Exercising and gaining weight...

How many calories are you consuming and do you use a food scale/ cups/spoons/guess to figure those calories out?

Am so, what are your age, sex, height, current and goal weights?

you cant outrun a poor diet

If you are not properly counting the amount of calories consumed/eating in deficiency NO amount of exercise is going to make you magically lose weight. If anything, you will either maintain or gain as you have which means you are eating too many calories.

Do you know for sure that at the end of each day you are in a calorie deficit to lose weight?

There is a huge variance between 5 - 10 pounds..

arnnap wrote: »

@cerise_noir I'm 5'4', 18, and female. I think I'm consuming 1700

What is your weight? How much are you trying to lose?

TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) is the amount of calories it takes to keep your body alive each day. This includes any calories burned through exercise or other activities. You can google TDEE and calculate it based on your age, height, sex, weight, BF% (for some calculations). This will be an estimate based on scientifically-determined equations. Note: when you are eating below your TDEE, your body draws the deficit calories from your fat stores and lean body mass.

A pound of fat approximately contains 3500 calories. If you eat 500 calories less than your TDEE, then you will likely lose 1 lb/week. For 1.5 lb/week, that is 750 deficit a day.

When you enter your stats into MFP, it calculates your TDEE, and does this math for you based on how many pounds a week you said you wanted to lose. This is how your goal calories are generated.

I would recommend setting your activity level to 'sedentary' even if you aren't. It's more accurate to enter your own exercise, but even that can be a little inaccurate. Every time you enter exercise, MFP will automatically add that you the amount you need to eat that day. You don't need to eat those back though, especially since they get overestimated frequently in the databases.

One more thing, MFP won't set your calorie goal less than 1200/day. If you have a low TDEE, then you may not see the results.

EX: If I sit around all day, my TDEE is about 1500. If I want to lose a pound a week, then I need to eat 1000 calories. That's too low for MFP to recommend, so it will auto set it to 1200 calories a day. My deficit is now only 300 calories a day, or only 0.6 lbs/week. The recommendations are there for a reason though, because it gets harder to have a diet that will allow proper nutrition at lower than 1200 cal/day. If you want to go lower than that, see a professional first to help draft a meal plan that will meet your nutrition goals.

to summarize, the best way to find a good calorie goal is to:
Calculate your TDEE
subtract off 750 cal off of it
*if below 1200, see professional or just be okay with slow weight loss*
recalculate each month or for every 10 lbs.

Once you get going, you can track your weight and calories each day and get a more accurate TDEE calculation.

In order for this to work, you must track your calories very accurately. It's difficult, but is much easier if you utilize a food scale and weigh EVERYTHING you eat, even packaged items! Product weight isn't always 100%.

arnnap wrote: »

@SLLRunner I am 155 and want to be 125

So since you're pretty light already, your TDEE will be lower. Note, TDEE also depends of body fat. The lower your body fat, the more calories your body burns.

I punched in your numbers real quick, and your sedentary TDEE is 1800. This is if you have an office job and don't really exercise.

Let's say you get light exercise: your TDEE goes up to 2000. So to lose 1.5 lb a week, you would need to eat 1250 cal/day. If you are eating 1700 calories a day, you could except to lose between 0.2 to 0.6 lb a week.

arnnap wrote: »

@srcorber thank you a lot

No problem! I definitely recommend getting a food scale. I started around your BMI and age, and tried to lose weight with MFP off and on through my early 20's. Never lasted more than a couple weeks. This time around, I bought a food scale and learned a lot more about calories and it finally stuck! It's amazing how hard it is to estimate the mass of food and how off volume measurements can be. I also have a friend logging with me, so that helps a lot as well. If you go on Reddit, check out r/loseit! A lot of good info there.