Advice please

I think you need some help with your nutrition and calories.

1600 seems really low for breastfeeding, exercising woman.

Breastfeeding in itself adds about 500 calories per day to your requirements. Seems to me you should set your Goals to, "Lose one pound per week," add in 500 calories, and eat back those exercise calories too.

I would talk to your doctor for more guidance, but I do know that eating too little will affect your milk production. Now's not the time.

Svhmaddison wrote: »

Also my diary won’t be insightful as I use Fitbit food diary since treating myself around a month ago.

I don't think we need to see your diary - my main concern is that you aren't accounting for your increased activity *and* your breastfeeding in your calorie goal.

1600 seems low.

Do not over restrict to make up for a binge! It leads to a really toxic cycle of over-restricting and binging. If you have a day where you eat over your calories you don’t need to make up for it the next day, you just go back to your normal routine.

I totally get your problem right now, because I, and I suspect pretty much everyone or most people here, have gone through the same at various points. For me, it's happened multiple times over the past year. No matter how well a diet is going, no matter how well you've ironed out what foods you enjoy and how to eat them within your calorie limit, no matter how motivated you were at first and still kinda feel, diet fatigue does set in.

It seems clear enough that 1600 isn't doing it for you right now. You don't have to bump it up forever and permanently, but right now you'd be better off with a few hundred more calories per day for a while rather than getting into the dreaded binge and restrict cycle.

Suggest you go to the MFP Goals too, bang in your age, gender, height, weight, etc., tell it you want to lose 1 lb per week, and eat however many calories it tells you to eat. For a while. You might well be able to go back to 2 or 1.5 lbs/week down the road but right now you need a break from the intensity. Just embrace it. If you don't feel like doing the MFP Goals too thing, then just bump that number up to 1800 or 1900 for a couple/few weeks.

One thing I think I've learned is that diet fatigue cannot be beaten back through brute force. It's your body and brain telling you to take your foot off the gas and it's exceedingly difficult to overpower, if that's possible at all. You are much better off listening to your body and brain and giving yourself some more food. In the long run, what's 1 or 2 pounds not lost over a 2-3 week period if it helps you stay on track.

Like others above, I highly recommend not trying to make up for calorie overages from past days. There's only one direction in a diet, forward, and only one thing that matters, today. Everything that happened right up until this moment is irrelevant to what you do next. If you shortchange yourself on calories to punish yourself for what you did yesterday, you are likely to binge and get frustrated and then binge again. Just stay the course. 1800. 1900. MFP's suggestion. Whichever you pick. Just pick a higher number that's a bit less demanding than you've been doing, and plow forward.

EDIT: If it helps any for perspective, I started with 1600 calories too, in June '19, and happily and successfully did that for around 5 months. Plus, I was kinda cheating on the exercise, in that I was eating back a quite small percentage of my exercise. I dropped weight very fast and was very motivated. I took a ton of before/after photos and reveled in all the praise from friends and family. It seemed so easy and I felt so empowered and successful. Then one day in December, and I have no idea why, I got diet fatigue. All at once. I hadn't been dissatisfied, or hungry, or in desperate need of a pizza. I was just suddenly tired of dieting. I almost lost it with a 2-3 week binge/restrict cycle and then tried to regroup. It didn't work, not at 1600. I upped it to 1700 and that still didn't work. I now eat 1850 plus 80 % of my exercise, and I am back on track. I couldn't begin to articulate why I was once happy with 1600 day after day after day but all of a sudden couldn't hit 1600 at all, not even for a single day, but there it is. Diets are weird that way. Instead of losing 2+ lbs/week, I now lose around 1, and it doesn't sound like a lot but here's the thing: I am still losing weight, a year later, and not yo-yoing and regaining. So I think my point here is, more calories and a slower loss rate is no bad thing; it might be the key to staying on course. Try to take the emotion and self-doubt out of the equation and deal with it as a simple algebra problem. Your body and brain want a new number, a higher number, so give them what they want.