How long should I wait before cutting calories?

WBB55

daniip_la wrote: »

... no more than 2,000kcal a day....

As you get closer and closer to your goal weight, you may have to be more accurate with your logging than you will be at first. However, I think at your height, 2000 total calories will always be a deficit. Eventually you may need to cut to 1800, but probably never lower than that.

What's great about you eating 2000-2200 every day is your body gets used to understanding "this is what 2000 looks and feels like." Every day. And then you eat that (on average) for the rest of your life.

daniip_la

ChachChi wrote: »

Part of the reason for the discrepancy is the over estimation of calories burned, especially from extra exercise. As you say you are eating back 50-75% of exercise calories to compensate for the over estimation. However, that isn't reflected in the theoretical deficit you are calculating. You are adjusting your 'calories eaten' input, but not your 'calories burned' input.

Say your fitbit says you burned 500 extra calories from exercise, and you eat back 300 calories (because you know that's closer to what you really burned). That is still adding 200 calories to your calculated 'theoretical deficit' that are not in your 'true deficit'. Add each day of exercise over a month, and that would account for a few pounds of you gap between theoretical and observed weight loss.

But really the point is to eat at a deficit to lose weight, which you are doing a great job at! Congrats on sticking with it for a month already! If you want the number to match up closer (I'm a scientist too, so I get the urge to track, plot, and understand the data) that idea of lowering your height in the fitbit so it gives calorie burns closer to the true value sounds like a good way to factor in overestimation.

I actually calculated (Fitbit - 500kcal) when messing with the numbers, while waiting for an experiment to run this morning. If I assume that Fitbit gives me 500kcal too high for my burn each day, my theoretical deficit for the month would have put me at a 6.8lb loss. Giving room for a margin of error due to me retaining water, I feel like that's decently close to my 5lb loss.

And I calculated just for fun that if I had cut my calories to 2,000kcal a day with that -500kcal adjusted burn, I theoretically should have lost 9.5lbs in that month.

So with cutting my calories to 2,000kcal per day, and with my height decreased to lower my calorie burn number, I'm anxious to see what my numbers look like next month. I know actual loss will never 100% match theoretical, but I'm excited to see how close I can get them.

PAV8888

The, so called, exercise adjustment you get between Fitbit and MFP is not an exercise adjustment. It is a whole day TDEE adjustment.

So.... while your mileage may vary I would consider a tracker that has a 10% daily error to verging on bad. And I consider Fitbits to be fairly good

You are ignoring body composition changes, and possibly water retention if this amount of walking is a relatively new thing.

Regardless of how accurately recorded, water weight changes are an order of magnitude larger than the underlying weight level change because of fat depletion or increase.

You also do not have a good 20-30 days of uninterrupted daily weigh in data as of yet which means we do not know for sure if your starting weight was a local low or a local high.

Since you use fitbit and can record your weight through there, I highly recommend that you go to trendweight.com and automatically connect the two accounts.

Many women also like linking their fitbit account to weightgrapher.com too as it allows you to visually superimpose a previous (user selectable) 28 day period.

When setting up weightgrapher and trendweight I suggest you tell them you want to maintain your weight so that they don't offer you un-needed advice about your rate of progress.

Other than that..... you HAVE been losing.

I think that your idea of balancing lower calories with increased activity is the best method.

I would urge you to NOT cut your calories again so soon. At your age, height, and activity level, you should be able to lose weight fine while eating a good 2500 calories. Your TDEE values are NOT out of line for the activity you're indicating.

And your deficit is already > 25% of your TDEE. At your current fat %, 25% is a safe deficit, reducing to 20% when you enter the mid-high overweight stage...

If you're otherwise very sedentary you may want to continue finding ways to move more, but for now I would encourage you to tough it out and get some more data to see if you're really losing as little as you think... before dropping the calories!

You will have plenty of time to reduce the calories as you get lighter; I see no reason to rush to achieve that

(all above assumes your caloric INTAKE is recorded accurately)

You can also express the estimation error as a % of your TDEE.

For an example of that approach see: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VDmqNpLPu7sbQSochUJNXdp2F7AN15AGgkvS3zLw1GU/edit?usp=sharing

daniip_la

To everyone who helped, thank you! I have a few more weeks of data, and my losses match the math within a pound. I've included the sheets and graphs if anyone would like to see the numbers. Also not apologising for being a data nerd, spreadsheets are amazing.



The first sheet is the last 2.5 weeks of data added to the data I posted in the first post. The totals at the bottom and calculations are for the entire period I've been tracking, which started on May 8th.



The second sheet is just for this month, with the totals and calculations only for that time period.



The graph is my trenweight.com graph since June 1st, when I started weighing daily to view fluctuations.

I'm not finding trendweight too incredibly useful yet, as I have very few upward fluctuations. I'm sure that will change later on, though. And the spreadsheet @PAV8888 linked shows that based on trend weight change, I'm over-estimating my TDEE by 7.34% and based on scale weight change I'm under-estimating my TDEE by -9.56%. If it's truly being underestimated, that might have to do with me dropping my height from 6'0 to 5'9 in MFP and Fitbit, hoping it would make up for any overestimation of TDEE.

Also, I'm aware that my deficits were too large for some of these days. I wasn't sure if I could trust my exercise calories that Fitbit were giving me, so I wasn't eating them back despite walking quite a bit. Now that I see that I can trust the numbers within reason, I've begun eating about 50% to 75% of them back so that I won't lose weight quite so fast.

PAV8888

Well, you've started the on-going process of monitoring, and you have perhaps discovered that you don't need to eat almost nothing in order to lose weight.

Leave yourself some room to drop calories down the road

You may also want to play with the start dates and separate out the 6ft from the 5ft 9 data as you've made a material change there; i.e you are no longer tracking the same thing.

While at a large deficit and above the overweight range and not engaged in novel exercise (and/or not eating a lot of sodium), Trendweight will keep going down swimmingly without too many complaints, matching your scale weight more or less.

Trending weight programs are more helpful when you start losing at a rate that is slower than your water retention cycle.

Note that a 20% deficit when overweight (25% deficit while obese) is (at least for me) as far as I think you should be pushing things while trying to minimise lean mass losses and minimise thermogenic adaptation.

Note too that you will NOT have a 10+:1 fat to lean mass loss ratio for ever. and if you're data friendly you may want to invest in a series of DEXA scans (which will also be motivating).

lean mass and fat have a different caloric values and lean mass synthesis has a different value that lean mass catabolisation. I have not found exact "authoritative" agreement as to what these values should be

Right now you are preferentially losing fat and will continue doing so for a while. When you get closer to the mid point of your overweight range this may change and things will get more complicated.

Hopefully, by then, you will be trusting the process sufficiently that you won't be too concerned over small differences.

As an example: some labels subtract fiber from carbs and don't list the calories. Others don't and do list the calories.... where does that discrepancy get captured?

At 40g of fiber a day... that amounts to a good 80 cal or so of discrepancy for me... i.e. almost 66% of my effective deficit!)

For your geeky side: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/profile/EvgeniZyntx <-- MFP data analysis spreadsheet

And in my humble-brag thread, I also have a link to another tool to extract your caloric data from MFP for up to a year (which you don't need since you do it manually every day

(link to thread): http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10415832/i-need-to-lose-weight-1200-cal-1500-cal-or-2775-cal-50-carbs-and-165g-sugar#1