I was unhappy with my weight before I got engaged in May, but the pressure of wedding dress fittings and photographers really motivated me to get in better shape. A LDR and a job with 50% travel (that I hated anyway!) had contributed to a 30lb weight gain I could ill afford. In early July, I moved 200 miles back ‘home’ to my fiancé and started a new job.
I also signed up for a personal training package: 2 sessions a week for 6mo. I was upfront with the trainers with my goals, my expectations, and my awareness of my habits. They expected I could lose about 1.5lbs a week; I’ve lost just over that in almost three months. (Yes, I know about muscle gain, but my clothes still fit the same.) I’ve changed a LOT of things -- including food logging, reducing calories to about 1700 a day, drinking four liters of water a day, doubling the amount of veggies in my diet, walking 10k steps a day, etc. However, one thing my primary trainer said was that I should ‘only’ be doing cardio three times a week for about 20 minutes.
That just doesn’t seem like enough to me. I feel like I should be working harder. And given the fact that my weight has changed less than 2lbs since the 4th of July despite all of my changes… I’m starting to wonder if I should be listening to this part of her advice.
I meet with one of my trainers twice a week for 45mn each session. It is a lot of strength training with some cardio in a circuit format. The trainer is telling me to limit myself to my 3x/wk 20mn sessions on my elliptical at home with my heart rate over 140. With the scale not budging and my pants still treating me as an enemy combatant, I’m concerned and feel like I’m tying my own hands before my back with this three times a week stuff. I feel like I should be on that elliptical for 20mn at least five days a week – and probably for longer than 20mn. She even said to limit yoga! (I should note I’m in fine health. I’m overweight but I’m perfectly capable of exercising safely, so it’s not that sort of an issue.)
Any thoughts? Experiences? I’m trying to avoid a lot of the pitfalls I see people talk about here – not eating enough to lose weight, not doing strength training, etc. But I still feel like something is missing and I'm simply not seeing significant results.