If you're on a Lose Fat goal and have reached the app's calorie floor (1,200 calories for women or 1,500 calories for men) but still aren't seeing the results you're hoping for, it can be incredibly frustrating.
The good news is that there are usually a few common explanations for why this happens, and several things you can do before assuming the app isn't working.
1. Review your food logging accuracy
The most common reason we see is incomplete or inaccurate food logging.
While the app can tell you whether you're within your calorie target based on what you've entered, it has no way of knowing whether everything you're eating is actually being logged.
A few questions to ask yourself:
- Are you weighing and measuring portion sizes accurately?
- Are you selecting the correct food entry from the database?
- Have you accidentally chosen a low-calorie or low-carb version of a product when you're actually eating the regular version?
- Are you logging everything you consume throughout the day?
Most users are very good at logging the "main" parts of a meal, such as:
- Chicken breast
- Vegetables
- Rice
- Potatoes
But some often forget to include:
- Cooking oils
- Butter
- Salad dressings
- Sauces
- Marinades
- Sugars
- Corn starch
- Creamers
- Condiments
While spices are usually negligible, ingredients like oils, sauces, and dressings can add hundreds of calories throughout the day without being obvious.
Even a small amount of underreporting repeated across multiple meals can significantly reduce or eliminate the calorie deficit you're aiming for.
2. Increase your activity level
If you're confident your logging is accurate, another possibility is that your maintenance calories (TDEE) are simply lower than expected.
The calorie targets generated by the app are based on creating a deficit from your estimated maintenance calories.
If your maintenance calories are already relatively low due to a sedentary lifestyle, there may be less room for the app to reduce calories further.
In these situations, increasing your activity can often be the most effective next step.
Simple examples include:
- Adding a daily walk
- Increasing your step count
- Participating in recreational sports
- Adding cardio sessions
- Increasing general daily movement
Even a few thousand additional steps per day can meaningfully increase your daily energy expenditure.
As your activity level increases, your maintenance calories increase as well, which will provide a higher deficit target without requiring you to eat even less food.
3. Consider whether continued fat loss is still the right goal
For some users, especially those who have already lost a significant amount of weight, continued fat loss becomes increasingly difficult.
As body weight and body fat percentage decrease, further fat loss often requires greater effort and larger trade-offs in hunger, recovery, and performance.
At this stage, it may be worth considering whether your goal should remain fat loss at all.
A Maintenance goal allows the app to focus on maintaining your current body weight while supporting:
- Better workout performance
- Improved recovery
- Higher calorie targets
- Long-term body recomposition
Many users continue improving their physique through body recomposition, building muscle and gradually reducing body fat over time, even while maintaining a relatively stable body weight.
If you're already relatively lean and struggling to make progress despite being at the calorie floor, this may be a more productive path forward.
For more information, see:
When should I switch to a Maintenance goal?
The bottom line
If you've reached the calorie floor and progress has stalled, the answer is usually one of three things:
- Improving food logging accuracy
- Increasing daily activity and energy expenditure
- Re-evaluating whether continued fat loss is the right goal
The calorie floor exists because for most individuals, these represent the lowest sustainable calorie targets we would recommend. Beyond this point, the solution is rarely to eat less, it is usually to improve the quality of the data, increase activity, or pursue a different strategy altogether.
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