Advice please!!

Sorry to hear about your struggles. Don't think like that, you can do this. You've been tracking various calorie levels, but do you have a food scale and are you weighing all of your food? That's the only way to truly know whether you are accurately eating 1200, 1500, 1700 calories a day. Even going low carb, at the end of the day it's still all about eating less than you burn. Either diet could work fine for you, but it's more of a preference to each person which way of eating works best for them long term rather than short term.

Start with a food scale, if you don't have one. It's an eye opening experience.

Edited: Grammar

My advice is to stop looking for "the fix" and keep it simple.

It sounds like you're looking for the magic bullet or the one secret that will change everything. Low fat, low carb, crash/starvation dieting, radical changes, etc. There's no fix, there's no magic, there's no secret otherwise everyone would be doing it and there'd be no MFP.

It also sounds like you're jumping in too far, too quickly and trying to do to much. The fact of the matter is when 99% of us start to manage our weight we're hopeless novices at it. We're complete beginners, Total Noobs. But we still decide to try and tacking weight management like a seasoned pro and get discouraged and give up when we can't achieve the impossible standards we set for ourselves. It's like deciding to learn to play the guitar and getting upset that you can't play like Jimi Hendrix the very first day.

So try starting to learn to manage your weight like a beginner and keep it simple. And it doesn't get any simpler than sticking to one rule.

Rule: Eat fewer calories than you use.

That's it. Forget about all the other rules like 'I gotta eat healthy', 'I gotta watch my <insert macro here>', 'I gotta cut out <insert food> etc. Just eat food you enjoy, food you genuinely like to eat and track (accurately, with a scale) how much of these foods you're eating to make sure you're eating in an appropriate calorie deficit more often than not.

Do this and you'll be 70% of the way there and what you'll find is that as you get better and more knowledgeable and more experienced at managing your weight you'll naturally start to make necessary tweaks to improve your results and make things easier. You'll find yourself naturally avoiding some foods as they'll be to "expensive" calorie wise so won't be as enticing. You'll start to discover other foods that you enjoy that are better "value" for the calories they contain. You'll get better and things will get easier but it all starts with Rule one.

G'luck

AreneeS22 wrote: »

I’ve been sticking with the basics food wise...eggs, meat, vegetables..I cut out starches and fruits, no sugar..anything I would need sweetened I use swerve sweetener...I don’t know, is there such thing as being TOO restrictive on carbs? 🤷‍♀️

Again, you're focusing on the wrong things.

Go back and read through the responses in this thread and (unless I missed it) no where does anyone mention cutting things out of your diet, sticking to any particular foods or restricting carbs. Go back and read the advice that people are giving you and you'll find one common theme. Eat food you like in a calorie deficit, have a little patience and you'll lose weight.

The key take away is, weight loss comes from a calorie deficit. Cutting carbs won't work unless you're eating in a calorie deficit. Eliminating a particular food or group of foods won't work unless you're in a calorie deficit and neither will sticking to a particular food or group of foods.

The truth is, when it comes to weight loss what you eat doesn't matter, it's all about how much you eat. Taken to a ridiculous extreme to illustrate the point. Eat cake, ice cream, burgers, pizza and chocolate in a calorie deficit and you will lose weight. Eat veggies, chicken breast, salad and kale-acai-goji berry smoothies in a calorie surplus and you'll gain weight.

You really would benefit from a full reset and rethink.

There's some really good threads in the sticky post section about how to weigh your food and chose entries.

Your next biggest issue will be perception of progress.

So:

Stop thinking about diet/hard diet/going all out.
.
Start thinking about dialing in the number of Calories you need to eat every day to keep your weight constant and reducing them by about 20% (for most people who are not obese and/or very active aiming for a 500 Cal deficit/1lb a week and achieving a loss between 0.5lb and 1lb a week is more than enough to see results)

If the "diet" is not too hard it just might be something you can stick to long term, right?

I mean what's the point of making changes you already KNOW you cannot stick to? What happens after? So look for changes you just MIGHT be able to stick to.

Just assign a label of: it was worth the calories to me at this time vs it wasn't worth the calories at this time. You will soon start weeding out "good bargains" from bad.

Use a food scale and chose the right entries.

Use a weight trend app. Use a weight trend app. Use a weight trend app.

As a woman compare your trending weight to your trending weight a month ago at the same point in your cycle.

Weightgrapher.com might help with that due to their ability to graph that comparison.

Personally I use trendweight (mainly because weightgrapher's suggestions annoy me).

Most phone people use happy scale for iPhone and Libra for Android.

You are going hard and expecting results right away. Go at it long term and be patient.

Don't think of it as removing items from your diet.

Think of it as adding new things that take out of the rotation bad caloric bargains.

A piece of pie may be ok in the right circumstances once in a while. A daily piece of 450 Cal worth of pie might be replaced for far fewer calories with say.. 453.6 grams of pineapple!!!!

My pediatrician used to suggest that eating an apple half an hour before your main meal was helpful in reducing calories.

40+ years later I have to admit that he might have been on to something, especially if he had suggested using a food scale!!!!