feeling a bit discouraged

tunicaf

My goal was to drop 10 pounds. Since January lost 5 through exercise and proper eating, but cannot seem to lose the remaining 5.

88olds

It’s only February 15th.

As you work closer to your goal weight loses get harder to come by.

Another unscientific observation- when folks get results doing things a certain way, the answer to every challenge tends to be more of the same.
Things that worked for me in the beginning didn’t get me to goal.

BladeRun45

The body reacts/adjusts to change. Keep at it, progress WILL be made! If it was easy, everyone would be fit/healthy

ValeriePlz

As someone who has been trying to lose those last five pounds for like two years, I hear you. Keep at it, sounds like you are doing great so far.

malibu927

It's taken about six and a half weeks to lose five pounds. With ten pounds to lose, that's an excellent rate of loss.

raindawg

Are you logging your calories and exercise?

tunicaf

I am logging in my exercise and calories, and get excited when it responds with " you should weigh XXX in 5 weeks, but it hasn't happened.

HDBKLM

When you don't have much to lose, you will lose slowly unless you do some nuts things. 0.5 pounds per week would be a generous estimate and anything higher than that is generally thought of as overly aggressive so please don't worry about the rate. If anything you might be losing 'too' fast according to MFP conventional wisdom.

To the somewhat separate question of MFP's 'In 5 weeks' estimate, there are several factors that could be at work, and the issue is probably a combination of several of these. For one thing everyone's body is different, metabolically speaking. MFP can only do so much as far as making that estimate, and it'll be based on population-wide estimates. Presumably much more invasive tests would be required (blood test? in-person physical?) to get a better estimate for you specifically, so take it with a grain of salt. For another, you could be entering your calories inaccurately if you're not weighing everything out to the gram as opposed to using cups to measure and/or going off the serving size information on the box. These can be surprisingly far off. There are lots of factors along these lines, and as a sort of tangential thing:

Funnily enough I realised reading another thread (couldn't find it to link here, unfortunately) that many of the people who were disappointed in the 'In 5 weeks' estimate had literally been just looking at what it said on a particular date then read the scale exactly 5 weeks later to see if they matched. I'm not saying that this is what you're doing, just that I saw on this thread, but the point is that of course this would not work because of the 'If every day were like today' preface to that estimate. Most people I know don't eat the same amounts of the same thing every single day for 5 weeks non-stop, so that being the case, the only way to estimate what one would weigh on the 36th day (the day after 5 weeks passes) would be to add up Day 1 through Day 35's estimates of 'X' pounds then divide that by 35. The 'actual' 36th day estimate—and again it's just an estimate regardless—of weight would be influenced by everything that came before it, not just a single point on the journey. Again, maybe I'm stating the obvious for you, I just want to make sure because I'd previously encountered an entire thread that was basically an ode to this misunderstanding.

Again, if the entire previous paragraph is ridiculously obvious to you, then see above that as there is still variation both in people's metabolisms and in people's logging accuracy that are surely at work.