Am I not eating enough to lose weight?

[nemmanoo]

I'm in that weight loss plateau stage and it's so frustrating!!!

I'm 12.5 stone and need to lose about 2, 2 and a half. I've been sticking very well to a 1300/1400 calorie a day diet (trying to cut out processed foods within this). My DP and I are also walking a lot for exercise - we walked 6 miles each on Thursday Friday Saturday and today we did about 9. Don't have any other exercise really but we're speedy walkers and when I'm fitter I'll start running again.

Question is - I never eat back my exercise calories and am just not losing anything right now. In the past when I've calorie - cycled (eaten a bit more for a day then gone back) it seemed to have helped, but that may just have been my imagination! Any advice would help

Agree with the other posters who said starvation mode is a myth, I'm not entirely of the opinion that every calorie is the same but if you are underfeeding your body your body needs to get fuel from somewhere - unless you are a scientific miracle! And it's damned hard to build muscle so it's unlikely that you have gained enough muscle to register on the scales.

How long have you plateaued for? My pattern of weightloss is every other week. I See no movement when I have my period and then the following week I have a massive loss, then nothing the next week when I ovulate and then massive loss again.

The truth is that is I have lost fat during the weeks I have my period and ovulate but I retain water which masks the weightloss.
There are loads of other circumstances where the body will temporarily retain water, new exercise causes the muscles to retain water, there is some evidence to suggest that when fat cells are emptied of fat they temporarily fill with water - how cruel is that?, medication can cause water retention, constipation, carbs will increase your water retention, salt.....

The list goes on, my point is that if you are really following your diet and not cheating you will lose fat it's just that with your body's fluctuations in water, it won't always show up on the scales when you expect it to. Stick at it, you'll get the result you want from the scales...but when you don't remember you are still losing you just can't measure it.
I wouldn't eat back the calories unless you are hungry, then I'd eat a small proportion of them. I think most exercise calculators over estimate burn by including your basic metabolic burn off p.