Stuck and looking for advice

Do you weigh everything that goes into you mouth? sauces? do you count/measure liquids and beverages? what do you have your calories set at? you're either eating too many calories or over estimated your calorie needs

Well i don't know what your calculated calorie burn is but i'd suggest its wrong and that you are eating too much. The calories you are aiming for are wrong. Eat less!

You should feel a tiny bit hungry when you go to bed at night. Not hungry enough to make you want to eat but you should not feel perfectly satisfied at that stage of the day.

I had a look at your profile where you helpfully note that you are a diabetic. Why didn't you mention that before. You know that diabetics tend to lose weight at a slower rate than other people.

I suggest if you are not doing it already, that you significantly reduce your carb foods, not vegetables, just the white carbs. Keep it under 150 to start with. Eat more protein, a lot more vegetables and when you choose carbs, make them LOW GI carbs.

If you eat sweets at all, eat them at the same time as you eat a meal and never separately.

Any other carbs except fruit, eat them only at the same time as you eat vegetables.

For instance don't eat bread and peanut butter. Eat bread and salad. This slows down the energy release and means the glucose gets taken up out of your blood more slowly, which is what you want. When its taken up more slowly, you have more time before it gets converted to fat. This is another reason to reduce carbs overall. Less carbs, less fat accumulation and more fat burning.

To compensate for the reduced amount of carbs, eat more fat. Yes it does have more calories but you still need the same amount of energy to get through your day and if carbs are not giving you enough, it must come from somewhere. Over time, your body will produce enzymes enabling more efficient burning of body fat. In the meantime while your body is getting to that stage, it will convert some of the protein you consume into energy but this is not an efficient process and the protein you eat is mainly needed for other jobs.

It looks like you need to tighten up on your logging - specifically weighing as much as you can (even packaged foods).

I don't necessarily think you should eat less. Your average cals of about 1800-2000 are fairly low for a male. But until you weigh your food consistently for a while it is hard to say how much you are actually eating.

I am not an electrical engineer so my analogy can only go so far here, but if you were to build a circuit (your body) and only estimated the size and setup (quantity) of the resistors, capacitors, inductors, and diodes (calories, carbs, sodium, fiber)...would you get the outcome you are looking for? Would the circuit work? No of course not. You can't be estimating things when you want a specific outcome.

Ooof. And on the same day, restaurant serving of French fries, 219 calories. This actually hits me close to home because I was hungry coming back from the mall yesterday and decided to get mcdonalds small fries to tide me over till dinner. The serving was so tiny I almost cried. Dude, I'm guessing that's not what they served you at your restaurant? Also, any dipping sauces or anything, those have calories too. Depending on how much you used, could be significant. I logged 230 calories of French fries and I think another 50 of honey mustard dipping sauce, plus 40 cals from coffee creamer




Reviewing your diary myself I came to many of the same conclusions:

A lot of "home made" items. If these are not your own recipes, you may wish to stop using them. Instead, either make your own, or list the items individually.

For restaurants, go to the specific restaurants website if you can to get their nutritional info. You've done the right thing by getting a food scale. This actually helps me with estimating restaurant food when I have to. If I have prepared, weighed and logged something similar, I have a better idea how many calories it might be

The exercise calories. I don't know if walking a dog changes the walking calories burned formula, but one I've seen floating around the interwebs for "net" calories burned is:

0.3 X distance (miles) X body weight (lb)

Based on that formula you can pretty much slash your exercise calories listed by half

In addition to the stickies, this post on accurate logging may help clarify some things for you:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1234699/logging-accurately-step-by-step-guide/p1

How long have you been stuck?

harlequin0318 wrote: »

Instead of looking at the food part - why not change the exercise. Your body has probably gotten used to 2-4+ miles of walking 6 days a week, so it's time to change it up

Altough I agree with the general advice of getting more active your body doesn't get used to an exercise to the point that it becomes less efficient and less effective. However, most people miscalculate their exercise since they should be concentrating on gross rather than net calories burned and normally we see gross calories burned when we add them in. For example, if I enter 60 minutes of 3.0 MPH walking into the exercise calculator on MFP I should only see 150 calories but it shows 260. That means it will over estimate 660 calories if I walk 6 days a week. If my food intake is underestimated by even 100 calories per day that's over 1300 calories difference in that week (i.e. I will think I have a greater deficit than I actually do). That can really add up.

coachscoop wrote: »

This last post was the most helpful for me. I don't completely understand it, but I get the jist.

