Yup, I've used the diary faithfully (except some sundays where I have a few drinks and know I went over on calories), and have only lost 2 pounds in about 2 months. It can be a pain sometimes to log every little thing, but at least this way I know that I"m not going overboard on a daily basis, which would be so easy to do on my days off and boredom sets in.

I've found that whenever I stop counting, I start to underestimate portions ("ah, this sorta looks like half a cup...") and then the weight creeps back on. So I keep counting and now it's like second nature, especially with the app (now I find the web version a pain to use). Sometimes I'm really lazy and don't want to input every single item, I just search for the recipe like "chicken alfredo fettucine" and pick the one in the middle-upper range of calories.

It's a pain sometimes but here's a few tips:

If you make/eat something often, save it as a meal and then you can re-add it more quickly the next times around. In your app, click on the little wrench tool on the right hand side of the mealtime (lunch, breakfast, whatever). It'll give you the option of "save meal" and then you can just enter a recipe/ meal name, like "PB banana toast breakfast" or "lentil soup" or whatever. Then at a later date when you want to add it to your diary, tap on "meals" instead of "frequent" and select the meal you want to track for the day..

Alternatively, if you ate something yesterday and are eating the same thing today but don't necessarily want to save it as a meal, click on the wrench tool, and tap on "Copy meal to Today/date".

You can change your MFP settings so that your more recent items or your more frequent items show up first on the list. Also, enable multi-add in your settings, that way you can add bunch of items at the same time instead of individually, it does save a little time. Hope this helps!

1200 calories does sound low, but I hear you, I've been there. I think MFP tends to tell you 1200 when you tell it you want to lose 1.5-2 lbs per week, which if you're not exercising I think is maybe a bit much. You can try playing with it for a weekly loss of .5 or 1lb and it'll probably give you a lot more to work with (like 1300, 1350 or something), and to me 0.5lb per week sounds much more realistic if you're sedentary... just my 2cents.

I'm also a firm believer in the "quality" if your calories -- aka I think that 150 calories of strawberries or carrot sticks and hummus is better than 1 calorie of diet soda. I wouldn't worry too much about going "over" by 50-100 calories when you know it was healthy stuff. You can do it!