Why am I not losing weight?

My fitbit also used to show me that. Turned out I had POTS so it was thinking I exercise all the time when I'm just standing still. I actually burned twice as fewer calories.

Are your 17K steps spaced through the day or are they "bouts" of walking covering substantial distance? With two walks it sounds like you're mostly doing them as (at a guess) two 45 minute to one hour walks? Do you have a non Fitbit estimate of your distance? How many active minutes are you seeing from your Fitbit?

AND — more importantly — the lb a month…. are you talking over 24 months or one lb a month AFTER you've started measuring and logging? How many months have you been measuring and logging and have this happen and how often do you weigh yourself?

hint: Fitbit is heavily influenced by detected heart rate and intensity of detected activity. It is designed to encourage "athletic" activity and "rewards" disproportionately (in my particular case) when I am more active than when I am less active.

I am 172.3cm (so 5ft 7 to 5ft 8), M, a bit older than you ;-) In the 36 month time period I recently did numbers for, I fluctuated between end points of 163lbs and 155lbs. Actual max and min were further out. Throughout the three years, based on steps, I averaged about half an hour of additional activity per day to what you do.

Based on my intake logging, and weight change, my caloric expenditure was closer to 2860 Cal actual than the just over 3K Cal Fitbit estimated. This is down by about 50 Cal per day over the past decade with similar weight and levels of activity. So the caloric expenditure number is well supported for myself and is consistent with a gradual decline in the intensity of my activity. This gives me a Fitbit "error" of between 6% and 8% which is substantially up from when I was losing weight. But far from impossible to work with ;-)

Now. ESTIMATES are ESTIMATES. Nothing says that either YOU or I track right in the middle of the estimates. Sailrabbit, that I am using as a sanity check and Fitbit and MFP all use research based estimates. As individuals, each of us can track AT, ABOVE, or BELOW the estimates.

At a guess your PREDICTED BMR (estimate) is the same or slightly lower than mine. I'm using sailrabbit.com and I have to set your weight to about 178lbs to equalize our Mifflin BMR. As mentioned Fitbit and MFP also use Mifflin's estimates.

This is a long way of saying that your 3K burn may or may not really be there.

17K steps would AT A GUESS place you in the 1.6 to 1.8 multiplier range of physical activity in the SailRabbit tables. Double check what that number gives you with what Fitbit thinks you're spending. (and as an exercise consider why the error may exist, or not, it doesn't really matter because you can work with it either way)

Sorry. Lost track ;-)
OK. Now. We've very much covered the expenditure side.

Let's check on the incoming side! You're logging 1900 a day
… but guessing on the items.

Hmmm…. Food Data Central has got a whole bunch of research based items. Bob's spaghetti with meat balls is not the same size, weight, or contents of spaghetti and meat balls as PAV's plate of spaghetti and meat balls. Which one do you log? And how would you know that they're close enough to Tishie's?

Does your 1900, probably, mean that you're not eating 2900? Probably that's true.
But could your 1900 actually be closer to 2400?
Your "I just guess which items" doesn't fill me with confidence that it would be impossible.

So. If you have 2400 coming in and, for example, instead of 3000, just 2500 going out…. you can see that you will not lose a lot of weight fast.

And any time the losses (or gains) are not fast, than normal daily weight fluctuations can very easily obscure the actual trend. You can be losing at the rate of a lb a month and end up the month with a number that is higher than you started! And the opposite is also true!

This is where the actual weight trend comes in and the suggestion of weight trend apps and weighing often— daily by preference if one is ok with doing that

So. What can you do?

Just eat less CALORIES. Not strictly by quantity—as in "east less". But by the correct intent of the suggestion to "eat less": Take in less CALORIES IN TOTAL than you ACTUALLY expend each day, on average, over an appreciable period of time.

Yes I am being "funny". But really either you will have to wing this "less" because of your current logging, or you will have to double down and invest on more accurate logging.

The benefit of more accurate logging would be to give you better data to see where exactly you're spending calories. BUT I am NOT suggesting that you become an ascetic monk (or nun) who never eats anything you enjoy!

The unwanted piece of advice? DON'T restrict everything you enjoy. Sure: you can't have everything you want, all the time, at the quantities you may want. But that doesn't mean an unbearable ascetic existence. Trying for that has a tendency to not always end well.

Maybe another post about how to best modify eating moving forward? @AnnPT77 has good ideas on that, and other things too ;-)

In any case, I do hope you will manage to figure this out!

<Of course I now find an answer by the aforementioned @AnnPT77 sitting right above mine since we were contemporaneously composing our posts> :-) I was angling for the famous "diet food" link:

Same!