not progressing the way i want

Straight up................you quit being consistent. No consistency means non consistent results. If anything I insist on with a client, it's stay consistent.

A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness industry for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

You need to log your food. Honestly and thoroughly.


Like, you NEED to log your food.


For serious.

Just like everyone else has said, you need to log your food. You also need to stop obsessing about progress. You will see lulls. Those first losses you experienced were not purely body tissue (fat/muscle) loss. A lot of it was water but if you continue to log and maintain your deficit, eventually that number on the scale won't be so dishonest any longer. If you maintained that 14 - 15 pound loss for four months, you could safely say by the end of it that what you lost was no longer water weight but true weight.

However, if you stop logging, you're going undo all the hard work you've put in. Estimating your day will find you vastly underestimating your intakes leading to longer and longer plateaus that aren't working towards your goals.

Remaining consistent will be the only way you lose. Inconsistency is a sure fire way toward frustration and abandoning what you've worked toward achieving.

I stopped reporting my food diary for more than a month because it became too time consuming keeping track of each and every piece of food i put in my mouth.

^^^ This is the problem.

Ask yourself, then answer : "which is more difficult - tracking my eating, or staying the same size I am, which I'm clearly unhappy with?"

I disagree with the water weight loss because some people have told me i look great and i lost weight even though i know it was minimal I did actually lose 12 to 14 lbs or else it would have found its way back to my tummy

Hit the quote button to make it more clear who you are replying to, not the reply button beneath the post.

On topic: 12 - 14 lbs of water is still going to make you look great because that's a large volume you've removed from your body.

12-14 lbs is 42,000 - 49,000 calories. Did you really eat at that sort of deficit in that short amount of time? I'm guessing the answer is no. Over a one month time period, that would be a deficit of 1400 - 1633 calories per day deficit. Yes, that initial weight loss was water weight (mostly). It happens to almost everyone, don't be troubled that it happened to you too. My initial post and recommendations stand.

Its not that easy to track everything you eat because tracking some foods that are not user friendly with MFP is not a true reflection of what you actually ate during the day. It gives a general idea of what you consumed but its still an inaccurate account of documenting your food diary

So your alternative is to be completely inaccurate with personal guesstimates instead of slightly inaccurate with MFP numbers?

Do you want advice on how to improve or do you want something else?

Consistency and trying to be as accurate as possible are really the only way. As has been said in here, you need to log your food, even if it does feel like you are guessing on some items.

It helps me to look for foods that ARE MyFitnessPal friendly as much as possible. Sure, that won't be every day, but on a normal day, I can look at the labels of what I'm eating and enter my food correctly. I very rarely come across a packaged food product that isn't in the MFP database. When I cook, I measure every last ingredient and put everything into the recipe builder on MFP to come up with an accurate calorie count. I measure portions and weigh everything - this has been a huge help. Get a digital food scale, and it will make it much easier to input accurate calorie counts.

And on the days that you go out to eat at a non-chain restaurant and cannot get nutritional info? Estimate, and use the high end of calories. It's better than nothing!!

Plateaus are natural, but you can break through 'em!

Yep..what's get measured,get done.

No,not easy...

I m still struggling myself,log food dairy & esp.posting for all view,kinda push me to b discipline.It's been 1 wk ne,since I started joining MPL community & challenges.

All the best to you.

Its not that easy to track everything you eat because tracking some foods that are not user friendly with MFP is not a true reflection of what you actually ate during the day. It gives a general idea of what you consumed but its still an inaccurate account of documenting your food diary

It's true that you're getting an estimate (that's just the nature of the beast) but there are some things you can do to make your diary as accurate as possible.

Weigh your food on a scale instead of eyeballing or using measuring cups.

Log foods by raw weight, and search the database that way. Instead of searching "steak" which will give you tons of results, most of which are user entered and may be inaccurate, type "raw New York strip steak" and choose the entry that does not have an asterisk. These are the foods that have been checked against the USDA database.

For rice, quinoa, or pasta, log the dry weight. Because cooking alters volume and it won't be the same each time, dry is going to be your best bet.

Don't give yourself "free" foods or drinks. If it has calories it needs to be logged. That includes your coffee, coffee creamer, condiments, oils, veggies, etc.

Use the recipe builder. Don't use other people's recipes that they've put in the database unless you have no choice, because they are certain to be different that whatever you ate. If you ate at someone else's house and don't have a way to get the calorie information those entries can give you a rough estimate, but if you cooked it you should create your own recipe.


I disagree that it's a pain or is time-consuming. At first it might be, but once you get in the habit it's almost no time at all. I spend about 10 minutes per day logging food. I enter recipes into the recipe builder and then reuse them. I save the meals that I eat over and over into My Meals so I can pull them up easily. I use the recent foods list for things I eat all the time. Logging doesn't have to be this huge hassle that everyone makes it out to be. It's definitely worth 10 minutes per day to me to be a healthy weight.

weight loss isn't a linear thing. Expect to gain and lose water throughout. With that said if you aren't consistent with it, don't be surprised if you start gaining it all back with ease, particularly if it was water weight. For the best results, get a measuring scale, and try to keep an accurate log.

If you're logging exercise souly with mfp, they tend to be over estimates. Eat back those calories, but perhaps not all of them.

IF you know something is not working, why continue on month after month? Like others have said - get honest with yourself.

Close your diary and start being brutally honest - weigh/measure everything; log every morsel that goes in your mouth.

Track your calories and exercise for at least 2 weeks (being brutally honest about what you're eating and using hrm/etc. to calculate your calories burned) and then if you still haven't started losing again, come back here and ask again.