almost 50 days in

You are ingesting the same calories as you are burning, aka maintenance. Consume less and/or move more.

How are you logging? Weighing your food? Do you know the number of calories you should be eating to lose? If you haven't lost any weight, then you aren't eating in a calorie deficit.

My first trainer, whom I adored, was a “J Wojcik”. I almost fell out of my chair seeing your user ID. It’s such an unusual name. I owe a lot of my success to “Miz J”.

Where have you been journalling? Where have you culled your data from? If you just joined, I’m hazarding a guess it was a paper and pen thing up til now.

That’s not a bad thing. It’s gotten you into the habit, and made you sit up and pay attention to what goes in your mouth, right?

Logging food into an app or website is radically different (and easier!!!!). It does much of the math for you. If you enter your profile data accurately, it will calculate your goal for you. (Initial calculations are only a starting point. You may need to adjust your calorie goal up and down from there.)

It pulls data from an established database. It enables you to do fractions of servings, or easily permits you to double or otherwise increase them. If you’re premium member, you can scan barcodes. (I am, and I seldom scan barcodes, though.)

I always save recipes as meals, which means the ability to log my protein pancakes or homemade pizza is at my fingertips. If I’m making something like pecan chicken, it’s easy to pull from my library of meals and quickly adjust for small differences in quantities.

It’s always in your pocket, so you don’t have to remember things when you get home. I got an Icee at the gas station yesterday and was able to find my flavor and size and log it immediately when I got in the car.

You can even set up a timed reminder to log inside of MFP, if you forget to log lunch, dinner etc.

If you pre-log, like me (I plan and pre-log meals four or five days out) it’s ridiculously easy to adjust on the fly.

Yes, there’s a learning curve, but it’s pretty fast, and there’s always quick help available by simply posting a question here on the boards.

BTW, besides Miz J, these boards were my other secret sauce for success. There’s so many successful users here willing to share their experience and offer advice.

Weigh and log accurately. If your weight is holding steady, you’ve found your maintenance calories. “Maintenance” is that golden place where you’re neither adding weight, nor reducing it. (I reached my weight loss goal about three years ago and have been carefully monitoring maintenance ever since.)

If you’re not losing as desired and are certain you’re numbers are accurate (and honest!), you’ll need to cut your daily calories.

A pound is roughly 3500 calories. To lose a pound a week:

3500 calories divided by 7 (days in a week) is 500 calories. You’d need to cut daily consumption by 500 per day to lose a pound a week.

You can also “earn back” calories with exercise- which is a whole ‘nother discussion. Exercise doesn’t have to be fancy and doesn’t have to involve a gym. Simply walking is the best exercise of all.

If, perchance, you are kin to that small, feisty silver-haired “other” JWojcik - the Island one with the giant set of lungs- wow…..what a fountain of knowledge, set on a plinth of a great heart, crazy *kitten* corny but so true, lol. Go to the source.

Friend me if that’s your jam. I’d welcome the opportunity to pay it forward to a distant Wojcik.

“Not weighing”. “Approximating”.

Calorie counting is difficult in those circumstances.

Not criticizing, but logging without weighing is kinda like dressing without underwear. Looks good on the surface, but lotsa room for mishaps!

The classic example give here is peanut butter. Most people are shocked when they see a weighed serving of peanut butter versus what they thought was a serving. I think the average, according to some unknown source, is about 50% larger. That’s 90 calories of unlogged peanut butter.

I know for me, if I don’t weigh, I get “serving creep”. That’s because my servings will get a little bigger, yet bigger, and even bigger than that until a single “serving” becomes two or three.

Best of success to you , but scales are your friend, as well as your weapon against the Battle of the Bulge.

Hugs!

jcwojcik1 wrote: »

I'm pretty good at measuring, but I'm not weighing the food

Though inartful and easily passed over, the truth lies in what @Retroguy2000 wrote.

Use your "good at measuring" skills with a new (very inexpensive) food scale. Become like a forensic account with the MFP food diary, open it to public viewing, and click the complete button at the end of everyday. We will gleefully explain to you, once you are accurately logging your food, the reasons you aren't dropping your goal amount.

musicfan68 wrote: »

250 calorie deficit doesn't leave any room for errors. Approximating, measuring in cups/spoons is not accurate enough with such a small calorie deficit. You really need to weigh everything. Once you get the hang of it, it is quick and easy.

Also, half a pound a week of actual loss can take multiple weeks to show up clearly in daily scale weights, given than random water/digestive-contents fluctuations of several pounds are normal from one day to the next.

A weight-trending app** may help, but mine thought I was maintaining or even gaining for around a month at one point, when I was pretty sure I was losing slowly. Eventually, there was a quick drop on the scale . . . i.e., I was right, the app was confused.

Patience, accuracy, and a good understanding of your actual (not estimated) calorie needs are good tools to have in your toolkit if shooting for slow loss. OP, yes, slow loss is appropriate in your case.

** Happy Scale for Apple/iOS, Libra for Android, Trendweight with a free Fitbit account (don't need a device), Weight grapher, probably others. They aren't a magical crystal ball, just statistical projections involving smoothing algorithms/moving averages.

I've had success without weighing portions. I'm not suggesting that is the way to do it. For me, it helps that my TDEE is quite high which gives more leeway.

What I often rely on is my average number of portions from something. I log that average. One day I might be a little high, another a little low, but it will be accurate over time. e.g. with a pound of lean beef that's four spag bol meals. One serving may be 0.27 pounds, another 0.23. Whatever, I log it as 0.25 and it all works out in the end. Similarly for a bag of chicken breasts, I divide the package weight by the number of breasts in it. In the end, it will work out.

I once tracked my total uses of coffee creamer from a bottle, because I was sure it was lasting longer than the "X servings per container" suggested. It was. My creamer portions are small enough that I was getting about 2.5x as many portions as the label suggested. So I plug that number into my daily tracking, not the serving size the bottle says.

Again, not suggesting this is the way, especially if you have a lower TDEE. I'm just saying, it works well enough for me. I lost over 50 pounds and kept it off.