Frustrated.

scarlettmoon6688

I've met my exercise goals and calorie / carb/sugar goals for 6 weeks.
Can't lose any weight.

In fact I've gained 6 pounds in 9 days.

So disgusted.

snowflake954

Are you using a digital food scale? What are your stats?

tomcustombuilder

There are a few reasons. The main ones are that you have your activity level set too high, you’re eating back too many exercise calories, your calorie counting and tracking is inaccurate with you underestimating amounts, you’re not including some days where your calories are higher than your target, you’re not weighing your food, you’re choosing entries that are lower in calories than your actually eating.

Any of these or any combination of these things will prevent loss. Water weight due to exercise or your body adjusting can be a factor for a couple of weeks however 6 weeks and the above factors will generally be the cause of no loss or even gain.

springlering62

Six weeks indicates you’re relatively new, although your account shows new as of this morning.

So my first thought would be, where and what exactly were you logging? How did you arrive at a calorie goal?

Second, most newbs (me definitely included) start out exercising very enthusiastically. Does that sound like you?

Are you sore? Hurts to move or walk? If so, you e gained several pounds of water weight. When you are sore following a new or vigorous exercise, your body responds by retaining water to heal that soreness. A LOT of water. After the soreness diminishes, you’ll basically wee it all out and those water weight pounds will drop.

Same if you’ve had a flight, surgery, stress, new foods, particularly salty foods, more carbs than usual, or made major changes in your diet (constipation, for example).

This is my own weight following a transcontinental flight last Tuesday, thru Saturday.


That’s an eight and a half pound difference for no other reason than cabin pressure. Water retention is a powerful thing and a lot of people experience it the first month or two of changing lifestyle.

Don’t give up. If you’ve got a reasonable goal, are weighing and logging accurately, things will come back into kilter and you’ll see some loss. Give it another month, and if not, you need to reevaluate your calorie goal and /or tighten up you food logging.

Don’t expect or even try to get it all off fast. That’s the main mistake people make. They burn the candle at both the food and exercise ends, get frustrated when they haven’t lost a lot in days or weeks, and throw in the towel.

This is a long haul project.

kshama2001

Yes, if the exercise is new and you are sore you've likely got some water retention going on.

However, inaccurate food logging is also a major culprit. It's very common so don't take that personally. Why don't you plan to scrupulously log everything and let us look at your food and exercise logs in a week or two?

You'll need to change your Diary Sharing settings to Public. In the app, go to Settings > Diary Setting > Diary Sharing > and check Public. Desktop: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/diary_settings

Unfortunately, the green check marks in the MFP database are used for both USER-created entries and ADMIN-created entries that MFP pulled from the USDA database. A green check mark for USER-created entries just means enough people have upvoted the entry - it is not necessarily correct.

To find ADMIN entries for whole foods, I get the syntax from the USDA database and paste that into MFP. All ADMIN entries from the USDA will have weights as an option BUT there is a glitch whereby sometimes 1g is the option but the values are actually for 100g. This is pretty easy to spot though, as when added the calories are 100x more than is reasonable.

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov

Use the “SR Legacy” tab - that's what MFP used to pull in entries.

Note: any MFP entry that includes "USDA" was USER entered.

For packaged foods, I verify the label against what I find in MFP. (Alas, you cannot just scan with your phone and assume what you get is correct. Note: scanning is mostly only available with Premium these days.)