Calories

If you believe that MFP’s calorie goal is too high for you, the first thing that you need to do is make sure you are using a food scale to weigh all your food. Most of the time when people don’t lose weight on their MFP calorie goal, it’s because they’re eating more than they think they are.

The next thing to do is make sure you’re eating an accurate number of exercise calories. Many exercise calorie calculators exaggerate the number of calories burned. To compensate for this, start with eating only half your exercise calories.

After you’ve started doing both these things, you need to give it about a month to know whether your plan is working. If you have a menstrual cycle, a month should be enough time to take into account hormonal weight fluctuations. And if you recently started an exercise program, you may retain water for several weeks due to the normal muscle repair process.

Finally, if you have very little weight to lose, all of this goes double. You’ll need to track very accurately and be very patient if you are only trying to lose about 15 pounds or less.