Do I have to give up sweets to lose weight???

if you can say "Food is fuel" and look at your food choices like that, maybe you wont eat the stuff making you fat and teasing your cravings.

it helps me getting a whole different attitude and emotions toward food.

i love pastry and sweets, muffins,etc. especially cupcakes with frosting! so if i see a plate of cupcakes with an inch of frosting, I will totally crave it like a drug addict seeing heroin.

so i think, well i will taste this for 5 minutes, but if i dont lose this weight, my body will continue to have pains from the overweight my body is finding it cant carry too well anymore. so in the short run, yeah those sweets that make you fat will be delicious, but then the long run, the big picture, they are really hurtful, if thats keeping you from losing weight and conquering your cravings.

I do not do the everything in moderation. i am doing well without it. others say its ok. what works for YOU is what you should do.

I eat delish greek yogurt which has some sweetness but is far better for me. and i eat fruit. after not indulging in sweets like cakes and pastries, fruit does taste really sweet.

its your decision - 5 minutes of pleasure, or 1 year of fat hurting you. all in that one cupcake.

I have a deficit of close to 500 a day just from food, plus the extra calories from working out that I do not eat back (half) which should show a loss of at least one pound a week depending on how many days I work out that week. But about 3500 to 4800 calorie deficit per week based on a TDEE of 1950. The numbers aren't exact, but I know I should be losing at the very LEAST 1/2 pound a week for sure. Been stalled for 3 weeks now.

This happens to me, too - I will drop a bunch, and then stall out and drop nothing - but then, after a few weeks, I'll drop another 2-3 lbs pretty quickly... then stall out again.

I think a lot of this is hormonal. I also notice, for me, that my water and salt intake are HUGE factors in seeing the scale drop. If my water is too low, and salt too high... the scale refuses to budge no matter what my caloric intake is for that time period.

Exactly!!

Weight loss is not always linear. It took me weighing everyday to know my weight really would fluctuate up to four pounds in the same day. I literally have only one week a month when I see my "lowest" weight then it's back on the sea-saw. Had to be really patient and trust the process to finally notice a downward trend, or accept a "range of weights" instead of a single number. Hahah. So I would say:

Three weeks is not really a stall. Give yourself a break, OP!

But if you want to clean up your numbers a bit I really would restate doing something with the exercise calories. You have a great formula but you must use good inputs. It's like when I was reviewing a high X nutrient day and wanted to see what made me successful. There was no one smoking gun; it was a combination of all the entries. Pepperoni slices? Bet you can weigh those too heh just messing with ya

I eat sweets, fast food & junk food...I eat them in moderation of course, I fit them into the diary and plan my meals around them. There is no way I can stick to a plan long term if I have give up sweets (etc) , it works for me.

an average candy bar is around 250 calories. you can burn that off walking an hour a day.

I eat pretty much whatever I want to eat. There's certainly nothing wrong with bread, chocolate, or dairy.

You say you weigh your food (kudos to you) but are you measuring your workouts accurately? An HRM with a chest strap is the most accurate method as MFP will wildly exaggerate calorie burns as well as machines. If you are accurately measuring your food, then the next thing to check would be how much you *think* you are burning and get more accurate with that. There are some fairly cheap HRMs out there (I suggest Polar [since they sync with many fitness machines] although I've heard others recommend Garmin).

No way! I have dark chocolate almost every night.

I concur that a heart rate monitor could help you better estimate your cardio burns. I went for a run last week and when I entered it my hrm had my burn at around 380 calories for 33 minutes and mfp put me at 1400+ for the same amount of time and average speed.

Even an app I use to track my speed wasn't that bad an estimate for a calorie burn at 400 something.