Frustrated and I don't know what to do.

I have to say that I'm impressed with you in terms of all the stuff you're already doing.

I sort of keyed on your current weight because it was the one I was at when I first joined MFP. And I was doing the same thing as you in terms of movement too in terms of increasing. Had to actually reduce my deficits to make things more sustainable at the time but that's a different story!

You're doing so many things right and you're maybe only a step or two from getting even more insight on yourself so you can make the best decisions for yourself.

Knowing my old self when evaluating a meal of pasta and sauce most of the calories used to come from the pasta, not the sauce.

And in the sauce most of the calories that I could painlessly shed came from the olive oil I was adding, and not the meat, especially if I used extra lean beef or turkey ground. ((The issue of dealing with draining the fat while cooking ground is a real tough one. My solution involves either not draining extra lean or using cooked "rinced after cooking" entries.))

The point being that you're close to but maybe still a step removed from knowing enough about what you're eating to enable yourself to make relatively painless but meaningful choices to reducing calories without generating too much privation.

The goal is to "by hook and by crook but as painlessly as possible" create a reasonable and sustainable deficit. It is not to eliminate evil this or evil that food if you can make it fit. But to figure out how to maximize what you can get out of your caloric budget.

One solution is the one advocated by @csplatt above: prepare your stuff separately.

Another is to keep written track of every single ingredient (including spices because even if they say they're zero Cal, they probably are not in sufficient quantities) that goes in your pot: 475g lean meat, 6g oil from the spray, 780g tomatoes, 200g tomato paste, 3g oregano, 7g lemon pepper, 11g Knorr cube, who knows what else..... and then measure the finished product: 1013g. Then you can just weigh what goes on your plate as a percentage of the finished product.

Similarly for pasta. You may have cooked 300g of pasta. Instead of eye balling your portions, just measure your total finished pasta weight after straining which will be somewhere between 600g and 750g and then you will know what percent of the original 300g of dry pasta the 207g of cooked portion you plated was.

Knowing that you can then evaluate if you would rather eat your sauce on 207g of pasta, or whether you might prefery to eat it on 200g of cooked rice, or 100g cooked rice and 500g of cauliflower rice, or just on 500g of cauliflower rice or just on 90g of bread! or on 400g of spaghetti squash or on spiral cut carrots, or beets, or zucchini or over a 250g baked "jacket" potato!!!! Or how you want to cook your sauce, in terms of the ingredients that you choose to use.

Nothing wrong with snacks. Especially nothing wrong with fruits and nuts. But, they do need to be weighed. If nothing else it will help you make awesome decisions! Do you know how much watermelon you could actually eat for very few calories? Almonds or peanuts or cashews (my favorites) not as many! Weigh the nuts and log them before you eat them.:

You're close. But a reasonable (not too small and not too large) deficit is sometimes tricky to establish.

A totally different way to go about things is to continue exactly as you have. But with a small difference.

You know your dates and how often you weight yourself. I advocate daily and using a weight trend app. But you said 3 months deficit and 5 lbs down.

So that's 90 days and 17500 Cal of effective deficit (about 3500 Cal per lb) as per your scale. So about 200 Cal of effective deficit a day. Regardless of what your "expected" deficit was.

Whatever your average intake (which you can't know unless you log every day), you could reduce it by 200 Cal more, as an example. And then you would be another 10lbs down in another 3 months everything else being equal. Far from nothing: that would be a 40lb a year pace.

I think, however, that my first suggestion is more powerful in that it can provide you with information that will allow you to make more effective and painless decisions as opposed to just "powering" through.