Help pleeeease!!

How are you calculating your calorie burn? 400-500 calories sounds like it could be a lot for weights.
How accurately are you tracking your food intake?

I agree with that question about how you estimate the 400-500 calories. Heart rate monitors and some fitness trackers are very inaccurate at estimating strength training calories (really, sub-ideal at anything that's not moderate steady state cardio).

Compare your calorie estimate to the estimate from the MFP exercise database cardiovascular exercise section, "Strength Training (weight lifting, weight training)" if you're doing classic reps/sets strength training with rests between sets (use the total time period, including normal-length between-set rests). This is actually a reasonable source for strength training calorie estimates, compared to the rest of the field of worse sources. (Some of the better newer fitness trackers now use the same estimating method MFP does, when they know you're doing strength training, but others still use heart rate.)

I'm smaller than you (5'5", around 10st5lbs), and this gives me about 160 calories per hour of strength training. Being taller/heavier, you'd get more calories per minute.

Or, if you're doing fast-paced high-rep but lighter-resistance strength training, compare one of the MFP "circuit training" estimates. That's a little iffier, but still likely to be more realistic than a heart-rate-based estimate.

Shifting gears, how long has it been since you lost weight? Did you stop losing suddenly, or gradually? How long in total had you been losing? (I see you mentioned 6 months, but it wasn't clear to me in context whether that's when you started calorie restriction, or when you added strength training to pre-existing calorie restriction.)

There's a thing that can happen where if a person is at a significant calorie deficit for a long time, or a maybe-excessive deficit for a shorter time, there can be creeping increase of water retention - from cumulative stress, basically. You can learn more about that, and some possible remedial strategies, in this thread:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10604863/of-refeeds-and-diet-breaks/p1

At an accurate 1700, it seems like you should be losing weight, but possibly rather slowly at this stage, maybe half a pound a week or a little more (though I don't know your age, potentially a relevant variable)? If that's the case, that rate of weight loss can play peek-a-boo on the body weight scale for a month or more sometimes, in amongst normal daily water weight fluctuations of a pound or few.

There really are quite a few theoretical possibilities, including those mentioned by others who posted above.

How many calories does MFP tell you to eat if you enter your stats and select "lose 1lb per week"?

Note that the way MFP is designed, you should then eat back additional exercise calories, but as you have discovered using the fitbit heart rate monitor for weights will not give you an accurate number, so you'd need to eat back fewer.

Redordeadhead wrote: »

You also didn't answer this part yet, and it's really important:

How accurately are you tracking your food intake?

While you can create a deficit from exercise alone, it's difficult. You really need to pay attention to the calories you intake as well.

She’s very close to goal. I’d go for .5 pound so she doesn’t climb the walls with too low a calorie goal.

slf2512 wrote: »

@Redordeadhead im tracking it on MFP but granted weekends go off track.

Are you weighing all food? Using cups? Estimating and eyeballing portions?
Do you try to make sure you choose accurate database entries, not someone else's homemade recipe for "lasagna" or "soup" etc.?

When you say weekends go off track, how many calories over? I know I can cancel out my week deficit if I'm not careful over the weekend.

slf2512 wrote: »

@AnnPT77 @springlering62 thank you for your replies I’ll try and cover your questions:

The calorie burn is estimated by my HR on my Fitbit which I’m now learning isn’t accurate. However, I don’t then add that calorie burn back into my daily allowance, I only consume the 1700.

I wonder if the years of 1200 that worked is hindering me now. It worked but I didn’t exercise. Not I want to be fitter and strong and it’s not enough calories.

I’ve fluctuated in the 6 months, losing 1lb, gaining 1lb. Covid hasn’t helped consistency to be fair.

I drink approx 3 litres of water a day to try and combat the water retention.

Can anyone set me a calorie limit that they think would work for my stats?? I’m 40 this summer which isn’t helping I’m sure.

If you have your Fitbit synched to MFP, the 500 (by the end of day) is a complete reconciliation between what your Fitbit saw you burn all day in all things you did (including the exercise, but other daily life things as well), and what MFP expected you to burn based on your activity level setting in your MFP profile.

If that's what's going on, there's a decent chance that the 500 is accurate.

