I'm gaining weight!!!

How do you know you're not eating more? Do you weigh everything you eat on a digital food scale in grams and chose the correct entries? How do you know how many calories you burn and that they are accurate. Sorry, but if you're gaining weight then you're eating more than you need.

These are my really generic tips. If you're comfortable opening your diary or giving us some more details, that might help to get you more specific advice.

1. If it's been less than 3 weeks or so, don't sweat it! Normal fluctuations happen and unfortunately sometimes we stall for a week or two even when we're doing everything right. Give your body some time to catch up with the changes you're making.

2. If you aren't already, be sure that you're logging everything. Sometimes people forget about things like veggies, drinks, cooking oils, and condiments. For some people these can add up to enough to halt your weight loss progress.

3. Consider buying a food scale if you don't already have one. They're about $10-$20 dollars in the US and easily found at places like Amazon, Target, and Walmart. Measuring cups and spoons are great, but they do come with some degree of inaccuracy. A food scale will be more accurate, and for some people it makes a big difference.

4. Logging accurately also means choosing accurate entries in the database. There are a lot of user-entered entries that are off. Double-check that you're using good entries and/or using the recipe builder instead of someone else's homemade entries.

5. Recalculate your goals if you haven't lately. As you lose weight your body requires fewer calories to run. Be sure you update your goals every ten pounds or so.

6. If you're eating back your exercise calories and you're relying on gym machine readouts or MFP's estimates, it might be best to eat back just 50-75% of those. Certain activities tend to be overestimated. If you're using an HRM or activity tracker, it might be a good idea to look into their accuracy and be sure that yours is calibrated properly.

7. If you're taking any cheat days that go over your calorie limits, it might be best to cut them out for a few weeks and see what happens. Some people go way over their calorie needs without realizing it when they don't track.

8. If you weigh yourself frequently, consider using a program like trendweight to even out the fluctuations. You could be losing weight but just don't see it because of the daily ups and downs.

9. Some people just burn fewer calories than the calculators predict. If you continue to have problems after 4-6 weeks, then it might be worth a trip to the doctor or a registered dietitian who can give you more specific advice.

taylorpigg wrote: »

How I measure my calorie intake is using this app and scanning the package.

Not everything comes in a package. How do you measure say, cheese? Do you weigh it on a digital scale? Also. on average, how many calories do you think you are burning when you exercise on average? If you have gone by the numbers on here it is probably wildly wrong. That's why many people eat only 50% of their calories back.

Some questions that may help us to help you further: How tall are you, what do you weigh and what is your goal? How did you pick 1500 cals, is that what MFP gave you? Is your diary public, if not make it so.

Also, do NOT go down to 1000 cals, unless you are 4' 6" and over 60.

taylorpigg wrote: »

If you use a scale to measure your food and get the exact calories and you guys all say you can't eat more than you burn so your telling me I need to burn 1500 calories while working out?

No, they are saying that you're not accurately measuring your calories to the point that you massively overate to the tune of 45,500 extra calories in 2.5 months while trying to eat at a deficit. Your body is not wired differently. You cannot gain that much weight without massively underestimating your food and overestimating your activity.

taylorpigg wrote: »

If you use a scale to measure your food and get the exact calories and you guys all say you can't eat more than you burn so your telling me I need to burn 1500 calories while working out?

No, daily calorie burn which includes the calories your body burns to function, general movement and exercise. If you're adding exercise to mfp, eat around half those calories back since mfp grossly overestimates burns.

I agree with those who mentioned weighing all the food that you eat. Weigh meats/fish/root veggies/rice/pastas/uncooked grains raw, weigh veggies, weigh butter/mayo/nut butter, weigh prepackaged foods. Don't eyeball portions and don't use cups and spoons for measuring solid or semi solid foods. Use cup measures for liquids. Make sure to count the oils used for cooking and milk in coffee.... Log everything. Choose accurate database entries (match packaging), and don't go for count servings, always use the weight.

Don't drop your calories before your weigh and log correctly. And don't go under 1200.

If you aren't "getting bigger" or if you notice that your clothes are looser, it could be that you lost some fat and gained more muscle

There are 3500 calories in a pound. So say your over by 500 cals per day for a week..that's a gain of a pound a week. Now it's very easy to lose track of 500 calories..is it possible you are under estimating how many cals you are consuming, a lot of the calorie counts are wrong in MFP so it's always good to double check. Or is possible your over estimating the calories burned during excercise?