I am getting so discouraged!

I’d like to help you but not sure I can. I’m not a fan of time driven weigh loss and ordinarily speak against it. But you have a medical reason.

So lets start with the basics. Where did you get the 1542 calorie target? By your count, how often do you stay within your target? Do you use a food scale to crunch the numbers? Keep a food diary? How are you doing living with 1542 calories? Sorry if this sounds harsh, but regardless of how you crunch the numbers, it you aren’t losing… well, you know. Cut calories until you do. And BTW do you find macros to be a needless complication? Maybe you want to consider ditching it. It doesn’t seem to be adding anything.

But take heart. You can get this to work. Calorie counting really works. It has to work because of how our bodies are designed. Just like we are built to store extra calories as fat, we can draw the stores down by eating in a deficit. Our bodies are designed to survive hard times. Fortunately the hard times have not arrived for most of us.

Unfortunately calorie counting is not very exact in practice. First we have to figure out a target that gets us losses. We don’t really know how many calories we are using unless hooked up in a lab. So we are left with the calculators. But the calculators are based on statistics and averages. So we start with the number the calculators give us. But the only way to really know what number works for us is trial and error. A frustrating process.

Then there’s the actual calorie counting. Unless we make everything we eat at home and from scratch we are going to find a lot of gray areas. Again, the only real way to test our skill as calorie counters is trial and error. The frustration drives a lot of people to throw up their hands and walk away.

So #1- don’t quit. Weight loss is mostly about problem solving and persistence. Solve enough problem and we get to goal weight.

But your predicament has to boil down to one of two things, either your target number is not working for you, or your counting is off.

And this- I’ve lost 100+ lbs but I had to reinvent my plan several times to do it. I lost about 65 lbs slowly but it seemed pretty easy until I got stuck. I finally had to face the fact that what I learned getting form 285 lbs to 220 lbs wasn’t much help getting lower. So if you’re down from where you started, congrats on the loss. It’s a new day. Keep trying. Good luck.