Weight loss

I have not been gaining, but I’m almost doing the same thing where I’m staying under the calorie count and exercising but I have not lost and I’m very stagnant for last few days.
A bit frustrated, but I want to understand if I’m doing anything wrong
And it has only been a week or so, so I may need to give some more time

How are you measuring your food? Weighing is the most accurate. It looks like your doing a very small deficit, which is great, but it also means you need to be really accurate. Also, it's very normal to go a few days with no loss showing on the scale. It takes patience and persistence.

If your watch is accurate for you, and you're eating roughly 1860 your daily deficit is only about 140 calories.

If your deficit were actually 140, it would take roughly 25 days to lose a pound of fat.

There are two potential problems here:

1. Any fitness tracker is only giving you an estimate of your calorie burn. It's a more nuanced estimate than an online calorie calculator, a little more personalized . . . but it's still only spitting out a calorie burn that would be typically across of a large range of people your age/size who moved about the same amount you do. Most people are close to those averages, but some can easily be plus or minus 100 calories or so of average. A few may be wildly far off average. My good brand/model fitness tracker - one that estimates quite well for others who've commented here - is off by around 500 or so calories per day compared to my actual calorie logging and weight loss and maintenance experience over nearly 10 years. It's very rare to be that far off, but obviously it can happen. To be off by something in the vicinity of 140 calories daily probably wouldn't be terribly rare.
2. Water retention and waste in the digestive tract fluctuate by multiple pounds within a day, over several days, maybe even a small number of weeks. For someone who was actually losing a pound every 25 days, it could take quite a few weeks for that fat loss to stop playing peek-a-boo on the scale with the much larger water/waste shifts, and show up as a downward weight progress in the multi-week trend. It's not the most common pattern, but a few women here have reported only seeing a new low weight once a month at a particular point in their menstrual cycle, even when they have a deficit of several hundred calories. Hormonal water weight shifts can be that weird.

Anyone really should give a new eating/activity regimen a 4-6 week trial run, logging carefully, to get a personalized calorie needs estimate using their own logging and weight-change experience. Those who have menstrual cycles should compare body weight at the same relative point in at least 2 different cycles.

Seeming stalls of a week or two are common, and may seem more common to someone who only weighs once a week (because they miss seeing some low points in the normal up/down fluctuations). Seeming stalls of many weeks are possible with a calorie deficit as small as your estimates would suggest you're creating. And yes, with a small deficit, things that look like gains over a week or two can happen.

At one point in maintenance, I decided I wanted to lose a few pounds that had crept on over the first 4 years of maintenance, but do it very slowly. Running an estimated 100-150 calorie deficit - estimated from my own logging experience data, BTW - there was one period of around 6 weeks where the scale and even my weight trending app thought I was gaining. I thought I wasn't, and eventually the expected loss showed up - rather suddenly - on the scale.

From the info you've given, we can't tell whether your Apple watch is giving you too high an estimate, your deficit is too small to give you a fat loss rate that will satisfy you, your logging has some imprecision or inconsistency (which matters more with a small deficit), or you're actually losing fat at the expectable rate but that fat loss is being distorted by water/waste fluctuations.

I'm sure this is an answerable question, or a solvable problem. Don't give up, but give the issues a hard, honest think.

Best wishes!

If it's too difficult then make it easy and use the tools as they are designed:

1. Enter your stats, activity level and desired rate of loss in to MFP and get your daily calorie goal.
2. Weigh and measure EVERY bite, morsel, and ounce of liquid (not water) into your diary. Don't estimate, guestimate, use another entry in the database you think is "close I'm sure". If you haven't weighed it or measured it yourself, don't eat it.
3. Stop looking at your watch for calories burned. It doesn't matter. MFP is assuming your are moving as part of your settings in the goal activity already. Just ignore it or turn it off. It's confusing your perspective and making it more difficult. MFP doesn't care what your watch thinks. It's irrelevant. If you want to use your watch to track your workouts or calorie burns then that's fine, but do not eat back all of the calories it says you burned, these trackers are wildly off and they use averages. Most people only eat back half of what they say at best.

