Need some advice for my girl
My gf is 42, 5'4 and about 150. I'm here out of desperation for her as she's been trying to lose weight for over 16 months solid. She's been counting her macros for what seems like forever and weight trains 4x a week for about 45 minutes with 15-20 mins of cardio to finish up. We have one cheat meal a week and outside of that she stays on track. She's beyond frustrated and earlier this year started showing signs of peri-menopause (we don't talk about that). In her frustration she spent the money to go to a Dr that provides hormone replacement/weight loss therapies. Her blood panel showed that her testosterone was nearly non-existent for a healthy woman her age so She has been getting a 50mg testosterone pellet in her booty cheek for about 6 months now. It's helped with some of the Peri-symptoms like her libido somewhat returning but done nothing for the weight loss or functional strength in the gym. Also, after being on semaglutide for several months they took her off of it because it also had no effect on her bf% but she did lose 3lbs of skeletal muscle. I've given her advice based on what I've done in the past to lose 100's of pounds multiple times (I was a lil' husky). I've never pretended to be an expert in the female physiology which is why I'm here. I have a hunch that her macros got so low over time that she's in starvation mode but she's tried doing reverses... High/low cal periods etc. Any recommendations? Questions or need more details? I'm ready to get her t3 and clen but supposedly her thyroid is "fine"
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Maybe my view on women is a little diferent but, 5'4 and 150....... Sounds ight to me.
She needs a coach dude. She’s gonna need someone working with her probably for 6+ months on developing the habits necessary to set herself up for the rest of her life.
Another thing that jumped out to me is the cheat meal once a week. That’s way too frequent. A well set up Diet does not need cheat meals. Also I’ve seen a cheat meal turn into 5k calories in one sitting which negates an entire week of hard dieting.
I asked my coach when we were doing a cheat meal. He said once you hit your goal, we’ll do one. Every time you cheat you’re deliberately moving bodyfat in the wrong direction. Stop doing it.
I wish you the best brother, that’s a tough dynamic when talking to your spouse about weight…
When I would see a slow down in fat loss is when I would hit a refeed, I hate the word cheat meal. You are not cheating. You are actually rebooting metabolism which is a necessary step in successfully losing fat. You are not cheating whatsoever. When starting out a cut, depending on starting BF I could go a couple months without the need for a refeed. Once BF gets lower and more aggressive strategies are needed to peel off the fat I needed to have more frequent refeeds, ( or implement carb cycling) but that was usually once every 2-3 wks max.
I think there’s a big mindset shift there taking it from a cheat meal to a refeed. Some extra rice and chicken or maybe a steak for some fats, instead of a smorgasbord at Cheesecake Factory with all the fixin’s
Has she actually had her thyroid checked with blood work, or just guessing it is ok?
Does she wear any kind of fitness tracker / Apple Watch to track calorie expenditure? As others mentioned she may be hitting her maintenance calories instead of being in a deficit. As much as I hate wearing my Apple Watch when I train it does help keep me on track when in a bulk or cut because I leave that watch on all day minus when I shower and the 6-7hrs I sleep which the calorie expenditure during that time is easy to add in. Also a lot of the time those macro counters like My Fitnesss Pal Cronometer ect either way over estimate BMR or under estimate it. I’ve used both but prefer Cronometer and I turn off the BMR calculator and have it base things off my activity tracker aka Apple Watch and its made things way more accurate within 100-150 calories. You don’t even need a fancy Apple Watch a Fitbit or something like that works too but if she’s not using an activity tracker, see if she can borrow a friends or someone who doesn’t use one and try it for two weeks and look and see what the numbers look like off the tracker versus what she is logging for calories and macros and see if theirs a huge discrepancy between the calories burned numbers. Also if the deficit is too steep greater than 1000 calories a day then your body will go into survival mode and hang onto everything more.
Any time someone’s dieting and it’s not working and they say they’re being strict, I think it’s almost always that they are in starvation mode, like you said. Weight loss can one hundred percent be done by diet alone. If you were to only have 500 calories a day, no matter what your hormones said, you’d lose weight. It’s a horrible idea but I’m just saying. If you just keep dropping the calories and increasing the energy expenditure then she will lose weight.how many calories is she eating currently? Adding calories back in to stop th starvation mode thing, I’ll be honest, that really confuses me that it didn’t work. Maybe she’s just too low on calories or maybe she’s actually higher then she thinks?? Make sure she’s tracking EVERYTHING, sauces and little things she nibbles on all add up
First guess is she's hitting maintenence on her calories.
Also... How are the majority of you calculating your daily cal intake? Goal weight x 12?
Or
Female BMR formula = 655 + (4.3 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches) – (4.7 x age in years)