Concerned!

morganbmiracle

So I've been following the plan for a month . Staying within my calories and only lost 1 lb.. anyone else with this issue..

TrenerMedyczny

Maybe your calories are to high. Or you just failed with checking your weight. Let's go with -100 calories and see what happend in 2 weeks.

mkculs

Are you weighing food or using measuring cups/spoons? That's the biggest issue for many people at first. A kitchen scale makes a huge difference and it is much more accurate.

It will also really help if you put your age, height, weight, sex, current weight, activity level, calculated daily calories burned (whatever you used) and targeted deficit (1 lb/week? 2 lbs per week?) People can trouble shoot better if they know what you are trying to do.

julie3423

I had to cut down to 1200 cals a day. I’m 60 and postmenopausal. I cut out most starches and sugars, and limited alcohol to one 5 oz glass of wine.

AnnPT77

The starting calorie goal is just that, a starting point. After 4-6 weeks (or one full menstrual cycle for people who have those), you have enough personal experience data to adjust your calorie goal, personalizing it.

The calorie goal MFP or other calculators spit out - even fitness trackers - is just the average for demographically similar people. It's close for a lot of people - that's how statistical averages work. But it can be noticeably far off for a few people, and surprisingly far off for a rare few. It's about 25-30% off for me, because I'm one of those rare people. It's not that the estimates are inaccurate, it's that not every single individual is average.

On top of that, logging is a surprisingly subtle skill. Most of us doing it for a long time have had face-palm moments of realization about some systematic error we'd been making. Think about how you could tighten that up.

Examples:

• Food scale is more accurate than cups/spoons (and quicker/easier once you know the tricks). Cups/spoons are more accurate than eyeballing.
• Don't use other people's recipe entries in the database, things like "meat lasagna" or "Denver omelette". Input the ingredients you used in the amounts you used, if you cooked it yourself. If it's a restaurant thing, get the calories from the restaurant's website, or a similar dish at a chain.
• If it comes in a package, make sure the food item you log matches what the package says. Do that even for bar-coded entries. The food database - including bar coded items - was nearly all created by regular users like you and me, and some of them aren't meticulous about accuracy.
• If it doesn't come in a package, check what you log against an authoritative source, such as this one: https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/
• Once you log a food, it'll stay in your recent/frequent food list as long as you eat it semi-often, so you don't need to verify it every time. Think of that verification the first time you eat something as an investment in success.
• Log every bite, lick, taste, beverage, condiment, cooking oil, dressing, snack, sample at Costco - anything you eat/drink that has calories.
• Log every cheat meal/day or oopsie day, if those happen. Regretting what we ate doesn't wipe out the calories. Log it.

I'm not saying everyone has to do all those things. But someone who's not losing as expected should at least think about things like that.

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/comment/48691905#Comment_48691905

I can believe you needed to cut further, because it IS personal. But the estimates aren't always too high. I was 59 and post-menopausal when I first started using MFP, and I'm not a tall woman (5'5"/165cm). 1200 calories plus all exercise calories made me lose dangerously fast. Accurate tracking is important, but so is monitoring average results over those first 4-6 weeks, and adjusting goal based on those results.