What am I doing wrong?

Kimo159

I'm just confused why we're so focused on the fact that exercise calories are wrong and that being the problem. I looked back for a few days and I don't that OP is in the habit of eating back all of her exercise calories or anything. If you actually burned 500 calories although your journal says you burned 1300, but you only eat back 200-300...that should not be an issue on why you aren't losing weight. I may not have looked deep enough though. I would say the most important issue here is weighing foods to determine accurate intake. Another thing that might help is if you're stressed deal with that however you need to...stress can really impact your ability to lose weight.

Another possibility here could be a food intolerance. It's pretty rare so unlikely but my aunt was gluten intolerant (yeah I know I'm going to get razzed for this with people saying this isn't even a thing) but when she gave up gluten she lost weight and gained energy without changing anything else. This wont happen for 99.9% of people but it's a possibility.

SueInAz

sexymom04 wrote: »

deceived1 wrote: »

christinev297 wrote: »

For now, just worry about getting your food logging as accurate as possible, which means weighing,measuring and logging everything honestly and precisely.
Once you've got a handle on that, then start worrying about your exercise calories.

I agree with this under most circumstances, but OP is, on some days, putting 1700 exercise calories (more than double what her MFP calorie goal is). So if she's doing 1300 calories and entering 1700 exercise calories when it's in fact, say, 500, it won't matter if she weighs or not.

Why wouldn't it matter? And I'm just entering the amount of time I did a certain exercise. MFP is setting the calories I burned. How do I know it's wrong? Would I only put in half of what I do?

MFP is notorious for over-inflating certain calorie burns. Try entering in only half of what it tells you and see if that helps.

sexymom04

Were moving and moving boxes for 3-4 hours a day and that's what MFP is giving me. So I'll just enter half of that. And now I'm weighing everything that I eat.

futuremanda

sexymom04 wrote: »

Were moving and moving boxes for 3-4 hours a day and that's what MFP is giving me. So I'll just enter half of that. And now I'm weighing everything that I eat.

I find a lot of the "exercises" in the database that are really "activities" (like cleaning or moving boxes) are particularly inflated.

You could just up your activity level during the moving days, or add something like 100 an hour.

se015

One idea is to just eat the set amount of calories before entering the exercise of the day, that way you're goal is still under the amount of calories burned whether that number is accurate or inaccurate becomes irrelevant at that point, right? Just a thought.

catgurl_reeree

It could be that your hormones aren't working properly. Do you eat soy or soy products? Soy messes up with hormones and can wreak havoc with weight loss. What's worked for me is going low carb high fat, keeps me full and satieted with no cravings, and lose weight fairly quickly. I'd suggest getting a check up with the doctors, and maybe go for more breathing focused exercises like tai chi or yoga as they don't stress the body as much as hard workouts. You could also be building muscle, therefore not finding much change on your scales. Do you measure yourself with a tape measurer? Scales tend to show muscle weight and water weight too

deceived1

sexymom04 wrote: »

deceived1 wrote: »

christinev297 wrote: »

For now, just worry about getting your food logging as accurate as possible, which means weighing,measuring and logging everything honestly and precisely.
Once you've got a handle on that, then start worrying about your exercise calories.

I agree with this under most circumstances, but OP is, on some days, putting 1700 exercise calories (more than double what her MFP calorie goal is). So if she's doing 1300 calories and entering 1700 exercise calories when it's in fact, say, 500, it won't matter if she weighs or not.

Why wouldn't it matter? And I'm just entering the amount of time I did a certain exercise. MFP is setting the calories I burned. How do I know it's wrong? Would I only put in half of what I do?

I'll give an example.

Your daily calorie goals are set at 1,300 calories. You log and weigh everything 100% accurately. However, for your burned calories from exercise, you enter 1,700 - when in fact, it was way lower (let's use 500 as the number here).

Let's say you eat back all of these "exercise calories" (3,000 total calories in this example). You weigh and log everything accurately and consume all your exercise calories burned. However, you actually only burned 500 calories - so you should have only eaten 1,800 calories to reach your daily goal.

