Really, please help. Calorie counting and going crazy. Not losing fat.

olegirl2000 wrote: »

@kshama2001 this was awesome insight. Everyone has offered wonderful wisdom. This wracks my brain.
It's exactly what I'm dealing with: Too much training and too little food and too little sleep. I need to boost the cortisol levels in a healthy way.

If my maintenance calories according to @deannalfisher is 2300, how in heaven's name can my an 800 cal deficit (at 1500) be any good ?

If I go down to an accurate 1700 or even 1800, would that be sufficient with properly weighing using a scale, of course?

From reading everything, my guess would be you don't actually have an 800 calorie deficit. Weighing your food (including oils/butters for cooking) makes a huge difference. I've never had an egg be at the calorie amount for one egg. They're always equivalent to 1.2 eggs or 1.5 eggs or even 2.1 eggs (double yolk). A piece of cheese is 1.1 or 1.2 pieces, a piece of bread the same at 1.2-1.3 and don't get me started on the freakin' chicken tenders! All those little decimals really add up.

With less than 25 pounds to lose, you should be aiming for .5 pounds per week. With your activity level, a larger deficit could cause the loss of more lean mass than you'd want and then there's the effects (over time) on your skin and hair ...). If your TDEE is 2300, I'd shoot for around 2000 daily. I am in the camp of "whoever eats the most and still loses weight wins." But see how your energy is and where your macros are. What you want is health--why eat in a manner that won't get you where you want to go?

olegirl2000 wrote: »

@Spliner1969, i will have to look more closely at my measurements.
when i think of things like grilled or steamed chicken, i consider it to be something like a palm sized portion.
i do log the red wine, as i know that's a huge calorie hog. i could drink in 1 setting more than half of my daily calorie requirement in wine. which only means, i just don't eat as much food that day. just kidding.
i do see where you are coming from, though.

When I add your stats to my iifym app, I get around 1730 calories at sedentary per day for maintenance. Obviously you aren't sedentary, you're exercising regularly so you'd need to calculate those calorie as best you can and add those in. When I was losing my weight with MFP, I set myself at sedentary maintenance, then subtracted 500 per day for a 1 lb per week loss. Then I allowed an app paired with a HRM that I trust to add back calories when I exercised, and I ate back a minimum of half of those calories up to about 80% of them max. I managed to average a 2lb per week loss sometimes more sometimes less but overall it was pretty steady. But I weighed everything I could to be as accurate as possible.

Even when we made recipes at home, we'd weigh all the ingredients, put them in the recipe builder. Weigh the finished recipe and divide it by the number of servings to get an exact calorie count. It sounds tedious and it is, but once you get used to it, it becomes second nature. Also you can repeat the recipes exactly the next time and use the same ingredients and you won't have re-enter it unless you change something.

To get an idea of how many calories you should be eating on a 7 day basis, I suggest iifym.com's calculator. I use it so that on rest days I don't have to eat less. What it does is allow you to enter your stats, as well as your exercise each week (be sure to be honest on intensity level), then it divides the total by 7 and gives you a calorie goal per day. Then it helps you set your macros by calculating those for you. You then manually enter the percentages (or grams if you have a paid MFP subscription) in MFP and the calorie goal then don't add in your exercise calories. You eat the same every day and you're golden.

The catch with this method is that you have to be precise in your exercise. Do the same every week (more is ok, but less will impact your loss rate) for exercise, same intensity, same length of time, and you then can stick to the goal it sets for you, eat what you want, as long as you stay within your calorie goals. If you look at my diary (it's not public but you added me so you should be able to view it) you'll see my calorie goal rarely changes and is set somewhere around 2700 calories a day because I average around 4900-5000 calories of exercise a week. My sedentary TDEE without exercise is around 2000 calories/day based on my height/weight/age/gender. I never really used MFP's wizard/calculations because I felt it was shorting me on protein goals.

Maybe focus on destressing. I put on weight recently while increasing my exercise levels. I went from 141 to 154 over the past year, but I think a lot of it is overdoing it and stress. So my goal is to still exercise at the gym, strength train and cardio but do more relaxing walks, yoga, baths and drinking tea. I am too hard on myself, constantly worrying which results in more stress. So just take it one day at a time? My diet needs massive improvement, which is why I probably have gained weight too.