Why am I not losing weight?

Hi, I am quite new here.
I am a 40-years-old woman, 163 cm. tall, kg 75 weight.
I started two weeks ago to diet and exercise.
I want to loose 10 kg. in about one year.
Diet means I eat more vegetables, fruit and meat instead of pasta and bread.
I eat 4 times a day, I do not drink alcohol, I do not eat fries, I do not eat junk food, I always cook my own food.
Little oil, little butter.
Last week I went to the park and walked-jogged for about 5 hours.(15K altogether)
This week I went to the park and walked/jogged for about 8 hours (40Kaltogether).
Each exercise I walk/jog for about 6 miles in one hour 45 minutes, sometimes more.
With great surprise I noticed this morning I am not losing weight at all.
The scale showed the same measures today as it did two weeks ago, even the fat percentuage.
What am I getting wrong?

Your not 40 years old. You're 40 years young! By the way I think when you first start dieting and exercising it may take a while for the weight to start to come off although I would think you would see something soon. I eat three times a day with healthy snacks in between each meal. Usually raw vegetables and fruit.

You sound like your doing great on your exercising. How old are your scales? If you have had them for years then you may want to get some newer ones. If you have weighed yourself on other scales and it reads the same then forget buying new ones. I think monitoring your food intake and keeping a journal would help you. If you don't see any weightloss soon then you my be weightloss resistant and may have a thyroid problem or something like that. You may have to see a doctor and have your blood tested.

I hope to hear from you soon about seeing some weightloss results. BTY
I'm thirty-nine and a half and will be the big four zero next June so we're on the same time line so to speak.

Take care

It is disappointing to see no change in weight when you feel you're doing everything correctly but don't let this discourage you. People often see a slight weight gain when they start a new exercise program. Those muscles you haven't used in quite sometime want to retain water.

Counting the calories is an excellent suggestion. Many in the group use www.fitday.com for tracking calories. It's free but you do need to register. In addition to calories it will tell you the protein/carb/fat ratio of your diet. This can be very helpful in keeping them at a healthy ratio.

Take a look at http://www.stumptuous.com/weights.html Krista has excellent info on diet and exercise. You'll find many in the group who do some type of weight training. Those muscles aid in weight loss.

Are you drinking plenty of water? http://inch-aweigh.com/water.html You'll find many such articles about the benefit of drinking plenty of water for helping the weight loss process. This was just the first one that came up in my search.

Keep at it! It might take a couple more weeks of tweeking your calories and exercise to find the right combination for you - but you'll find it!!

Keep posting here. You'll find many of us who have experienced the same problem and successfully worked through them.

let's get real here... Just how much muscle could you build in a week?
Muscle building is a naturally slow process.

You are doing everything right, except that possibly, you are eating too much. Give it a bit more time -- 1-2 more weeks -- and adjust how much you eat, modestly.

Brava!!

I bought brand new scales before starting all this.
I appreciated the idea, though.

If you have had them for years then you may want to get some newer

Actually, I feel as I was a teen ager.
Someone mentioned that we woman in our forties do not get slimmer fast, and I had to think twice why she was telling this to me

Atkins is not as popular here as in the States.
I live in Italy.
I understand it is a low carb diet, but I am not sure I got it right.

I will, thank you.

it's not that hard. You have two choices:

1) Log your food to a paper diary or excel or fitday.com. Fitday is a very easy system, actually, as I recently discovered. Logging is a bit cumbersome, but accurate. It is easier if you are good at "eyeballing" the quantity of food, as you don't have to weigh it.

Still, do not attach too much significance to your total calories unless you weigh everything and have an accurate scale. What's more important is to be consistent in your estimations, day to day.

Also, fitday grossly overestimates calories that you burn.

2) instead of logging, you can eat the same food every day. Say 2 sandwiches in the morning, soup and a piece of meat for lunch, 2 eggs and hot oatmeal cereal in the evening, and 15 tomatoes. I am just making it up. The point is, if you eat the same quantity every day, then you know how much it is.

So, if you eat same quantity every day, it is easy to adjust it. Say, remove one slice of bread from your breakfast, replace it with, say, a carrot, and eat a smaller lunch. You get the idea. It works great in practice, and after a while you become very good at this without spending effort on logging, etc.

I lost 48 lbs last year using method 2 (22kg for you metric people).

I log my food into fitday this week because I want to figure out if I need to take vitamin pills. Otherwise I do not bother with it.

There is no "right" type of bread. Simply get the portions down, a regular piece of bread, for example and post in fitday. I'm thinking like many others that you're eating more than you think. When I started, I sure was.

I've lost a little over half the weight I've wanted to lose. I weighed in at
154 this morning. I have about 24 more pounds to go.

