Hmmm why am I not losing?

I have cut my daily calorie intake by roughly 500 calories. My daily intake now is around 1400 on average. Im 5ft8 and 164lbs. Apparently I should be eating 2100 a day. On a daily basis I eat:

Breakfast: Kellogs Bran flakes (30g) with skimmed milk. 7:45am

Morning Tea: Weightwatchers yoghurt. 10:45am

Lunch: Sandwich from Tesco & 4 slices of melon. 13:00pm

Dinner: This can range from anything. It is always home cooked though. 18:30-19:00pm

(I have cut right down on my alcohol. Used to drink 3 bottles of red wine a week and now I only have 3 vodka and tonics on a saturday)

I do roughly 30 mins on my stair-treadmill machine and about 30 sit ups. (working on increasing them) I also walk the 3 miles home sometimes. I have a desk job.

I have been doing this for 2 weeks now and at first my weight was staying the same. Now ive actually put on 2lbs though. Can anybody help or explain why this isnt working? Thanks in advance!

I guess it depends what's in the sandwich and what you have for dinner each evening, are you calorie counting? it looks like you are?? you might be building muscle with your working outs which adds weight.

Try posting this on one of the low cal boards or weight watchers or something see if they have any ideas??

It is possible you are actually eating too FEW calories per day and your body is craving nutrition, especially if you are following an exercise programme too. If that happens, your metabolism may be slowing down to conserve energy - which would mean you don't lose weight necessarily even though you are consuming relatively few calories.

I had a client who was eating approx. 1000 calories per day and not losing any weight. Once she began the Cambridge Diet and getting her full RDA of vitamins/minerals etc. she began losing steadily and ended up losing 3 stone in 3 months.

It's very hard to get a complete nutritional balance by counting calories as you're inevitably cutting out so many of the essential foodgroups.

As you're on the Cambridge Diet forum, maybe you might like to consider giving it a go and seeing if that will make any difference?

Edited as I've just re-read your message and checked your BMI: It appears you are currently below BMI 25 (within the normal weight range for your height) and therefore wouldn't be able to follow anything below the Step 2 (810) calorie programme. Hope this helps.

Thanks for both your feedbacks. I think I may try having a naughty bag of crisps or something in the afternoon and making my own sandwiches for lunch. Tonight im having stir fry for dinner. comes to about 550 calories. Which brings todays to about 1300.

Have you tried fitday.com, you can enter custom foods or standard foods and calculate vitamins etc from what you're having might help to give you some visibility of it all. good luck anyway. x

1400 cals sounds a sensible amount to me

A few things could be happening. Scientifically, you should lose about 1lb a week...so what's going wrong?

TOTM?
Extra exercise wont mean more muscle, but your muscles will hang on to extra water.
Sure you are counting accurately?
Scales accurate?

It really should come off, but all the above things can make the scales not tell the whole story

BTW, did you mean to post this in the Cambridge forum? Would you like me to move it to Calorie Counting forum?