Dietary Review

I would also suggest adding sodium to your tracker. You may be going over on this and it will cause you to retain water if you are way over all of the time.

I 2nd this. I have been eating more sodium lately but also have not been drinking enough water, and I'm definitely retaining some water right now. Eating more sodium is okay unless your doctor tells you not to, but the more water you drink the less water you will retain from all that salt you're eating.

Try buying a large (32 or 24oz) water bottle that is labeled on the side, and try drinking one of those every 1-2 hours. Basically you want to drink enough to maek your urine pretty clear, although if you eat a lot of salt then you might want to drink more water. I usually try to drink my 32oz bottle 4+ times a day, which is about 16 cups basically, or more.

I see you mentioned Fat2fit, did you enter your goal weight as your current weight? Otherwise it will not provide you with an estimated maintenance for your current weight. Scooby's is another great site to check out as well.

Also, use the recipe feature on MFP. That way you can enter in all your ingredients, and if you know that you want it split up into say, 4 servings, then put that in. Then the 4 times you eat it, you select it from your "my recipes" tab and it will do all the calculating for you. Or, something I often do when I'm going off of final weight of the entire dish, is set it as being 1 massive serving. So if total dish is 655 grams, and I take out a 233 gram serving, the I'd mark that as being 0.36 of a serving.Again it will calculate macros and calories.

As for protein, I eat 160+ grams a day on a 2000-2100 calorie diet and only half the time I use a protein powder. Low-fat or no-fat cottage cheese and greek yogurt, part- or fully-skim cheeses, low-fat jerky, lean cuts of meat (especially poultry), tuna and some other fish (although most fish is higher in fat, but still worth eating), egg whites, turkey bacon, a bit of peanut butter when you can afford more fat for the day, adding protein powder to baked goods... these are all things I turn to for protein. I also do whole eggs and fattier meat too, but if I need to focus on adding protein then the things I listed above are good resources. Also I think beans are okay for protein? Great for fiber though (same with air-popped popcorn).

Do you have the phone app? If not, utilize it. Put foods you eat very regularly into your custom food (don't select to share with MFP) and that way you can access the nutritional info with or without internet access. I do not have data on my phone, but 99% of what I log is in my custom food. If it's something I'll eat once, or I'm just being lazy, I might scan or look it up and just look at the macros only for a better idea of my calorie consumption, but otherwise it's very easy for me to log on the fly. Have a notepad on you and write it down if you can't use the app, but just be careful about how much you are eating before you can run it through to check the calorie count. Your example of the different type of milk, that's a custom food that you can create in 60 seconds and delete when you no longer need it. Unlike the "recent" and "frequent" tabs, there doesn't seem to be a limit on how much you can have as custom. I think I have like 7 pages now for custom foods?

You don't need to work out to lose weight, but if you want to.. then honestly it's about making it a priority. You have 3.5 hours between getting home and going to bed, so.. why not just go for a 30 minute walk around the block every night or something? Also, try cooking large recipes on weekends, enough to last you the whole week. You can easily make like 3-4 dishes if you want a lot of variety. Or cook meats and carbs in bulk so you can just grab food during the week instead of having to make something every night. That gives you more time to work out a bit. This would also be a good way for you to use up some fresh produce. For example, I LOVE me some mac & cheese. A good way to make it a bit more health-conscious or simply to reduce the calorie density of a serving is to do something like a 1:1 ratio of meat+veggies to cheese+pasta. Or 2:1 of meat+veggies to cheese+pasta. It tastes delicious too. And if you aren't buying produce/food regularly (is there a reason you aren't making more frequent trips?) then why not try buying a lot of frozen stuff? I buy frozen fruit because it's an easy way to have fruit on hand at breakfast to mix with my oatmeal, or I can have berries last a lot longer.. you could even try freezing your normal fruits/veggies, and look into which produce last the longest when bought fresh. OH, and you can do crock-pot dishes on the fly so that they are cooking while you're at work. Just plop ingredients in there in the morning and bam, dinner is practically calling your name come home-time.