The Math Behind Weight Loss Plateaus

As we prepare to wrap up our calorie counting challenge, I imagine you may fall into one of four categories:

1. You may have started off counting your calories, but became so disappointed and surprised that you gave up after a few days;
2. You may have said you don’t want or need to know your average daily calorie count, and decided not to participate;
3. You may have not only started your counting but kept up your counting and still are;
4. Or, you may have started off counting and became so disappointed that you immediately started changing your daily diet to try to meet your daily calorie and weight loss needs.

credit: cogdogblog

As long are you don’t fall under number two, I don’t care where, exactly you fall. The reality is that those numbers you collect – be it from two days or twelve – play a monumental part in our ability to maintain and lose weight.

I’ve written about the hard numbers before, but I’d like to get into a little bit more detail about it, today. If you’ve never read my post about the basics of calorie counting, you might want to check it out.

The facts stand as follows:

• Our bodies burn a set number of calories each day based on our height and weight.
• A body carrying more weight than average is going to require more food than average to maintain that weight.
• A body carrying more weight than average is going to require more food than average to gain weight on top of that weight.
• A body carrying less weight than average will require less food than average to maintain that weight.

To put this into action, let’s use a 27 year old female who weighs 170 at 5’8″ with a sedentary lifestyle as an example.

If we plug those numbers into one of my favorite calculators, it says that she burns approximately 2,173 calories per day. What this means, is that in order for her body to manage all of the functions it needs to handle, it will burn 2,173 calories. The body will pull those calories either from the food she eats, or the fat stores in the body.

In order for her to not gain or lose any weight over a one week time frame, she’d have to eat approximately 2,200 calories. That’s what you call a maintenance count.

In order for her to gain a pound in a week, she’d have to eat an extra 3,500 calories worth of food. (Remember, 1lb = 3,500 calories.) Aside from the weight of the actual food still in her system (that is, if she doesn’t go number two regularly), if she eats, on average, 500 calories over her maintenance count each day, she’ll gain a pound.

In order for her to lose a pound in a week, she’d have to cut 500 calories from her maintenance count. So, if she made sure her average daily calorie count never exceeded approximately 1,700 calories, she would lose a pound of weight (not including the weight of the actual food still in her body, because she should be going number two regularly.)

Note: If she wants to burn two pounds a week, she can step it up in the activity department and burn approximately 500 extra calories a day – either through running or swimming or even walking – and knock out another 3,500 calories in a week. But we’re not talking about exercise just yet – that’s for next week. So for this example, she’s not working out.

So we’ve covered the obvious basics, but here’s where we go wrong.

Say she works her tail off, and gets down to 148, but decides she wants to drop down to 140. Okay, now we’ve got a goal. This is great. She keeps up her same routine – eat healthy every day, weigh herself on Saturday – because obviously it’s working for her.

Except… it stops working for her.

All of a sudden, the weight loss slows down. It’s almost two weeks before she even sees a pound fade away. She starts getting discouraged, and starts to feel like she’s ready to give up.

This is where we go wrong.

When we lose 22lbs like this, we HAVE to go back to start. What did I say at the start?

To put this into action, let’s use a 27 year old female who weighs 170 at 5’8″ with a sedentary lifestyle as an example.

If we plug those numbers into one of my favorite calculators, it says that she burns approximately 2,173 calories per day.

A 20lb weight loss alters how many calories our bodies burn in a given day by over100 calories! A woman who is 5’8″, weighing in at now 148 pounds, doesn’t burn 2,173 calories each day – she burns 2,025! If she’s counting to make sure she eats 1,600 calories each day,that’s only a 425 calorie deficit! That’s not enough to burn a pound every 7 days, it’s enough to burn a pound every 9 days. Meaning there may only be two Saturdays in the month where she sees any progress on the scale, depending upon where those nine-day markers fall.

After each successful stride in your journey, you must reassess your metabolic rate, be it for an athlete or a couch potato. You have to know what your body is doing, and you have to remember that as your size changes, your capabilities change. Remember, being conscious is a MAJOR part of not only losing weight, but keeping it off. My favorite line is “If you never eat it, you don’t have to worry about burning it off.” But you have to know what you’re eating in order to know whether or not you should be eating it, right? That’s why I calorie count!