Screw this!

You've gotten great feedback. Listen to them!

Whatever you do, you can't quit.
That is, unless you were never serious in the first place.

Good luck. You CAN do this!

The worst thing you could do is give up. Look over what you've been doing and try another approach. If plan "A" doesn't work you have plans "B-Z" left. I willing to bet you that it wont take 25 more trys till you see results! Good Luck!

Do you add your exercise calories back in? I agree with those saying you are not eating enough and should log in more. It helps me to enter foods before I eat them. If they take too many calories, I find something else. My guess is you are starving your body and it is hanging on to every calorie for survivial. Can't do that!

Well you only logged one day this week and you were under 1200 calories that day. Start logging everything then people can help you better.

This^

if you're not logging in consistently, you're not tracking your calorie intake as well as you think you are. Believe me, I know!
1- log in everything that you eat down to a tic tac
2- eat ALL your allotted calories, even the ones you've earned through exercise
3- patience! give yourself time!
4- you seem like you don't have a lot to loose - trust me, those last 10 pounds are a bugger
5- do not weigh yourself all the time, your weight fluctuates daily, even hourly. pick one day a week at a specific time and stick to that
6-don't just rely on the scale, you could have lost inches! how do you feel? healthier?!
7-it takes time and patience. you've made a great decision to join MFP and make changes in your life! hang in there and you will see results!

Give your body a chance!!! When I started working out, it took a month before I noticed anything. I was waking up muscles that had been asleep for quite some time!! My rule of thumb is this: if I can feel my muscles from soreness I don't go NEAR a scale because I know they're holding on to lots of water for repair. You'll have a whoosh soon if you keep up your hard work.

take measurements as well, the scale only shows 1/2 the story.

I highly recommend you read a ton about how the site works:

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/23912-links-in-mfp-you-want-to-read-again-and-again

there is SO much good information there. I particularly liked the your body's thoughts on calories thread

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/233474-the-latest-diet?hl=the+latest+diet

Best of luck! :drinker:

Unfortunately I have to weigh myself every week because I just started participating in a weight loss competition, which is now going to be extremely embarrassing with all the weight I'm gaining.

I do watch my sodium and I buy mostly organic food.

You can pretty much ignore my food journal because I mostly use it as a guide since I eat basically the same thing every day. I can't afford much variety, so I just try to make what I buy as healthy as possible.

Don't just use MFP as a guide.. LOG LOG LOG.
Personally, I suck at estimating and doing it on my own. If I don't log for a day, then I go over probably by 300-400 calories. That adds up FAST. So log your food and don't give up.

First, make sure you are logging everything to ensure you are not eating too much or too little. Be faithful with that so you aren't guessing in the dark.

Second, give yourself time. Whenever I up the intensity of my workouts, my weight goes up 2-3 lbs because I am retaining extra water...but it always drops off once and in the meantime I get more fit. The scale is only a tool. Take measurements. = )

Third, DO NOT GIVE UP! If you are eating right, getting the right amount/kind of calories, and exercising...it WILL pay off. Give yourself time.

Two issues;
Are you working out hard enough and for long enough?
When you watch what you eat are you careful about portion sizes?

How many calories are you eating? After I'd lost some weight, MFP lowered me to 1200 calories. My weight loss slowed and then stopped altogether. I then reset myself to only half a pound a week, increasing my calories to 1390. I've now lost 2 lbs in one week. I think that everyone is different, and calorie numbers that are good for one person, aren't for another. Try eating a bit more and see what happens.

You've been on MFP long enough to know how this works. We've all been through it and you should know all the things you need to try. You vented, now keep working!

I've been watching what I eat and working out regularly for 2 weeks now and I'm gaining weight faster than ever. If working out makes me gain weight, then I'm just going to stop.

And don't tell me it's muscle because you don't gain pounds of muscle after 2 weeks of cardio and a couple exercise DVDs.

If you guessed that I just got off the scale and cried for 5 minutes before posting this, you'd be right.

Here's a few suggestions...
1) Don't quit.
2) Don't say your gonna quit. Working out is just as mental as it is physical.

As far as weights I would suggest circuit training. If you are on a machine I would suggest very low weight and a ton of reps. In fact 10-20 pounds and doing as many reps as possible for 30 seconds. After a 30 sec rest repeat. Over time you will get a lot stronger and a lot leaner.

I looked at your eating and it looked great. You were pretty close to your daily caloric intake though. Burning more calories will help. 3500 cals = 1 pound of weight loss.

PS DON'T QUIT!!!

"Why the Scale Lies

As a personal trainer I’m constantly warning people that the scales are an evil contraption designed to make us feel bad about ourselves and so “diet clubs” can look down on you and say “have you been cheating” to make you feel even worse!

I constantly tell people over and over again that daily weighing is unnecessary, yet how many of you cannot break the ritual of hoping on the scales every day. Do your self a favour and throw the scales in the bin or my favorite, give them to someone you don’t like! If you can’t bring yourself to do either of those then you should definitely familiarize yourself with the factors that can influence its readings. When you factor in things like water retention, glycogen storage and changes in lean body mass, fluctuations in your body weight is normal. The bathroom scale should not be looked upon as your sole guide of success or failure. Once you understand more about how the body works, you can free yourself from the daily battle with the bathroom scale.

Your body is made up of approximately 60% water. Daily fluctuations in the body’s water content can send scale-watchers into a panic if they don’t understand what’s happening. Two things that can influence water retention are water consumption and salt intake. As strange as it may sound, the less water that you drink, the more of it your body retains! If you are even slightly dehydrated your body will hang onto its water supplies, possibly causing the number on the scale to creep upward. So if you are thirsty, drink up as you are already dehydrated!

