Am I destined to be fat or what?

FRUITS AND VEGGIES! Try clean eating! Your diary is so fully of processed convenience foods. And your biggest mistake is logging "homemade" and "generic" foods - stick to the foods with the most number of confirmations, even if it's from Panda Express. Also, if you're not weighing or measuring your portions, how do you know exactly what you're eating when you eat fast food? You can definitely get into shape, but you can't treat every day as a cheat day; you need to learn the valuable art of clean eating. I guarantee the pounds will come off.

Take a look at her diary. It's far to high in carbs for her daily caloric intake she's trying to hit.

Many days you're not even hitting 50g of protein, while over 200g of carbs. I'd bet you'd start to see significant weight loss within weeks if daily caloric intake is what you're claiming to log and you were closer to <150g carbs and 100g+ protein.

There are tons and tons of articles and peer reviewed essays that talk about high protein diets being a contributing factor to fat burn. http://www.bing.com/search?q=diet+high+in+protein+weight+loss&src=ie9tr

Again, calories in/calories out. As long as person eats at a deficit, barring any significant medical issue, weight will be lost. You'll lose your bet, as long, as she's eating at a calorie deficit.

Take a look at her diary. It's far to high in carbs for her daily caloric intake she's trying to hit.

Many days you're not even hitting 50g of protein, while over 200g of carbs. I'd bet you'd start to see significant weight loss within weeks if daily caloric intake is what you're claiming to log and you were closer to <150g carbs and 100g+ protein.

There are tons and tons of articles and peer reviewed essays that talk about high protein diets being a contributing factor to fat burn. http://www.bing.com/search?q=diet+high+in+protein+weight+loss&src=ie9tr

Again, calories in/calories out. As long as person eats at a deficit, barring any significant medical issue, weight will be lost. You'll lose your bet, as long, as she's eating at a calorie deficit.

+1
Op keep it simple until you get into the swing of things, then you can make changes where you see fit
I lost weight by cutting down not cutting out also i started to exercise.
use food scales, and the scanner feature on the mfp app
good luck you can do it.

Thank you to everyone for giving me their input. I appreciate the feedback.
Also, for the people who have been saying that I'm over-estimating burned calories and underestimating my calories, I just use MFP. I don't know exactly how to calculate burned calories, so I use MFP, I enter in my time and let it work it out for me. I also just search for what I'm eating, and add that too. Especially if it's from a restaurant that isn't listed. I'm not trying to be dishonest, I'm trying to get as close as possible using what I have and what I know.
But thank you again. It really helps me take a good look at what I am or may be doing wrong.

I don't think any one is saying you're being dishonest. We're just trying to point out what could be causing you to stall. As for the burned calories, you could either not eat them all back (try half instead) or you can actually change what MFP puts in for you (if is says 500, change it to 250).

Same with the food log, no one is saying you're dishonest but you could have a better guess than what you currently are doing. When I eat at a restuarnt that doesn't list calories, I try to find something from a chain resturaunt that is similar (I even google pictures of it to compare). That will get you so much closer than using the generic or homemade entries in the database.

Keep pushing forward. You can do this!

ETA: When in doubt, estimate higher intake and lower output. If you're not sure which food entry you should use, go with a higher calorie one.

Just want to reinforce GothyFaery's point. Not saying you are being dishonest or "cheating." Accurate logging is a skill, and like any skill it takes some experience, some tips from others more experienced, and practice to get better at it. You're halfway there with logging stuff; now get a little closer to goal by developing the skills to log more accurately. I haven't looked at your diary, but just based on the comments from other posters, I'd be willing to bet you are underestimating the calories you are consuming - again, not deliberately, just because it's a challenge to do well without scales and skill and knowledge.

As for exercise calories, I share the view that MFP tends to overestimate calorie burns for many common exercises. A shortcut in the interim would be to manually adjust the calories MFP wants to give you downward. Longer term, get a real handle on being an excellent food logger, and then compare your actual weight lost to the weight you'd expect to lose based on your food logging and your exercise burns - it will likely help you get a better grip on exactly how many excess calories you're actually burning on a treadmill / elliptical session, regardless of what MFP and/or the machine wants to tell you you have burned.

