Okay, OP, I get you. I’ve been here before, I genuinely have. It was baffling, I did the calorie counting, the apps, and all it did was make me hungry and wonder how the hell women who have always had weight issues kept doing this on and off. I was hungry, pissed off, all I did was think about food and I lost no weight! I lasted 3 weeks before I wised up.
Low-key starving yourself is never a good way to lose fat tissue, it holds on to every last bit. Constant too-low intake doesn’t work like intermitent fasting. With constant, for a lot of people, your body thinks you’re in a cave with your tribe and there’s no food around, maybe not for a while, so it’s trying to preserve mass until the place is flush with plants and animals again - the evolution hasn’t caught up. ‘Breaking the fast’ of the night instead of letting it drag on is why people who eat a healthy breakfast are slimmer than breakfast skippers, pretty sure that’s still currently evidenced. Your ‘break-fast’ is important because eating is. The only way you will lose weight by eating so little at the body frame you already are is by this dragging on a while, and by that time your hair, skin, everything will look shit no matter how many nice products you spend money on, because you’re not nourished. Trust me, I’ve been there when I was getting divorced.
Now, you’ll be thinking, why does MyFitness pal tell me I need to eat so few calories to lose weight? Well because that’s just a rough and ready random calorie average. I’m sure it feels instinctive to agree with ‘100 extra calories of spinach wouldn’t make me store fat like 100 extra calories of sugar.’ - and I think it’s true. Forget about the calories unless you’ve intense exercise goals. The bottom line is, you don’t want to lose weight, any weight, to change a number on a scale, you want to lose excess fat tissue.
What I recommend: You won’t keep fat tissue that your body doesn’t need if you eat non-processed food, satisfying amounts, little to no sugar, lots of veg, not crazy amounts of oil, little frying and do not snack. For bonus points, drink alcohol maybe once a fortnight only. Three meals a day, humans aren’t grazing cows, we’ve had mealtimes for thousands of years, our insulin response expects it. If you don’t know what a sensible portion is - a fist of protein, same of carbs, fill the remainder of the plate with veg. The mustard rim is not a touch line to pass. Clean up 90% of what you eat, stick with it. Become someone who wouldn’t buy a jar of ready made pasta sauce or biscuits. If you want to lose this excess fat enough you are eating so sadly little a day then you must want to enough to put the discipline in until it’s second nature. It doesn’t have to be exotic, just from scratch. Never be hungry. And whatever you lose won’t ping back on like a crash diet will do to you. Protect your metabolic and hormonal health by not starving yourself. And I would also say, if you do all that consistently and after a few months the gradual loss plateaus and you settle at a certain weight - that’s it, that’s your healthy weight, barring you working to put more muscle on.
I’d also add that if you’re eating diet food products, stop now. Sugar is terrible for weight gain, and even the taste of sugar from artificial sweeteners triggers your body to think you’re eating actual sugar so it still responds accordingly in some ways, so something like a yogurt with the fat ripped out as a selling point that tastes sweet to compensate is trash for your health. It’s why slimming world is overall nonsense in my view. As soon as you cut down on sugar and booze your stomach should go flatter pretty quickly so that’ll be a boost to see you through until you get the rest off.
It’s hard to lose a small amount like a stone at this height and when you’ve always been slim, really hard, but in my experience what makes ‘always been petite women’ pile on bad fat is either slipping into bad habits for the first time or age. I know, it was amazing when we were 20 and could eat and drink the most wonderful garbage but as time goes on we’ve to change our tastes to keep it. I’ve said clean up 90% of it but I can get by on 80% and look my ideal with zero exercise, but I think that’s because I’m only early 30s, I expect 40s to be different, and menopause to tell me to pack the nonsense food in for the most part, going by the women I know of the same body type.