site tells me to eat almost 3k cals a day,,,but I eat half that and still dont loose

so you ate maybe 12g of oats, which would be closer to 44 cals which is not indicated by your logging. Do you (or your wife) regularly make recipes? You might want to utilize the recipe function. Even if I'm just making straight beef burgers, nothing in it but salt and pepper, I make it into a recipe. That way I can enter in the oil I used to fry them, enter in the weight of the total beef I'm using, and then I can divide into how many burgers I want and I will weigh each raw patty out to be equal before frying.

I'm not really sure what your goal is now though.. are you still trying to lose weight? Do you want to maintain? The two websites I listed are good resources for estimating maintenance calorie needs, I definitely recommend trying them out. If you exercise very consistently then simply include the exercise. I switched from that method (known as TDEE) to MFP's net method because my exercise is not as regular, but also i wanted more freedom to be less strict with exercise. So I eat 1880 max a day, and then if I exercise I eat closer to 2000-2100.

If you want to lose, then subtract 15% (or even 10, I doubt you have much to lose if that's your goal). Otherwise, keep it as it is and aim to eat that every day. In either case, weigh your food and log it as the weighed measurement. Even that shred of cheese, weigh and log it as such. Look for entries that 100% match your labels, and if you cannot use the weight function then figure out the decimal ratio. So let's say your cheese serving is 30g (I believe most cheese blocks are), but you only weigh out and eat 3g. So that'd be 0.1 of the label serving, and shoudl give you accurate information. Or if you ate 40g, then that'd be 1.33 servings. Just be consistent in weighing things, and log things appropriately. So if you weigh some raw meat, you'd look for the raw meat entry. Or for cooked, you'd log the cooked entry. If you'd like an idea of how this should all be done you can look through my diary - I weigh everything, and I tend to weigh both cooked and dry and make sure to use my appropriate user-created entries for it (as I wanted accurate calories reflecting the macros and I wanted to be able to log in grams/ml)

LosinMama1966 wrote: »

frob23 wrote: »

I'm done arguing the point. If you want to prove you're a special snowflake who just happens to prove this site doesn't work, you're going to need to try harder next time.

I will say one more thing about accurate logging. I used to think using food scales for everything was stupid and a bit OCD. That's until I actually started comparing my volume measurements to the weight they should be. My volume measures were systematically higher (often much higher). For example, my protein powder says a serving is 1 scoop or 34g. The scoop came with the powder. How off could it be? A level scoop (not rounded) weighs between 40g and 48g. That's up to over 41% of the amount I expect. It's an extra 60 calories per scoop. Systematic underestimation of that sort would give me over 800 calories more per day than I was aiming at while trying to lose (more then wiping out my deficit and instead putting me on the road to weight gain).

I have a digital food scale and I measure stuff, too. I'm going to try weighing more stuff and see if I can get a more accurate "hold" on this...I just started a week ago and what you said makes sense. What the OP (and yes, he's very defensive and a bit snarky even tho he asked for help) says makes NO sense at all.

If you eat calorie-dense food regularly (e.g. peanut butter), definitely make it a habit. I love eating chocolate PB a few x a week (or like.. daily lol) and I'm always so sad that the 1tbsp is so tiiiiny. I go to scoop out how much I think it should be and I'm at like 25g haha. Compared to the 18g a tbsp is!