I’ve been using Huel for breakfast and lunch (1 scoop + 2 scoops) and having a healthy dinner for about 3 weeks. The first week I lost 4lb, the second one I put 2 back on again. I’ve lost 1lb this week but seem to be stuck and can’t shift it.
Questions -
Am I just being impatient?!
Am I eating the right amount? My TDEE thing that I did said I should be eating about 1100 cal to lose weight but I also did a macros calculator and that put me more around 1400. I do stick around the 1100 but I find it a bit hard to track my dinner calories as I tend to make a big pot of something to last a few days and I just take a portion so it’s hard to work out what percentage of the meat/veg I’m eating.
I’m 5’7 and three weeks ago was 146.4lb and now I’m at 142.4lb. I’m pleased it’s going down but with any weight loss I seem to fluctuate a lot and get stuck at certain points. I exercise 2-3x per week plus a big walk at weekends. My target weight is around 134lb.
Think weekly rather than daily - record your weight every day but the best way to look at it is to plot it on a graph and look at the general trend your weight is following.
One thing I’ve learned is that there’s a huge difference between the weight of food (and water) that you’ve consumed, and the weight of the fat you would put on for the amount of calories in that food.
Example - Eating 1kg of cucumber will make you 1kg heavier, but it only has around 100 calories, which = around 12 grams of fat.
So if one day you went on a massive cucumber binge, and ate 3kg of cucumber that day (and only that), all that food weight would boost your weight on the scales by quite a lot, but once it’s all out of your system, you’ll have likely lost weight because it only amounted to 300 calories.
This is a very simplistic way of looking at it, and I’m not advocating eating nothing but cucumber, just trying to show that on a daily basis your weight change is just as much down to the sheer weight of the things you’ve eaten (or drunk) as it is down to the weight of your body. Weekly is better because it puts less emphasis on these variances and more on the general trend
To give you an idea, here’s what my daily weight chart looks like -
There’s points where my weight (the blue line) has gone up a bit on a particular day, but there was never any need to get frustrated though, because it went down further a couple of days later
(The very end of the chart is a bit of an exception, I’ve just been camping with some friends and had no intention of sticking to the diet/exercise, just for that weekend)
Thanks so much for that. How long a time period is that graph over? Mine is going downwards in general so I guess I should be reassured by that, just hoping I don’t keep hovering around the same weight. Thanks for the cucumber analogy too it actually really helped.
I’d get tracking/weighing that pot of stuff. Weigh the ingredients, put them into Myfitnesspal and divide by whatever portion size you have. Perhaps weigh the pot before and after you take your portion, work out what % it was and calculate it as a % of the total cals in Myfitnesspal.
“But that’d take like an extra 5 minutes”. Exactly, 5 minutes to know exactly what’s going into your body. It’s a little extra effort but it’ll pay off.
You’re right of course. I mainly have quite healthy food- veg, lean meats, beans/pulses etc but I guess too much of even the right food is still not going to help me. I’ll do that next time! Thank you.
That’s about a month - 5 weeks exactly. I’ve lost about 18 lb, but to be fair I’m starting from 267,and apparently my TDEE is around 3800 cal/day (accounting for cycling 8 miles and back work commute most days) so it’s a lot easier to lose that kind of weight at the moment. No doubt it’ll get trickier as I get lighter
Keep reporting back on your success!