Am I doing something wrong?
 

I've been eating a very healthy diet and exercising at the gym several times a week for about eleven months now. I also walk almost everywhere now. I am 20 years old, five foot five, and eleven months ago I weighed 150 pounds. Now eleven months later, I haven't lost any weight. Now matter what I do I can't seem to lose weight. The lowest weight I've been able to get down to is 146, and I gain back the four pounds really quickly. I tried eating fewer calories and working out more, and my weight stays the same. I tried eating more calories, and I gain 5-10 pounds in just one day. It's been like this for a year, and it's really frustrating and kind of depressing. I've been thinking about seeing a doctor, but I don't have insurance so I'm not sure I can afford it. I don't want to always be like this. I'm not trying to become super skinny or anything, just lose maybe around 10-15 pounds, and I can't manage it even after a whole year. What do you guys think I should do? Any advice would be appreciated. I know losing weight is hard but is this normal?

Definitely sounds like a puzzle. Are you willing to share a bit about what you mean by "very healthy diet" and how many calories you eat per day, as well as what you do for a workout?

my birthcontrol was affecting my weight so mabe u should look into that.

Do you measure your food and track it with fitday? I suggest going to the supermarket, buying 3 days worth (9 meals) of frozen entrees. They can be high in sodium so pay attention to that if you can. 3 meals won't put you much over your sodium limit if you are careful, and this is a short-term diet anyway.

Weigh yourself in the a.m., after you've used the bathroom. Then eat three frozen entrees in one day and drink water or diet cola. Don't eat anything else. Do this for three days, with no snacking, no supplementing the meals with other 'healthy' food.

At the end of three days, wake up on the fourth day and weigh after using the bathroom. What is your weight change? If your weight is down, then you just need to be scrupulous about weighing and measuring your own food when you eat. The pre-measured frozen entrees limit you to a certain number of calories and you don't have to count except to read the calorie count on the box.

Have you tried getting your thyroid checked? Make sure they don't just check TSH. TSH is a very crude screen. Check FT4, FT3, and RT3.

First, a question - is your BMI healthy? Do you actually need to lose fat? Or are you just looking at the scale?

If you do need to lose fat - People seem to vary a lot, but when I use a low-fat eating program, I plateau fairly quickly even with a lot of exercise. (Even with professional supervision.) When I use a low-carb adequate protein program it keeps coming off. When I was pre-menopause the "Carbohydrate Addicts Lifespan Program" worked for me. (Went from size 16 to 8 and kept it off for five years, until lifestyle and career changes sabotaged me.) Now I am over 55 I am trying "Protein Power." Some of us need to count carbs more than we need to count calories. The Carbohydrate Addicts website has a quiz to see if you are hypersensitive to carbs and might benefit from that approach. "Healthy eating" seems to vary by individual, and it can take time and trial and error to find what it means for us.

Your BMI is at the upper range of healthy, so you may not need to lose much, but here's my advice:

Honestly I don't think you're weighing and measuring your food correctly. When you pour yourself a bowl of cereal for example, are you guestimating it by eye, are you using a measuring cup, or weighing it by grams? The last method is the most accurate. Eyeballing portions and eating 'naturally' is what got most of us into this obesity mess in the first place. for a lot of people it just doesn't work. Weigh or measure everything. The milk should be measured in a measuring cup too.

Are you really logging everything you eat, or are you forgetting to log some things?

When you eat fruits and vegetables, are you entering them as as "one apple, raw" or are you weighing them? You should be weighing them because each one can vary by how many calories it has.

A lot of times an apple can be close to 100 calories, and some people don't bother to log fruits and vegetables. This is a big mistake. Three apples can be as many calories as one of those frozen dinners. One sweet potato can be around 300 or more calories too, and you won't have any idea how many calories are in each one unless you weigh them on a food scale before you cook them.

How often do you have a "cheat"? To some people, hearing they can have an occasional "cheat" sets them up for failure. Occasional doesn't mean every week, and might not even mean every month. When you do 'cheat', try to keep the calories reasonable, and eat less the rest of the day, or the day before or the day after, to compensate for it so your overall calories don't go up that much.