Everything - absolutely everything - we're doing here on MFP is an estimate (some better than others) and trial and error and analysis will help you get to a spot where your estimates are better, allowing you a lot more control around weight loss / gain goals.

Thank you to everyone for giving me their input. I appreciate the feedback.
Also, for the people who have been saying that I'm over-estimating burned calories and underestimating my calories, I just use MFP. I don't know exactly how to calculate burned calories, so I use MFP, I enter in my time and let it work it out for me. I also just search for what I'm eating, and add that too. Especially if it's from a restaurant that isn't listed. I'm not trying to be dishonest, I'm trying to get as close as possible using what I have and what I know.
But thank you again. It really helps me take a good look at what I am or may be doing wrong.

I don't think you are being dishonest or that anyone was suggesting that. There are tricks to using MFP, that's all.

One is that some people find that certain calorie counts are inaccurate when it comes to estimating exercise. IME, the elliptical counts can be a major offender. It's good to be skeptical of anything that seems too high. Basically, if you are going full out then 10 calories per minute is a decent cap, and if not than you'd want to assume less. I commonly reduce my calorie counts by a third (some do by more), although I usually don't reduce running counts, as they seem accurate enough based on results.

Sometimes it's easier to just estimate your overall activity with exercise (if you exercise a good amount say active, if not that much but some say lightly active) and set your loss to maybe 1.5 lb to start and see how it works. Then you don't have to worry about trying to adjust for exercise.

For logging, read the link on logging that someone gave. It helped me a lot. One thing to think about is that meals are going to vary a ton in calories depending on the size, the specific ingredients used, etc. So if you have a burger or lasagna or some such, you can't assume the calories will be anything like some generic entry in the database and you'll find those vary enormously from entry to entry.

What you need to do is either find the precise item (if packaged food or a chain restaurant) or calculate based on ingredients and size (if homemade or no applicable entry). One reason cooking for yourself can lead to better results is that you will know what you are eating, whereas you really don't from a restaurant (although chains have okay information). I still go out to non chain restaurants once or twice a week and estimate, but I always estimate high and add in extra butter and other stuff you can't see because I know they have tons more hidden calories and bigger serving sizes and all that vs. something I'd make at home.

It's just a matter of figuring all this out and getting used to it.

I'd say try tightening up the logging for a few of weeks and see how you do. Then if it's not successful (although I hope it is and think it's likely to be), you can go to the doctor and have a really good list of what and how much you've been eating as a starting point.

Take a look at her diary. It's far to high in carbs for her daily caloric intake she's trying to hit.

Many days you're not even hitting 50g of protein, while over 200g of carbs. I'd bet you'd start to see significant weight loss within weeks if daily caloric intake is what you're claiming to log and you were closer to <150g carbs and 100g+ protein.

There are tons and tons of articles and peer reviewed essays that talk about high protein diets being a contributing factor to fat burn. http://www.bing.com/search?q=diet+high+in+protein+weight+loss&src=ie9tr

AGREED too many carbs

Actually "clean" eating means cutting out processed, fast-food, and convenience foods. Clean eating means not choosing hamburgers, and ramen, candy bars, and soda. I'm all for cheat days because if I didn't allow for cravings sometimes, I'd go overboard all the time. I don't know how you feel about chemicals and additives, but I don't consider that clean eating.

Actually "clean" eating means cutting out processed, fast-food, and convenience foods.

Depends who you ask. A shocking number of people claim to be "clean eaters" and eat lots of processed foods, and plenty of others claim that "clean" means no white foods or grains or sugar or any number of other self-defined rules.

Given this, I think we should all just acknowledge that "clean" means nothing in particular and is mostly just a way of claiming that the way you eat is superior to the way someone else eats.