Excessive amounts of salt (sodium) in our diet can also play a big role in water retention. A single teaspoon of salt contains over 2,000 mg of sodium. As a guide, we should only eating between 1,000 and 3,000 mg of sodium per day, so it can be easy to go overboard. Sodium is a sneaky substance, its in nearly everything you eat and drink. The more highly processed a food is, the more likely it is to have a high sodium content. That is why, when it comes to nutrition I recommend sticking to the basics: fruits, vegetables, lean meat, beans, and whole grains. Be sure to read the labels on canned foods, frozen meals and anything that comes packaged in a box.

Women may also retain several pounds of water prior to menstruation. This is very common and the weight will likely disappear as quickly as it arrives. As with general water retention, pre-menstrual water-weight gain can be minimized by drinking lots of water, maintaining an exercise program, and keeping high-sodium processed foods to a minimum.

The body stores carbohydrates as glycogen. Think of glycogen as the fuel tank for daily living. Some of this glycogen is stored in the liver and some is stored the muscles themselves. This energy reserve weighs more than a pound and for every gram of glycogen stored the body stores approximately 4 grams of water. This can add up to 3-4 pounds of water weight when its stored. Your glycogen supplies, along with the stored water, will shrink during the day if you fail to take in enough carbohydrates. When this happens our weight will drop on the scales but its only temporarily because as soon as we eat a meal containing carbohydrates the body will fill the glycogen fuel tank along with storing water. It’s normal to experience glycogen and water weight fluctuations of up to 2 pounds per day even with no changes in your calorie intake or activity level. These fluctuations have nothing to do with fat loss, however I can imagine they would make the weekly weigh-in at the diet club frustrating, something I’m sure they don’t tell you about!

People also tend to forget the actual weight of the food that we eat on a daily basis will affect the number on the scale. So eating a big meal along with any drinks before hopping on the scale is only going to result in a higher reading. The 5 pounds you put on right after eating a huge meal with drinks is not fat, it’s the weight of the food and will be gone in several hours when the body has finished digesting it. For this reason, it’s a good idea to weigh yourself first thing in the morning before you’ve had anything to eat or drink.

In order to store one pound of fat we need to eat 3500 calories above our daily caloric needs. So if you take the above example, to actually store the above dinner as 5 pounds of fat, you would have to eat a massive 17,500 calories. This is highly unlikely, and in fact it’s probably not humanly possible(but please don’t try to prove me wrong!). So if the scale goes up 3 or 4 pounds overnight, relax, as it’s most likely increased water weight, glycogen, and the weight of your dinner. Bear in mind that the 3,500 calorie rule also works in reverse. If our goal is to lose one pound of fat you will need to burn an extra 3,500 calories more than you take eat. Generally, it’s only possible to lose 1-2 pounds of fat per week. So when you follow a severely low calorie diet that causes your weight to drop 10 pounds in 7 days, it’s physically impossible for all of that to be fat. What you’re really losing is water, glycogen, and muscle.

This brings me to the scale’s sneakiest lie. The scale doesn’t just weigh fat; in fact it only tells you how heavy you are under gravity at that moment. So when you hope on the scale what it collectively weighs your muscles, bones, water, internal organs, in fact everything that is you. Losing weight and losing fat are two different things and in fact, the scale has no way of telling you what you’ve lost (or gained). With that in mind, if you have been on a restrictive diet and lost a lot of weight in a short period of time then you have probably lost a lot of muscle tissue. Losing muscle is nothing to celebrate. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue, the more muscle you have the more calories your body burns on a daily basis, even while you are sat reading this. That’s one of the reasons why a fit, active person is able to eat considerably more food than the dieter who is painfully counting points and who is unwittingly destroying muscle tissue. Also if you are losing a lot of weight by crash dieting and not exercising and therefore by sacrificing muscle tissue you will not get the body transformation results you desire. You will just end up a smaller version of yourself. Or as one of my clients recently put it, a smaller fat person!

If you were to compare your muscles and fat to gold and feathers with one pound of fat being a big lumpy bag of feathers, and one pound of muscle as a small but extremely valuable piece of gold. Our goal would then be to get rid of the lumpy feathers and replace it with as much gold as possible. So in effect we would weigh exactly the same the only problem with the scale is that it doesn’t differentiate between the two. It can’t tell you how much of your total body weight is lean tissue (gold) and how much is fat (feathers).

Skin-fold calipers, hydrostatic (or underwater) weighing and bioelectrical impedance are all methods we can use to measure our body composition to discern whether we are losing (or gaining) fat and muscle and while none of these methods are 100% accurate, they offer a better way of measuring our bodies changes than the scale.

Now if the thought of being pinched, dunked, or gently electrocuted doesn’t appeal to you, don’t worry, one of the best measurement tool of all is a simple tape measure and your very own eyes. If the tape is showing that you have lost inches, your clothes fit better and the person looking back at you in the mirror is a leaner, fitter more confident person who isn’t bound by different coloured days then surly that is a better judge of your success than the lies from the bathroom scale.

Do yourself a favour and buy yourself a big hammer and introduce it to the springy, beady eyed lying menace, not only will you release a lot of built up tension but you will feel better for it, (just be sure to wear the correct safety clothing)!

Train Hard, Eat Smart! "

It's just a little set back. Make sure you take your measurements 'cause if you don't lose the lbs, perhaps you're losing the inches. Don't give up. You don't have far to go!