If you are eating incredibly small portions, tracking all your meals, and the scale is still refusing to move, you need to look inside your cup. Liquid calories are the easiest way to accidentally erase an entire week of hard work. Your brain does not register liquids as actual food, which means they do not make you feel full, but your body absolutely still stores the energy.
When I first bought my notebook and decided to start tracking my calories, I only wrote down solid food. I thought my morning coffee was just a harmless habit. I was going to the drive-through every single morning and ordering a large iced vanilla latte with whole milk and extra caramel drizzle.
After three weeks of zero weight loss, I finally looked up the nutritional information for that specific drink on the cafe’s website. I was drinking six hundred calories before nine in the morning. That is the caloric equivalent of a large fast food hamburger, and I was sucking it through a straw while driving to work.
I did not give up coffee. I know myself well enough to know that any diet that requires me to quit caffeine is a diet I will abandon by Tuesday. I just had to change the math.
I switched my order to a large cold brew. Cold brew on its own has about ten calories. I asked for a splash of unsweetened almond milk and two pumps of sugar-free vanilla syrup. The new drink tasted completely fine, gave me the exact same amount of caffeine, and clocked in at under forty calories. I instantly created a massive calorie deficit just by changing how I spoke to the barista.
You have to track everything that pours. This includes the olive oil you use to cook your chicken. A single tablespoon of olive oil is one hundred and twenty calories. If you just uncap the bottle and free-pour it into a hot pan, you are easily adding three hundred invisible calories to what you thought was a healthy dinner. Put the oil on the kitchen scale. Measure it out.
The only liquid you should be drinking without tracking is water. I am admittedly terrible at this. I bought one of those giant plastic jugs with the motivational time markers printed on the side, but it usually just sits on my counter mocking me while I drink my low-calorie cold brew. But water helps with digestion and keeps the scale moving, so I force myself to drink it. Track the oils, fix your coffee order, and you will probably see the scale drop by the end of the week.