Help

If you're not losing, you are not at a deficit. Can you open your diary?

Stop doing silly diets and follow a healthy balanced normal diet so your energy doesn't slump and you have the right building blocks to support your body nutitionally through weight loss. Simple thing is, unless you're at the latter stages of getting shredded, not generically losing weight, then the simple calories in < calories out. Your choice how you do it. Exercise for the deficit, eat less for the deficit, or a bit of both (favoured method for health, results etc)

You probably know the basic principles that 1lb fat approx = 3500kCal. To lose a lb of fat weight (hypothetically) a week, you need to be eating 500 calories LESS than what your body needs to MAINTAIN your current weight. This needs to be periodically reiewed as the weight falls off. MFP helps.

If you aren't honest to yourself about what and ho w much you are eating and how much energy you are expending then you probably are going to be over eating and will gain weight, or at least not lose any. Activity trackers can help with estimating your calorie burn but you need to make sure you input data correctly in to it such as heigh, weight etc. I reccomend the Jawbone UP24.

Portion control can be the biggest issue for people not measurng out their food. Therefore, it might be time you started weighing your food so you start to get an idea of what a portion of x, y and z looks like. Serving size can be measured by seeing whats on the package as a reccomended amount, or weigh out what you have and use the /100g Nutritional info to work it out. Be sure that when logging you are using the correct state of food. For example, raw chicken will have less calories than cooked chicken /100g because it will have more water in it. Whereas 100g COOKED pasta will have LESS calories than 100g DRY pasta!

Getting moving is one of the biggest things, it helps build better conditioned muscles... ones that are always hungry even when resting so that raises your metabolism and thus your daily calorie expenditure (in simplified terms... it's not much but its some!). It's better for your heart and mental health too, plus helps get rid of cellulite, well, reduce it anyway, by improving your circulation.

They say that walking for 20 mins briskly (so thats slightly out of breath, only just about to hold on to a cnversation) should be the minimum reccomended daly exercise, even if you are overweight, to be as healthy as you can be... that doesn't mean that it's enoug, but its a start. They also say a few steps every 20 minutes should be done for longevity according to a very recent study by Cambridge University.

I don't often write in the forums anymore, but felt like you needed some guidance and/or a reality check. Please feel free to friend me if you want to!!!!

scraver2003 wrote: »

I actually had FUN weighing my food when I started. I weighed all kinds of stuff. (I even weighed my 100 proof rum so I could pour it perfect every time. I had to measure out an ounce and then weigh it.) Lol! Then I weighed meat I bought to see if it was close to what the label said. It is really AWESOME for weighing condiments like butter and dressing and croutons and such. I actually found that I was shorting myself on butter, but getting WAY carried away with dressings.

I haven't looked at your diary, but the other thing that really helped me at first was not to go from eating whatever I was eating (probably 3,000 calories a day, I am sure) to cutting back to 1200. Instead, I worked on aiming for 2,000 or 2,200 calories a day. Then as my appetite adjusted, I find I now sometimes have 1400 calorie days and feel quite satisfied at the end of the day.

I weigh everything, too, even when I make a PB&J. I put the bread on a plate and then on a scale. I turn on the scale, drop peanut butter on the bread until it weighs 30 grams (2 tablespoons), scrape off the knife and then take the plate off the scale and spread the peanut butter. I put the plate back on the scale, tare it back to zero and then add the correct weight of jelly. No messy measuring spoons and no food wasted because you can't get it all out of the spoon and onto the bread.