Weighing most things, using an app, hitting roughly 1800 on weekdays. Three weeks and the scale is within half a kilo of where it started. I am not trying to do anything drastic, just slowly lose a bit, and I cannot tell whether my logging is wrong or whether 1800 is simply my maintenance. Where do people usually find the error?
The weekday qualifier in your post is where I would look first. Two weekend days eaten freely can easily be 1500 calories above a weekday, which spread across seven days moves your real average by 400 or so, and that is usually the whole deficit.
Second place to look is the things people do not weigh. Cooking oil is around 120 calories a tablespoon and gets poured by eye, nut butters are dense and get scooped, and dressings, milk in coffee and the bits eaten while cooking never make it into the app. Weighing oil for one week is unpleasant and extremely informative.
If after a properly logged fortnight, weekends included, nothing has changed, then your maintenance is genuinely lower than you assumed and you adjust the number.
The honest answer is I have not logged a single Saturday. I think I know what the problem is.
It is nearly always the weekend, and there is nothing wrong with eating more on Saturdays, it just has to be inside the average rather than outside the spreadsheet.
Also, three weeks of scale readings is noisier than people expect. Water shifts from salt, carbohydrate, training and general life easily hide a slow loss for a fortnight. Weigh daily at the same time and look only at the seven day average, and judge by whether the averages are trending, not by any single morning.
I have been weighing every few days and reacting to each number, which explains why it feels like nothing works.
Check your database entries too. App entries are user submitted and some of them are simply wrong, occasionally by a factor of two. I found a bread entry logging a 45g slice as 60 calories when the packet said 120. Prefer entries that match the barcode on the actual product and spot check against the label once.
@venv_val · 4mo ago · 2 replies
Worth saying that this is what worked for me rather than a rule. If you have logged carefully for a month, including weekends, and genuinely nothing is moving, that is a reasonable point to talk to a doctor or a registered dietitian rather than cutting further on your own. There are ordinary medical reasons for it and a forum cannot check them.
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@mat_mira · 4mo ago
Seconding this. The internet's default answer is always eat less and sometimes that is the wrong advice for the person asking.
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