16 days with no loss

First, it's not muscle - muscle doesn't build that fast, and especially not at a calorie deficit. Second, it's only been 16 days. If this is a new pattern for you - eating differently and exercising - it's going to take time for the body to adjust. Sore muscles and new exercises cause the muscles to hang onto water to repair themselves, resulting in a "gain" on the scale, or no loss at any rate. It's just water, so not a fat gain.

Lastly - looking at your diary, I would say you could definitely stand to eat more. Yes, MORE. Goal means goal, not a few hundred under, especially when you're set at 1200 - the bare minimum for women. And at that level you should be eating back your exercise cals. The daily goal already has you at a deficit for the day - meaning eat to goal, do zero exercise, and you should lose weight, so exercising creates even more of a deficit, too large of one in fact, and can actually hinder progress and cause problems in the long run. Your net calories for the day should be 1200 or dang close to it.

Honestly, you probably should be eating more overall. I'm only an inch taller and a year younger than you, and I've had my best success with losing the fat eating 1800-2000 calories a day. Food is fuel and you gotta feed that furnace if you want it to burn! Eating too little for too long gives the body a reason to store fat rather than burn it. You can tweak your settings at MFP by making sure your activity level is correct for your workouts (as in not sedentary), and make sure your weekly loss goal is only .5 to 1 pound a week - if you're set at 2lbs a week, that's too aggressive. These changes will probably up your daily goal. And I would still eat back those exercise cals, at least a good portion of them.

Another method is to find your BMR and TDEE and eat in between those numbers - good info on that here: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/974888-in-place-of-a-road-map-2k13 It's long, but worth the read.

And just have patience - this is a process that takes time - we didn't put the weight on overnight and we won't lose it overnight. But slow steady loss is sustainable and will give better results in the long run, and you'll be more likely to keep it off. Good luck!

My dairy is open - feel free to have a look!

Eat more. I'm 5'2, 175# and I'm eating 1900cals (not eating back exercise cals).

If you looked at my diary you should have noticed an upward trend in my calorie intake. Even though I am not eating 2000 calories a day I have been gradually increasing my calories. As a matter of fact that is when the weight loss stopped.

I will continue to slowly add more calories and hopefully things will start moving in the right direction again.

If you're increasing calories, you may be storing more glycogen and water in your muscles. That could explain a plateau. But it seems bizarre to me to say that you stopped losing weight when you started to eat more, and to conclude that you should eat even more. Slowly increasing the amount that you eat is what you should do when you reach your target weight, not while you're still trying to lose.

"Eat more, weigh less" is true in a certain sense, but not in the sense that you should add more calories. That would be like having a bathtub that is about to overflow onto the bathroom floor, and saying that if I put more water in, it won't overflow but the water level will go down. Your BMR might go up slightly if you increase calories, but not as much as the additional calories.

The sense in which it's true is that if you eat less calorie-dense foods, you can eat more bulk, and feel satisfied, without eating as many calories. The CDC has a web page on it: http://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/healthy_eating/energy_density.html

One bow-tie doughnut from Dunkin' Donuts has 310 calories. That's the same as 2 cans of light tuna in water and half a pound of broccoli. So if you have one can of tuna and the broccoli, you'll be a lot fuller than if you ate the doughnut, and you'll have eaten only about 180 calories.

While there is a lot to be said about calorie-dense foods, no, that is not all that the Eat More to Weigh Less movement is about. It's about eating enough to fuel your activity level, eating enough to provide the nutrients and calories that your body needs every day to keep you healthy. And while it sounds counter-intuitive to a lot of people, a lot of us have gotten out of plateaus by increasing our calorie goal.

While there is a lot to be said about calorie-dense foods, no, that is not all that the Eat More to Weigh Less movement is about. It's about eating enough to fuel your activity level, eating enough to provide the nutrients and calories that your body needs every day to keep you healthy. And while it sounds counter-intuitive to a lot of people, a lot of us have gotten out of plateaus by increasing our calorie goal.

It looked from the OP's diary as if she was doing everything you said. She wasn't starving herself. Instead, she was gradually increasing calories right around the time her progress stalled.

I know a lot of people claim that they got out of plateaus by increasing calories (while still maintaining a deficit). The problem, though, is that there was no control. You might very well have ended the plateau without changing anything. It's a logical fallacy (post hoc, ergo propter hoc) to conclude that if B comes after A, then A caused B.

To test the proposition, you'd need to have a bunch of people eat the exact same calorie deficit, and live at about the same level of activity, then, after some of them had plateaued, you'd need to take half of those on the plateau and increase their calories, while leaving the others on the same diet. That would be a controlled test.

It's also possible that many people who think they have hit a plateau are simply unlucky, especially if they weigh only weekly. If I had weighed myself only Monday morning, I would have several plateaus. On March 4 I weighed 203.0; on March 11, 202.4; and on March 18, 203.6. However, my daily data show that March 4 was unusually low compared with the days surrounding it, while March 18 was unusually high (1.2 lbs. higher than March 17 and March 19). The 2-week "plateau" was a sampling error. March 25, meanwhile, was 199.4 -- there's no way I could have lost 4.2 lbs. of non-water weight in a week. A week later, on April 1, I was back at 199.6, followed April 8 by 198.6 and April 15 by 199.2. Looks like a plateau from March 25 to April 15, three whole weeks, but in fact it wasn't. If I hadn't been weighing myself daily and noting the variance from day to day, I might have been even more depressed on tax day than usual.

I remember people saying when they hit a plateau they would stop eating at a deficit for a week, so that week they ate like they are maintaining their weight, and then go back to the deficit intake....

this is not a plateau. when you haven't lost anything in 6 months, maybe you start to worry. just give it some more time.