Need to break my Plateau

IMHO, you can't exercise your way out of over-eating.

From my personal experience, it is far far easier to loose weight when fully sedentary and properly fed than it is to work like hell to overcome your intake of thousands of extra calories ...

I'd go with baby steps:

1. Log what you are eating, accurately and completely - honesty is a must!
2. Look at your logged food entries and be objective about what you can and cannot change (look for opportunities)
3. Slowly change your intake to match your current and desired lifestyle (first "stop gaining", then begin to align your feeding for weight-loss).
4. Increase your resistance training (progressive resistance, to help preserve the muscles that you have)
5. Continue to modify / tweak your intake to match your lifestyle & weight-loss goals, ensuring that you include sufficient protein in your macros to avoid muscle loss
6. Look at adding some conditioning / cardio as a way to slightly increase your eating and maintain overall body condition (remember that caloric burns are often over exaggerated, and as a petite person, consider the reality of just how long it takes from your day to burn an extra 100 or 200 calories)

No need to rush into things, the weight didn't just sneak up on ya last night, it'll be here tomorrow. Smaller changes are easier to maintain and incorporate into your life.

Just my thoughts...

If "bulking up" were just that simple, you wouldn't see so many body builders and weight lifters working at it so hard. Bulking up takes a lot of work and a caloric surplus (weight gain). Since you'll be eating in a deficit to lose weight, you'll be a long way from bulking up like a builder or anything even close...

Protein values are generally guided by your lean body mass, and there's a wide variety of thoughts around that as well... Naturally, I'll open my mouth and hop right into the flames and offer that general guidance is to go for about 0.8 to 1.2 grams of protein for each pound of lean body mass -- Nice and scientific, but sometimes difficult to properly assess, I mean, you'd have to know lean body mass first, right?

So, I kinda go more toward saying this more simply -- You have a goal weight in mind for yourself, I trust that it is realistic and appropriate for your frame... If we assume that your goal weight would have you (as a 4'11" female) be about 25% or 30% body fat that'd mean that your goal lean mass (the stuff you want to hold onto beginning today until you reach your goal weight) would be about 70%-75% of your coal weight. Yeah, it's an assumption...

Using those assumptions, a reasonable starting goal for protein intake is about 1 gram of protein for half your goal weight

GOAL WEIGHT ÷ 2 = protein grams

(this targets a goal body fat of from 25%-30% at your goal weight,
and while not perfectly precise, gets you going.)

Now you can go over or below that protein intake without the world coming to an end, but it's a solid starting point, and chances are good that the automated values in MFP will differ, so you'll wanna tweak your settings some to fall somewhere around that half-gram per pound of goal weight. (Realistically, you'll wanna keep an eye on things and adjust your numbers to meet YOUR own physiology as you move along, but today we're getting started, right?)

You are 100% correct that the little things add-up... and you've been dealt the short stick as well, so your height will make your need for accurate honesty even more necessary to your success. Be honest with yourself in your logging -- it's always a good first step.



If you've not yet read this, @usmcmp has a nice thread that is well-supported: http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1161603/so-you-want-a-nice-stomach