Can Someone Help Me?

A good scale will definitely help with accuracy., I think it's an invaluable tool. But honestly, it doesn't sound tooooo bad and you may just need to hang in there. I had 6 weeks of faithful weighing, logging and deficit eating without any change on the scale; just up and down the same two pounds. They I randomly lost 6 pounds in a week. Try upping your water intake if you are regularly hitting high sodium numbers. It's always worth tweaking things like that when you're concerned, it might get something moving,

Are you taking your measurements? If they're going down steadily than I wouldn't worry too much about the scales, it'll follow eventually. Steady decreases in waist, hip and thigh is what stopped me freaking out during my apparent plateau .

Thanks for opening your diary, it's helpful. A couple of questions:

1. I notice that there's quite a lot of variation in the number of calories you log each day. Based on past conversations I've had with other users, I'm gonna have to ask: is that because you actually eat differently every day, or is it because some days you give up logging halfway through the day? A LOT OF PEOPLE do the second thing. Obviously, that won't help -- you'll have to be honest with yourself.

2. I notice there are many entries for home-made food, which can be helpful. However, it's difficult to tell if they're foods you've prepared yourself and added to the database via the recipe builder, or if you've used someone else's entry that got added to the database. Many relatively new users such as yourself do the second thing. That can be very problematic, as you simply don't know whether the way they prepared the dish was more or less caloric than the way the person who prepared the dish did for you. Obviously if you're eating out you don't have much choice, etc., but in that case I'd always advise you to use the MOST CONSERVATIVE (i.e., most high-calorie!) entry in the database you can find that looks reasonable. Learn to look at the nutritional info of database entries with a critical eye. Generally you can *sort of* trust the database entries for big brand names, chain restaurants, and the like because they tend to make their nutritional info public, and they're required to be accurate to within 25%. (That's ONLY 25% btw, and often they're actually less accurate than that because honestly, who checks?!). But anything without a brand name attached or that you didn't prepare yourself is likely to be very, very wrong.

3. Measuring foods. A lot of people don't want to measure foods when they're just starting out. It seems like a PITA, or they believe they'll have a "disordered relationship with food." That's all well and good, BUT. As a newbie it's a VERY GOOD IDEA to at least go through a measuring phase for a month or so, because it will train your eye. I see a lot of items in your diary that are solid foods but logged as 1/2 cup, etc. Chances are you're underestimating those. You might be inclined to argue "but it can't add up to that much." TRUST ME. IT CAN. If you're 25% off on bready things, buttery things, potato-y things, peanut buttery things, sugary things, even microwave popcorn, it can add up to a lot of calories ALARMINGLY FAST. A food scale is best for solid foods. They're cheap and easy to use for any foods you prepare or plate up at home.

4. I'm not going to food shame you for what you're eating -- I don't think that's constructive! But I will just say that I notice you eat a lot of high sodium foods, like take-out and restaurant foods, etc.. That's not going to have ANY negative effect on fat loss over the long term and is nothing to worry about (see, not food shaming!). HOWEVER. It can make it difficult for your fat loss to show up as "weight" loss on the scale over short periods of time like a month. People who are retaining water can be losing fat without seeming to lose "weight" based on scale measurements for actually WEEKS, then suddenly "whoosh" the water weight away in quick spurts. {shrug} It happens.

TLDR: You've been at this for 35 days, and you've lost 2.7 pounds -- congratulations! It is not at all unusual for relative newbies like yourself to see limited results like this at first while you figure out how to use the logging features accurately and consistently. I know a lot of people report very fast losses at first, then slow down, but it can happen the other way too, especially if you need some practice and experience logging.