Personally, I think about what I eat, but some of it--like yogurt, cottage cheese, smoked salmon, probably frozen veggies and canned tomatoes in the winter, steel cut oats, whole wheat pasta, quinoa, protein powder, etc.--is processed. Rather than thinking of these things as "cheats" or "unclean" (weird), I consider them to be foods I have chosen to eat because they meet some nutritional or taste consideration that I find important. Along with that, I'd include ice cream (homemade or otherwise), the pie I will make on Thanksgiving from fabulous ingredients, and the meals I get from restaurants, whether lunch places that meet my nutritional requirements and quality concerns or the various local restaurants I like for the occasional dinner.

Clean eating means not choosing hamburgers, and ramen, candy bars, and soda.

What the heck is wrong with burgers inherently? I get ground beef (along with other meat) from a local farm. It's even from cows that are grass fed and raised humanely, etc. I sometimes use it for pasta sauce or eat it on its own or, yes, make a burger. Don't see why that's "unclean." Similarly, if I go to a local restaurant with good ingredients, why is the burger more unclean than, say, the chicken? Or is restaurant food inherently "unclean"? See the confusion? Why not just aim for an overall nutritious, balanced diet and forget about the clean/unclean dichotomy? It really seems to serve no good purpose, and just asks to have someone go through your diet to see how "clean" it really is.

I'm all for cheat days because if I didn't allow for cravings sometimes, I'd go overboard all the time. I don't know how you feel about chemicals and additives, but I don't consider that clean eating.

I don't cheat. I am concerned about overall balance and nutrition. I don't see why my diet is less healthy if I eat a 45 calorie Café Tasse Noir (my current favorite bit of chocolate to have after lunch on occasion) or even 200 calories of ice cream if I have lots of calories and have had my protein, fiber, and veggies. Re chemicals and additives, there are various things I choose not to eat (I don't personally choose to have HFCS or added transfats, and I simply don't like most packaged foods when compared to what I can cook myself), but I think a blanket prohibition on "processed" foods is too broad. There are many processed foods (the ones listed above, legumes, which I should eat more of) that are nutritionally positive. A focus on simply excluding allegedly bad foods and not creating a sensible balanced diet that meets nutritional needs and tastes good seems to me the wrong focus.

IME, if you focus on the sensible balanced diet, you aren't even going to want to or have room to be immoderate wrt high calorie sweets or chips or whatever it is that you are concerned about, other than rarely. I have a weakness for French fries, personally, and yet I did not need to cut them out or some foolish thing that would cause me to think about them more, and certainly not to declare them "unclean" (which makes no sense, especially since I can make them myself out of nice, clean potatoes). But because I'm focusing on other things I don't eat them often at all. And when I do I enjoy them and do not feel guilty or beat myself up or think I've polluted my body or fallen off the wagon or whatever. Ugh.

I struggle. 3 months ago I was down 80lbs now you see I'm back up. Every friggin day is a literal battle with food and myself. It's exhausting there are times when I'm like F" it I'm going to be fat, eat what I want, when I want, and not worry because it's easier. Then I look down at my son. He is the result of that struggle that battle. If I had not kept pushing I'd never have lost enough weight to balance my hormones. I thought I was destined to never have a child, but luckily there is that little glimmer of hope in all of us that keeps making us push despite how many times we fall and trip ourselves up.

No, you are not destined to be fat. There is no preordained fate looking down on you saying that women will always be fat. You know that it's possible, but it's a g-d damn f'en hard struggle every day. Some days we get tired, and we feel hopeless. You can do it though, you can make it happen. Never stop fighting it's all we have.

One thing I am noticing though, using MFP, they show a "mixed green salad with no dressing" at 170 calories! LOL! Some of the calculations on here are incorrect, if I have to keep going to other resources for calorie counts I may bail on this tracker. I think SparkPeople has one that is a little more reliable.

That's because you have no idea what the person who originally created that entry for "mixed green salad with no dressing" put into their salad. Entries with asterisks are user-created. It's always better and more accurate for you to create your own recipes or enter each individual component of a dish as a separate item.