Instead, you ate 3,000 - 1,200 more than what you actually needed. That 1,200 would put you OVER maintenance (so you'd be gaining weight instead of losing weight).

When I said "weighing wouldn't matter" I just meant in this extreme scenario. Where your calories burned is so far off that it doesn't matter whether or not you were accurate on the scales.

It's still very important to weigh but you need to make sure you're not grossly overestimating calories burned because that could hinder process just as much as not weighing can.

ElJefeChief

Weigh your foods. Chances are much more likely than you're overeating rather than underexercising.

deceived1

DrEnalg wrote: »

Weigh your foods. Chances are much more likely than you're overeating rather than underexercising.

On 6/23 on her diary she put: *You've earned 1,741 extra calories from exercise today. I highly, highly doubt that's accurate. She's definitely double dipping from standard daily energy expenditure and combining that with actual exercise calories (I'm pretty sure).

EDIT: I will say that she didn't EAT all of those back. But still, I think it's worth pointing out.

ElJefeChief

deceived1 wrote: »

DrEnalg wrote: »

Weigh your foods. Chances are much more likely than you're overeating rather than underexercising.

On 6/23 on her diary she put: *You've earned 1,741 extra calories from exercise today. I highly, highly doubt that's accurate. She's definitely double dipping from standard daily energy expenditure and combining that with actual exercise calories (I'm pretty sure).

EDIT: I will say that she didn't EAT all of those back. But still, I think it's worth pointing out.

Yeah, 1700 calories exercising doesn't compute. For comparison, a 10K run for me nets me about 975 calories, and that's a very good workout for me. I'm six foot three and 41 years old.

sexymom04

Thank you so much for all the important all the help everyone, I think I'm getting this lol

hearthwood

If you're working out hard make certain you're not overeating your workouts. These electronic devices, including MFP and machines have a history of overestimating calories burned. So it's never a good idea to eat more than 1/2 calories burned back.

Good luck--remember--it's just calories in versus calories out.

BruceHedtke

KisforKrista wrote: »

honestly some of the things in that excersize database are just.. ridiculous.
I've seen people log cleaning and burning almost 800 calories from it apparently.
Even when i wore a heart rate monitor i still always halfed my burned calories.
But even some things in that database, CMON... 800 calories burned from cleaning, if people aren't questioning that there is something wrong lol

I don't think any of estimated calories in the database can be trusted. A few months back, I was out hiking all day (8+ hours). A decent portion of it involved some steep inclines/declines but the majority was your basic hiking through woods, hilly terrain, flat paths, etc. I wear my HRM when I hike. I know enough not to think that it's super accurate, but it gives me a much better ballpark number to work with.
My HRM told me I burned 1,900 calories. MFP told me I burned over 4,000.

triciab79

Yep I don't even record calories for activities like cleaning or moving boxes. I only consider my actually cardio on an actual machine as exercise and even then I only eat back about 25% of what the machine tells me I burn and I have maintained the same weight in spite of working out at the gym for 6 months (on purpose - doing recomp not gains or losses)

ElJefeChief

hearthwood wrote: »

If you're working out hard make certain you're not overeating your workouts. These electronic devices, including MFP and machines have a history of overestimating calories burned. So it's never a good idea to eat more than 1/2 calories burned back.

Good luck--remember--it's just calories in versus calories out.

I've been eating typically 80-90 percent of my exercise calories back and I've been losing at a pace I've been pretty pleased with. However, I think I've been compensating by 1) overestimating my caloric intake (e.g., always rounding up where I can) and 2) not including nonsignificant exercise

l8knut

For me, it helped in the beginning to not eat my excercise calories. I never had more than 500 anyway. That way I was assured that I was in a deficit. I'm trying to make this easy and fun this time and so far it's working. I only excercise 3 days a week for 30 min and it makes a big difference. Now I add in my excercise calories, but usually don't use them anyway. Just training my mind. I always go over on the weekends but make up for that during the week. Just adapting this to my lifestyle is what it'sall about. If I can do this, anyone can!

sexymom04

Weighing everything now. Now that I know how lol. We'll see what happens. Looking for some good DVDs workouts that might be good. Hopefully I find some good ones.