Posts by dolphinclick

lavendergooms, to answer your question, I'm approximately the same weight I was when I was 18.  However, I recently lost about 25 pounds while eating 1500-1600 calories a day.  I put on a good 10 pounds when I was 19.  The rest came on over the years.  I'm 33 now.

You, however, are underweight and undereating.  I think you're worrying a bit excessively about gaining weight and counting calories.  1500 calories is the minimum amount a girl your age should be eating if she needs to lose weight and is sedentary.  You are neither.

No, you're not going to gain weight if you stay within your calorie limit, and while Slim Fast certainly isn't the best thing you could be eating, it's not the worst either.  I personally wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole, but really, that's more my own personaly preference than concern over its detrimental health effects.  That said, it would probably be a hell of a lot cheaper and healthier to drink chocolate milk if you want a similar snack.

OK, so at 117-120, you were hovering between being just underweight to just barely at a healthy weight.  At you're current weight, you at a very healthy BMI of 20.  Have you noticed your clothes getting at all tighter?  If not, you're still at an age when your bones are getting denser, so it's very possible that the weight you've been putting on is bone mass, which is a very good thing.  So, don't worry about the number, and if you don't feel your clothes getting tighter, stay off the scale.

Original Post by derigon:

If I eat 1300-1500 calories per day, will I go into starvation mode?

 Yes, you will.  So eat double that and you'll be fine.

Seriously though, you are a 17 year old growing boy, and you have already stated that you are not fat, and you don't need to lose weight, so why on earth would you eat less than a maintenance level of calories?  If you stupidly decide to torture your body like that, it will either become full blown anorexia (and honestly, that's where it looks like you're headed), or you will simply damage your metabolism to the point that you will be more prone to getting fat as you get older.  You are at a critical stage in your development.  You're still getting taller, and if you undereat like this, you won't grow as tall as you should.  Your bones should be gaining density, and your muscles and other organs are growing and developing.  In other words, YOU SHOULD BE GAINING WEIGHT.  You most certainly should not be trying to lose weight.  And 4-5 percent body fat is incredibly low.  You need a certain amount of fat in your body to live, and if your numbers are accurate, you're coming dangerously close to that minimum.

But please, like others have said, see a therapist about this.  Talk to your parents.  DO SOMETHING.  Because this is not normal, and your problems will not be solved by people posting on a weight loss forum.

I broke my 9 month plateau this month.  I'm now down 6 pounds from my plateau weight, and this morning I dropped to my lowest weight in over 14 years (since I was a teenager), 2 pounds above a healthy BMI.

What posessed you to weigh yourself at night after you ate dinner?  Weigh yourself tomorrow morning and see where you actually stand, and even then you'll probably still be retaining some of the water weight from your business trip.

These things happen.  We get out of our comfort zones where we know what we're going to eat and when and where we're going to excercise, and most of us mess up.  Chalk it up as a learning experience and cut yourself some slack.  Obviously when the opportunity to make more money comes up again, you're not going to turn it down, so take this time and figure out how you could have handled it better, so you'll know for next time.  You can't remake the past, and there's no point beating yourself up for past choices, so look ahead.  Tomorrow is another day.

I think the easiest way to deal with this is to figure how much you really should be eating.  Trainers are notorious for recommending too few calories, unfortunately.  You are not sedentary, so you should be eating more than was recommended when you were.  Try plugging your stats into http://www.phord.com/cc/ and see what it recommends.

A good deal of the weight you lose when you cut out carbs is water weight.  When you don't eat carbs, you deplete your glycogen stores, and every gram of glycogen holds 3 grams of water.  When you start eating carbs again, you replenish those glycogen stores and gain back the water weight.

If you can't envision yourself giving up carbs for the rest of your life (I couldn't), then it's not a very good method of losing weight.  You can lose weight without giving up any food groups.    Focus on eating a healthy balanced diet and starting to add some excercise if you don't excercise already.  Many of us here have had god success counting calories and logging what we eat using the tools on this website.  But a better website to give you a good idea of how much you should be eating in order to lose weight is this one: http://www.phord.com/cc/

Yeah, I tried that.  I was eating 1600 calories a day and not losing weight.  I was excercising for an hour every day.  So I didn't change how much or how hard I excercised, but I lowered my intake to 1500 calories a day -- not a big decrease, but over the course of 8 months, 100 fewer calories a day should translate into 6 or 7 pounds lost.  It didn't.  No pounds or inches lost.  I ate 100 fewer calories, so my body burned 100 fewer calories.  No one ever said this process was fair.

It seems you need to find a balance rather than going to extremes.  Obviously, eating fast food and sitting on the couch all day isn't healthy, but neither is what you've been doing.  First of all, definitely follow the advice from previous posters and put your stats into phord to find out how much you should be eating, and keep in mind that you haven't even been eating the bare minimum a man should be eating to lose weight, which is 1500 calories.

As others have said, you're already showing signs of disordered eating.  If you continue at this pace, one of 2 things will happen.  Either you'll get sick of it all and go back to your sedentary, fast food eating ways because there's only so long you can live at this pace and obsess over every calorie eaten and burned, or you'll develop a full blown eating disorder and eventually need professional help to stop it.

At your age and weight (and I'm guessing you're relatively tall too), you can probably lose weight very effectively without counting calories at this point.  Focus on eating healthy, nutritious foods.  Eat a wide variety of vegetables and fruits, whole grains, lean meats and fish, nuts, beans, and healthy fats like olive oil, flax seed oil, etc.  Focus on listening to your body's hunger cues and watching your portions.  Have a treat every so often, but in moderation.  As for the excercise, it's great that you're so willing to do it, but 6 hours on the elliptical is insane.  Hell, 2 hours on the elliptical is a little crazy.  If you like the elliptical, stick with it, but I imagine 2 hours of it must get a little monotonous.  Definitely keep up the weight training, but make sure you're only doing it every other day because your muscles need to rest, and explore other forms of excercise as well.  Find something you enjoy: maybe there's a sports league you could join or something like that.  You're young -- enjoy your life.  Your life is not about losing weight, and you can't put your life on hold while you do.