Not able to reach the 1,200 calorie goal

your diary is not open.

i imagine you are eating more than you think you are.

rebbekah16 wrote: »

About 5"7. 13st 4lb. I'll use food scales for cereal, pasta etc. But not for main meals. It's not worth the hassle for me. Only the past two months I've been really serious about lossing weight.

If you're not weighing meals, I wouldn't be sure you're under your calorie goal at all with any certainty.
Also I can lose weight eating 1,700, as can lots of other women. I'm not sure that's a 'piggy' intake that would've led to weight gain in the first place, unless you are very very sedentary. The maths isn't adding up somewhere IMO.
If you really are eating on average 1,000 calories a day, that large a deficit is not likely to be good for you in the long term. For lots of people underfuelling yourself to that level can lead to fatigue, unnecessary hunger, and losing a lot of muscle which you want to keep.

You are definitely eating more than you think. I had the same problem when I started until I shockingly realized the actual amount of calories in the foods I was eating. MFP is an exceptional tool in this sense because it really gives you a clear idea about the calories in your food. I was shocked to see that only one table spoon of olive oil contains 120 kcal. I usually used two to season my salad! So log everything you eat, literally everything, just to get an idea of how much you really consume. After a while you get used to scaling and eventually you can stop doing it (at least for certain types of food) because you naturally remember how many calories certain foods contain. 1200 kcal is seriously restrictive and you can easily go over it, especially if you workout.

You aren't logging accurately, so you have no idea how many calories you are consuming.

Until you are logging accurately, no one can give any other advice than to log accurately.

Exactly. Just scale the food and log it in, MFP does the rest of the work so no excuses.

rebbekah16 wrote: »

I am using the bar code scanner for the packages, tins etc I use so that is accurate. But I'll start scaling everything I eat instead of just a few things. Thanks for your advice

All the bar code is, is a number. It is associated with a database entry, but not always the right one either due to two products in the whole world have the same number, the right product but because of regional differences having different calorie amounts, changes in products that have changed the calories, or because the entry was put in incorrectly by the user who entered it.

In other words, just because you are using the bar code scanner does not mean you don't have to double check if things match up and make sense.

yesimpson wrote: »

rebbekah16 wrote: »

About 5"7. 13st 4lb. I'll use food scales for cereal, pasta etc. But not for main meals. It's not worth the hassle for me. Only the past two months I've been really serious about lossing weight.

If you're not weighing meals, I wouldn't be sure you're under your calorie goal at all with any certainty.
Also I can lose weight eating 1,700, as can lots of other women. I'm not sure that's a 'piggy' intake that would've led to weight gain in the first place, unless you are very very sedentary. The maths isn't adding up somewhere IMO.
If you really are eating on average 1,000 calories a day, that large a deficit is not likely to be good for you in the long term. For lots of people underfuelling yourself to that level can lead to fatigue, unnecessary hunger, and losing a lot of muscle which you want to keep.

I agree with this. I'm actually the same weight as you and about an inch taller. I am pretty active, but maintenance for me is about 3000 calories, so an intake of 1700 would have me losing 2-3 pounds a week. Everyone's different obviously, but it's likely that your estimates are undershooting. Even if it's just for a little bit, weighing out everything is really helpful in learning what a certain amount looks like for each food (there are a lot of things that are really easy to underestimate how much you're eating), and how many calories that contains.

rebbekah16 wrote: »

Thanks for all the advice. Just so everyone is clear that was a typo what I put 1,700. was supposed to put 2,700. In MY opinion that was eating like a pig because it was all fatty foods. Thats how I got to my current weight.
I will start using scales and measurements for my foods

If you're avoiding fats, you might want to incorporate healthy fats into your diet like avocados and nuts and fatty fish (tuna, salmon, sardines, etc).

I log everything carefully, and I've found the calorie deficit tracks closely to the amount of weight I lose per week. I find playing around with numbers using the calculator here helpful in understanding the effect of age, activity, and calories on the amount of weight gained/lost:

http://www.calculator.net/calorie-calculator.html

rebbekah16 wrote: »

Thanks for all the advice. Just so everyone is clear that was a typo what I put 1,700. was supposed to put 2,700. In MY opinion that was eating like a pig because it was all fatty foods. Thats how I got to my current weight.
I will start using scales and measurements for my foods

So if you can eat 2700 per day, then there's no reason you can't eat 1200.

synacious wrote: »

Even weigh prepackaged foods because they can be far off with the calorie counts, not to mention the fact that almost all nutrition labels are rounded anyway. Yesterday I ate a fruit and nut bar from Trader Joe's that was 40 grams per serving; the actual bar weighed 50 grams which brought the calorie count up by 50. That's a hell of a difference in calories.

^^This too