If you would like me to clarify anything just PM me and I can give you some links to get your started.

Many of the items in your dairy are incorrect (as in, the macros add up to being WAY more calories).
Food
Saturday, Nov 1:
-Homemade Grilled Cheese Sandwich. You have 300 calories. Did you create that entry? 2X1 slice of 75-150 calorie bread, plus cheese 50-300 calories, plus butter in the pan 10-50 calories. You may be close to accurate if you used packaged sliced bread and cheese but you still would need to weigh the butter.
-Fish - Tuna salad, 1.25 cup: It's hard to level goopy solids, like tuna salad, and be accurate. It's likely that you had much more.
-Fritos: I used to count out tortilla chips. One serving for that brand was 13 chips. I later got a food scale and found that 13 chips could be 25-30% more or less than a serving, depending on the chips.
-Planter's peanuts: A serving of nuts is miniscule AND extremely high calorie, which means that overdoing it by even a small handful could be an extra 100-200 calories.

Friday, Oct 31st:
-Vegan - Buckwheat Pancakes , 3 pancakes: What brand? Did you make these from scratch? Is this someone else's homemade entry?
-7.5 saltines: Really? You broke one exactly in half?
-Kelloggs miniwheats: cereal, like nuts, is extremely hard to measure with a measuring cup. It's higher calorie, so if you're wrong, you can be very wrong. Cereal doesn't measure flat.
-Many of your items have macros that don't add up to the final calories. Subway cookies: 420 cals (60 carb, 20 fat, 4 protein). Sooo.. 60*4+20*9+4*4 = 436 calories, and that's if they were exactly the same number of grams as the cookie used to measure the macros. If the macros don't add up, there's a good chance the entry is completely wrong.

I just wrote about 2 days, but I saw the same problems (measuring high calorie foods with measuring cups, incorrect entries, homemade meals, and a lot of guessing). I also noticed that you eat a LOT of sodium. This doesn't prevent fat loss, but it does cause water retention.


Exercise
2 miles 2X a day at ~3 mph (do you use a GPS? are you sure it is a mile? do you time yourself for pace?), I'm assuming level terrain is going to burn you 400-500 calories, max.

uconnwinsnc1 wrote: »

The problem probably lies in your definition of what a tablespoon is or a what a cup is. For me, a tablespoon of peanut butter is as much as I can fit on the spoon as physically possible. I am probably fitting 4-5 REAL tablespoons in that one scoop.

A tablespoon is a very specific measurement standard. And there is a standard method of measuring dry (and wet) ingredients. I'll give you that most measuring cup and spoon sets aren't highly accurate, and that in general weight is preferable, but the inaccuracy, if measured the way you should is not off by multiples or orders of magnitude. More like 10% either way.

uconnwinsnc1 wrote: »

freeoscar wrote: »

uconnwinsnc1 wrote: »

The problem probably lies in your definition of what a tablespoon is or a what a cup is. For me, a tablespoon of peanut butter is as much as I can fit on the spoon as physically possible. I am probably fitting 4-5 REAL tablespoons in that one scoop.

A tablespoon is a very specific measurement standard. And there is a standard method of measuring dry (and wet) ingredients. I'll give you that most measuring cup and spoon sets aren't highly accurate, and that in general weight is preferable, but the inaccuracy, if measured the way you should is not off by multiples or orders of magnitude. More like 10% either way.

Using a tablespoon doesn't work for measuring peanut butter. I promise you.

It sure doesn't...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVjWPclrWVY

bendblake wrote: »

I have hit a plateau that I cannot seem to break through. Hoping the community might have some valuable input.
I have been stuck at ~236#'s for the past 6 weeks.

I exercise everyday M-Sat and take Sunday's off completely to recharge the batteries. For exercise, I typically walk 2+ miles twice a day at a ~19min/mile pace.

Since I have been stalled, I have joined MFP and have logged my food religiously. If I smell it, I log it. I really thought that I must have been consuming more calories than I am burning, but with my calorie tracking that doesn't seem to be the case. I have even bought a kitchen scale to weigh my food and a new Withings bathroom scale for my personal weight.

Something is truly amiss, but I can't figure it out. BIG thanks in advance for your input and advice!

Blake

From the sound of it, you may have hit a maintenance phase. The point where yoru calories in equals calories out. I'd recommend lowering your caloric consumption by about 100-200 every day. Also, as what everyone else states, measure your food.

In addition to tightening up on your logging, I would take a look at the high amounts of sodium you consumed on many of the days you did log.