This is not a perfect science, and your body is a living organism that will constantly respond in strange ways you can't predict. You could do the exact same things 2 weeks in a row, and lose weight one week and nothing the next. No rhyme or reason. But its the loss over time (weeks and months) that will show your success. It's hard work at first but gets easier after you start making the same recipes and eating the same foods in your day to day and you can track faster with less data entry. But it does work if you put in the time and effort.

it is difficult because there are so many factors that could potentially be inaccurate. our watches give us an estimate of what it thinks we have burned but it might be off because none of us really have the exact same makeup of muscle vs bone vs fat or burn fuel at exactly the same rate or even ate the same foods that turn into that fuel. when we log food, we do our best to get the entry we select just right but it’s also not perfect —- for example one slice of sandwich bread is 70 calories but did I weigh to see if that slice was the exact number of grams it should be? Nope. also, the numbers in the nutrition label of food are also within a specific range of accurate, per the law.

then there’s the fact that lots of things inside our bodies “have weight” and the weight of those things changes by the hour. for example how much water our body has needed to hold or release. how much waste still sits in our intestines.

it’s a GOOD THING to realize how complex this is. helps with reasonable expectations so you don’t quit.

this is why you try something for 4-6 weeks. assess the level of success you had. adjust. rinse and repeat.

Two things commonly suggested around here:

1. The size of your deficit depends on how fast you choose to lose fat weight. Roughly, a 500 calorie average daily deficit would be expected to result in losing about a pound a week, when averaging loss over a 4-6 week time period. Averaging over several weeks is because the loss isn't necessarily the same - or at least doesn't show up as the same in scale weight - every single week. (If a person thinks in kilos instead of pounds, 1100 calories daily deficit would be expected to result in losing about a kilo per week on average over several weeks.)
2. For sustainability and for avoiding unnecessary health risks, one conservative rule of thumb is to try to lose no more than 0.5-1% of current weight per week, with a bias toward the 0.5% end of that range unless severely obese and under medical supervision for nutritional deficiencies or health complications.

For example, a person who weighed 150 pounds would be encouraged to consider losing no more than about three-quarters of a pound (0.75 pounds) per week on average. If they're young, generally very healthy, getting good nutrition, not over-exercising, and in general don't have any other major sources of stress in their lives, it might be OK to push that a little. (A calorie deficit is a physical stress, even though we think it will have long-run benefits. If our life is high-stress in other ways, an aggressive weight loss rate is more risky health-wise than if our life otherwise is really low stress and easy. I hope that makes sense.)

I can't speak for others, but I'm not saying your deficit isn't high enough. I'm saying that it implies a weight loss rate so gradual - assuming the 2000 estimate from your watch is accurate - that it will take a long time to show up on the scale amongst routine multi-pound changes in water/waste in your system. It's fine to lose that slowly. I've done it. What isn't realistic is to adopt a small deficit and expect fast loss.

BTW, I disagree with the advice to ignore your Apple watch. In general, I'd recommend syncing your Apple watch to MFP, turning on negative adjustments in MFP, then logging carefully for 4-6 weeks or one full menstrual cycle while following the resulting calorie goal. At the end of that time period, you'll have enough personal experience data to adjust your calorie goal based on results. If you stick with the potentially very small deficit, i.e., a slow loss rate, then you might need to go for 8-12 weeks or 2 menstrual cycles to see a reasonable average, though.

Fitness trackers don't always overestimate calories burned. Sometimes they overestimate calories, sometimes they underestimate calories, and in many cases they'll come pretty close. It's not about how accurate the tracker is. It's about how close to statistical averages the person is. As I wrote previously, my tracker underestimates my calorie burn by 500 or more calories daily. It's unusual to be that non-average, but it can happen in rare cases.

I do agree with the advice to let MFP recommend your starting calorie goal. In your MFP profile, you can tell it explicitly how fast you'd like to try to lose weight, and it will give you a calorie estimate for that loss rate.