so have to go. All suggestions for how to teach her an "s" sound in place of the "f" sound she insists on gratefully received - she is obsessed with socks at the moment which is rather when we are out!

It does sound like you are exceeding your TDEE.

But for your daughters spirits - it might be worth thinking about her menstrual cycle. I've ben using MFP and doing 5:2 for a few months and also logging my weight on an app I use to chart my cycle. I have a plateau or even a gain every month when it's my period, but the general trend is a straight line loss.

Hi. Thanks for the info everyone.