Why is the weight not coming off?

That’s 0.5 lb/ week, which is healthy and sustainable.

Keep in mind that weightloss occurs in the kitchen, not the gym. Exercise is for cardiovascular fitness, strengthening, endurance… but not primarily for weightloss. Increasing your exercise at the same time you’re taking a deficit for the goal of weightloss will muddy the waters in terms of scale changes. You might actually have to increase your calories, depending upon where you started, to fuel your workouts. Your body will have water weight fluctuations as it adjusts to the stressors of exercise and the natural healing process of weightlifting. It’s good to exercise while losing weight, if you’re able to and healthy enough to… but it makes the scale weight “goofy” for awhile.

You’ve chosen a very intense program. Make sure you have a plan for what to do when real life hits and you’ve lost motivation. Motivation is fickle and short-lived. Which habits are actually sustainable for you? Which habits can you continue even on the days you don’t want to, when you don’t have the time or energy for much at all? Those are the ones to focus on now, make those rock-solid.

Adjust your mindset and your timeline. You’re losing 0.5lb/ week. That’s 20lb a year, in reality. That’s amazing, really. Keep up that pace for as long as you need. And, think about all the times you’ve dieted and regained… what if you had instead kept with a plan that had lost/maintained a 20lb loss/year instead? That would have been a win, right? Make those changes to your mindset now. You’re on a good path. It’s not a crash diet, so it won’t crash and burn, either. Keep going.

jandg122 wrote: »

I’m on week 6 of 5-6 days a week of 30 minutes cardio, 2 days a week weights, I only drink water, no sugar, no snacks and only eat two very small portions of carbs a day. I’ve only lost 3 lbs. getting very discouraged and my motivation is fading.
I’m a 59 yr old female.

By coincidence, I joined here as a 59-year-old woman, too. (I'm now 66.)

The things you mention - water, sugar, snacks, number/timing of meals, limited carbs, cardio, weights - are not things that assure weight loss.

Weight loss, directly, is all about getting calorie intake below calorie expenditure. One way to do that is calorie counting. Some of the things you mention are other ways, for some people, but it depends on their situation. If those things don't indirectly decrease intake and/or increase expenditure enough to result in a meaningful calorie deficit, weight loss won't happen.

You are losing weight, it sounds like. You may even be losing more fat than you're thinking, right now. Is that exercise routine new, as it sounds like? If so, kudos: It sounds pretty hearty!

People add water weight from new exercise routines. It's part of how a healthy body does muscle repair, and muscle repair is part of maintaining/increasing strength and muscle - good stuff. It can hide fat loss on the scale, though . . . yes, possibly for weeks at a time.

Me, I tend to strength train only seasonally (character flaw 😉 - I'd be better off if I did it all the time). When I start up strength training after a long hiatus, I tend to add a couple of pounds on the scale. Personally, I generally hang onto those pounds until I stop strength training at the end of the season, then they drop off. I know it's not fat, so I don't worry about it.

Since you're on a new routine, you probably don't know for sure what your personal water fluctuation patterns are. It can be very confusing. If you haven't seen it yet, this could provide some background:

https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations

If you're calorie counting, it would be helpful to know whether you've been calorie counting and logging food here, how you've been doing that (estimating/eyeballing, cups/spoons measurements, food scale, etc.), whether you're logging any "refeed" or "cheat" meals if they're in the picture, what your calorie goal is, how tall you are and how much you weigh, what your daily life activity looks like, whether you're eating back exercise calories as MFP intends, and if so how you're estimating those.

I know that's an annoying big bunch of questions, but if you'd like help figuring out some possibilities about why you're losing more slowly than you'd like, we'd need some information to go on. If you'd be willing to open up your diary (even temporarily), and say you have, some of the old hands here would be willing to take a look at your diary, maybe see some things that would be relevant. That's not a criticism: Logging is a surprisingly subtle skill, and takes time for all of us to learn, when we start out.

If you're willing to get in a conversation here with folks, I suspect we might be able to help. The dialog might get frustrating for you, because we'll misunderstand some things, repeat questions, and otherwise behave annoyingly like the random MFP users opining for free that we are.

One possible distinction is that some of those questions and opinions will come from people who've worked through weight management themselves, and succeeded. Back in 2015 when I came here, I started a gradual process where I lost from class 1 obese to a healthy body weight at age 59-60, and have been at a healthy weight since, after around 3 previous decades of overweight/obesity.

Regardless of how your thread here proceeds forward, I wish you success, and encourage you to stick with the process!