I don't want to be mean, here, but I'm starting to think that your good intentions (to exercise and eat healthfully, etc.) are somewhat clouding your ability to see whether reality is fully in line with those intentions. That's not an accusation, it's just being human to do that sometimes, especially when we perceive that we have to work hard toward a difficult goal.

You mention "Covid hasn't helped consistency", you mention "weekends go off track", for example.

You can lose weight, I quite sure. It's not about drinking more water. Your age is not a significant factor. (Read the link from JBanx; and realize that several of us commenting here are older than you (I'm 66, lost 50+ pounds at 59-60).)

Can you take a month, one full menstrual cycle, and log consistently, as accurately as possible? Every bite, lick, taste, condiment, beverage, cooking oil?

I'm not one who believes that everyone must log hyper-accurately every minute of every day forever in order to lose weight. However, when someone is stuck and doesn't understand what to do, doesn't understand how many calories to eat . . . it's a heckuva a good diagnostic tool, to log accurately, honestly, completely for several weeks.

If you can do that, at the end of 4-6 weeks (1 to 2 full menstrual cycles, looking at the same relative point in each), compare the average number of calories you've been eating to your average weight loss rate over the time period.

You can use that information to estimate your own calorie needs: Add up the calories you ate for the whole time period, and divide by the number of days in the whole time period, to get average calories eaten per day. Compare your weight at the beginning to the weight at the end. Divide that by the number of weeks in the time period, to get average pounds lost/gained per week.

If you lost weight, take the number of pounds/fractions you lost on average per week, and multiply that by 3500 (approximate number of calories in a pound of fat). Take that resulting number and divide by 7 (number of days in a week). Add that to the average number of calories you ate per day during the same time period. That would be your approximate calories to eat on average every day (not adding exercise separately) to maintain your current weight. Then, you can take 250 calories off from that daily maintain-weight amount for every half-pound per week you want to lose.

(This is the way to do the numbers to get a goal that doesn't involving accounting exercise calories separately. If you like doing the exercise separately, you can figure that out, too, but the arithmetic is a little more complicated.)

If you gained weight over the test time period, then get your maintenance calories in a similar way, but subtract the calories-equivalent of the pounds you gained, instead of adding the calories-equivalent of pounds you lost.

Calorie counting is not the only possible way to lose weight. (I'm old enough to have been adult already before there were apps to count for us: Calorie counting in detail to lose weight wasn't practical. But some people lost weight anyway.)

However, if you want to use calorie counting to lose weight, I'm sorry to say that you need to count the calories. You can be approximate, or estimate, or eyeball portions, or have some "days off" that you don't log, or what-have-you . . . as long as that works, as long as you actually do lose weight, and are satisfied with the result.

If your logging is loose, and you don't lose weight, but you want to calorie count and you want to lose weight . . . we will recommend that you tighten up your logging and be consistent and accurate.

If you want not to count calories, that can work. That's where structured meal plans (that you have to follow pretty exactly) come in. That's where people use programs like highly structured meal plans, or strict rules structures like Whole 30 or Bright Line Eating (of which I'm not a fan, personally) that limit what foods you can eat, and focus you on foods most people find filling . . . but that have very serious pitfalls of their own. There are methods other than calorie counting. But if calorie counting is the method you want to use . . . you need to log them accurately enough to make semi-predictable progress.

There are other strategies (diet breaks, NEAT strategies, etc.) that could help you, if you find your calorie needs are unusually low, but it's premature to talk about them, I think.

Sincerely wishing you can find a route to success (and wanting to help, if I can)!

slf2512 wrote: »

@Redordeadhead im tracking it on MFP but granted weekends go off track.

I personally used to get discouraged when I “went over” on calories. Then I’d stop tracking, feel sorry for myself, and eat more of whatever…. But one thing that really helped me was when I friend recommended I track everything I could remember eating the day I was “off track” even if over my calorie goal. I’ll admit that it didn’t feel great tracking everything over my calorie goal. But in the end it was empowering. Once I started tracking the data (good and bad) I started having more success.

I do still have days that I go over on calories. But when I look at the weekly average on my calorie tracking in MFP, I can see that I’m still on track overall.