Hi there,

Thanks for your message and sorry to hear you’re not losing those last few pounds as you’d hoped.

I’ve had a look at your food and exercise diary to see if there is anything ‘immediate’ that springs out at me to see what might be happening for you. On the whole your diary looks great – you mostly stick within your allowance, and you are being active on most days which is great.

Now there are a couple of things that might be going on – the first is that I believe January is one of the toughest months to lose weight in (although it’s the month when everyone tries!) so perhaps it’s had a bearing on your weight this month?

I did notice that you do tend to use some generic weights in your diary – so for example ‘a small apple’ or ‘a serving of mushrooms’ etc – although this might not make much difference, we can often underestimate our calories by not weighing exactly what we’re eating. Even for fruit and veg – just a few calories difference per item can start to build up over the course of the day. Start weighing everything you eat - fruit, veg, meat, pasta etc - and record the exact amount in your food diary.

I also noticed that you seem to have 2 days of the week where you have higher calories – are these your ‘easy’ days or are you following a 5:2 type of diet method? It wasn’t clear from your diary what these two ‘heavier’ days are achieving? Although it's absolutely fine to have easier days in your diary, if this is something that you’ve been doing differently since Christmas, again this could be something to do with your weight not shifting? Maybe try and spread your calories across the week a bit more evenly, and see if it makes any difference?

Please don’t get disheartened – weight can play lots of tricks on us, just when we think we’ve got something cracked. Keep up the good work and stick with what you’re doing, maybe just try and be really strict with weighing your food for a couple of weeks, and perhaps add in a little bit of extra activity. Small changes really can be all you need to kickstart the weight loss again.

Best of luck and please don’t hesitate to come back to me in a week or two if you’re still not where you’d like to be.

Janet