Nearly everyone who suddenly starts exercising experiences weight gain for the first 6 weeks or so. What's happening is that your muscles are starting to store glycogen and with the glycogen comes a lot of water weight. It's the exact opposite of what happens when you go on an
Atkins induction diet. You've heard about how people drop 10 pounds in two weeks? Well, they're depleting their glycogen stores and the water weight that goes with it.

That's one reason I hate the scale so much. It gives you such terrible feedback that it steers you wrong. The scale not moving is temporary.

And when it does start to move it should go down very slowly - so slowly that you can barely tell. That way your skin can keep up and you will be making lifestyle changes that you can sustain instead of yo-yo dieting.

A much better idea is to get a cloth tape measure and take a bunch of measurements. Upper arm, calf, thigh at the fattest part, hip, umbilicus, waist and bust. Track those changes someplace: I use www.bfltracker.com, and see the changes gradually. You can see my gradual changes in my blog at www.bfltracker.com, look for Dally if you're interested.

Ok, I'll track down what I eat.

Doubtful... What fitday overestimates is basal metabolism (how much calories you epdns by doing nothing except breathing etc)

You know, bread is bread... Even if you specify wrong bread, it is not likely that you will be very far off. Just try to make sure that white bread matches white bread, and if it's whole grain, then choose something whole grain from fitday.

You have to fudge stuff all the time, yes.

One other thing where fitday is useful, is analysing if you get enough micronutrients.

In which case, the non vigorous participant can enter something different....

But my question still stands, if the person actually marking *vigorous* in the fitday really *was* as vigorous as they say, does fitday grossly overestimate the measly 231 calories of 7 hours of activity?

Maybe joining a group can do me good.
This morning I was really feeling down...

Probably eating too much.

You have made great changes, and regardless of your weight loss, exercise and better eating will likely make you feel better. To lose weight though, you need to consume less calories than you eat.

So, for a few days, eat like you always do, note how much you eat, and then reduce the quantity to 80% of your regular amount. With continued exercise etc, you will see a nice slow weight loss. Don't go too low on your food, or else you will have a million of problems. Just make sure that you undereat by enough to lose a kilogram per week.

There is no magic here..

I already knew fitday.
Unfortunately, food is different from place to place.
This morning I had troubles in getting the right type of bread I had for breakfast, then I chose "toast" but I am quite sure it did not fit the one I had. So, counting calories is not that simple.
I'd be curious indeed to discover what they mean by "Italian bread"!
It must be completely different from the one we actually have here

I have to get in my "ditto" in here too. Keep working on it. Use fitday or something to keep yourself accountable for your calorie consumption. I just use an Excel spreadsheet, the USDA Nutrient DB, http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl and a calorie count book (for backup if the net's down) to keep track of my calories.

Don't exercise to excess (5 hours of walking might be getting near to that), read on Mistress Krista's site http://www.stumptuous.com/weights.html about interval training or fartleks and also about the importance of weight training.

When you're certain that you're on the right track, stay there. When women are in their forties, it's just not that easy to lose weight for most of us as it would be for someone in their twenties. I'm 45+. I've lost 26 pounds in 20 weeks but I didn't lose it a pound or so a week, it came off it seems in 2-3 pound chunks right around the time of each monthly period the rest of the time nada. You may look at where you are in your cycle too and see that you're in the "water retaining" part now.

Be patient, and it will happen. Don't give up. I had lost down to 163 a couple of years ago but gave up and gained most of what I'd lost back and re-losing it seems so much tougher this time!

btw, that 7 hours was an exaggeration... but man, given how sex is a workout, it feels like it should be more, donchathink?

Remember CM, it can be vigorous for one participant but not necessarily for another..

I would not say so.
I feel somewhat better, because of the exercise, but clothes are not looser.

You are building muscle which will

Let's hope so!

you will weight this much forever, as long as you eat enough to maintain your current weight.

That said, 1 kg is not that much and perhaps your scale is not very accurate, or maybe your weight naturally fluctuates due to menstruation, salt intake etc.

You are not that fat, so losing weight will not be very easy, but it is completely doable.

Good point about the scales. We have one scale that is not very accurate at all. It can do general weight, but basically, it is 3 out of 5. I could get back to back weights that varied by 3 or 4 pounds!

I bought a new scale. I can weigh myself 5 times and get the same reading all 5 times. It may not be exctly the same as the doctor's scale, bu it is consistent. Right now, it is upstairs in the living room. They wanted to weigh something, and in doing so, found out that my scale is more consistent, so now everybody is enjoying my scale.

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You are being too impatient. Also make sure you understand that what you have to develop is a way of life you will stick with for the rest of your life, because if you change back you will go back to the old problems.

Are your clothes looser? You are building muscle which will shape you better, and which will consume calories at a higher rate than if you weren't exercising.

Do you mean that 7 hours of vigorous sexual activity burns
LESS than the 231 calories that it claims to?
(I guess I will have to find a new exercise