Help Me, if you will

I'm not sure how you set up your account from the beginning, but I believe you would be lose much quicker if your daily calorie goal was less. Looking at your weight and height I believe 1500 would be a healthy doable amount. I only looked at a couple of days, If you cut out things like soda, juices, and high fat condiments you would cut out substantial calories. I personally eat some high calorie foods like peanut butter and stuff, but not much because it eats up my calories quick. One of my new favorite things to eat when I want something savory is sauteed veggies in just some low cal butter flavored non stick oil. I steam some broccoli for a couple minutes then toss it in a pan with the spray, salt, pepper, and garlic - its SO good.

Good luck!

Sarah.

Greek yogurt tastes sooo good with sweet-tart fruits like berries and low sugar granola.

My advice would be to try eating more frequently and less calories. Some days the breakfast calories are really high. Try eating a 350 calorie breakfast, an early lunch of another 350 calories, an afternoon snack of 250 calories, dinner at 550 calories and a snack around 8 of 150 calories. If your exercising 200-300 calories off per day you will net around 1300-1400 calories per day give or take. Also, you should increase your protein intake so it is consistently somewhere around 100 grams per day, give or take 20.

How quickly are you losing weight right now?

Aim for 30/30/40 (30% from protein and fats and 40% from carbs)--your choices look good--well balanced. You may want to cut back on soda and fats to give you more calories to play around with (soda doesn't fill it you up) but I eat 2 tbsp of butter every morning for breakfast with my English muffin and I'm not changing that! I'm 5'5 aiming for 135ish. I think I'm actually pretty close but haven't weighed myself recently. I always eat back my exercise calories. 1500 is probably good--I wouldn't go any lower actually to make sure your body is getting enough food. I set my goal for 1700 after estimating my BMR and TDEE.

You can and should calculate your BMR on this site- go to Tools tab and select BMR. That's waht your body would burn if you were in a coma - i.e. what your organs, brain, and system as a whole need just to keep functioning. MFP advice is never to eat below it. TDEE is total daily energy expenditure - for this you need to google, there's loads of free calculators.

You enter some basic stats and select your usual activity level. The result gives you what you burn daily - obviously higher than your BMR as you're moving about! To lose weight you need to eat less than your TDEE, creating a calorie deficit which will force your body to burn its own resources - obviously again you want this to be as much suplus fat as possible, rather than muscle tissue, which is why MFP advises slow steady weight loss and excercise to help maintain your muscle mass.

Most people think it's unhealthy to eat below your BMR, and there are thoeries about that if you do your body will start to cling to its reserves as much as possible, thus actually slowing your weightloss and messing up your metabolism.

On MFP there are countless people with all sorts of opinions which they are passionate about, and are more than happy to share with you, often for hours!

However the above is a summary, and as it makes sense to me, and enables me to eat really very well without any faddiness or sense of deprivation, and lose weight, that's the approach I'm pursuing.

Hope that makes sense and my apologies for being confusing! I've only been on the site a short while myself and look at me adopting the jargon already!

Since you aren't that heavy to start off, you might want to consider aiming for a .5lb weight loss each week. This will give you more calories per day and will help you to ease into maintenance when the time comes.

If your TDEE is 2300, I think I would aim to have your calories a bit higher. I know it seems that creating a larger deficit would result in greater weight loss at a faster pace, but it doesn't work that way for most people (unless you are very obese). For people who are closer to their ideal weight, you want to create less of a deficit. This will result in a healthy, sustainable weight loss.