2 lb per week weight loss
Replies
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janejellyroll wrote: »The thing is I don't feel hungry to eat those exercise calories. I went from eating 3 meals a day, mainly eating out or eating junk to now eating 3 meals plus snacks when I'm hungry and eating all kinds of veggies and fruits and protein. If I was starving after a workout I would eat something but usually I workout at night and the last thing I would want after a workout is food so I just shower and go to bed.
Yep, I was afraid to eat my exercise calories when I began MFP and it worked fine for a while. Then my energy crashed, I struggled to complete daily activities, and I got really hungry. Just be aware that if you use MFP other than as designed and you create a larger than recommended deficit for yourself (as it sounds like you may be doing), there may come a time when you won't be able to comfortably continue.
Once I realized what the problem was, I adjusted my plan and began eating back my exercise calories. I continued losing, but my energy and workout performance got much better.
Your body can handle a lot for just a month. You want to be thinking of the long term because presumably long term success is what you want -- not just a month or two. Even higher quality foods won't make up for not eating enough to fuel what your body truly needs.
Thanks! I needed to hear that! That explains why I feel fine doing what I am doing right now. As my body tells me I need more I will eat more! I am glad that I figured out how the exercise calories and calorie deficit worked now instead of later down the road when I started to feel deprived!
Good luck! Sounds like you're doing a good job of monitoring how you feel and your hunger level.0 -
Also, one of the above comments is correct about my food measurements probably not being exactly correct. I do not have a food scale and have been guessing on the amount I am eating. I try to do a high guess instead of low, but maybe I am doing the opposite since my weight loss coincides with the weekly goal.
If you have been steadily at 2 pounds per/week you probably have been underestimating your calories since you don't measure. Food scales are inexpensive and make this all a GREAT DEAL easier. (My electron scale was under 15 bucks....)0 -
buy a food scale and use it to measure out your food in grams to get accurate calories. Never count exercise calories towards what you can eat. You burn very little calories from exercising, just consider the calories you burn as a bonus.
if you are near the 1200 calorie mark, do not go below. 1200 calories is the calorie intake of like a 10 yr old and you are bordering on malnutrition. You need to be lifting weights to build muscle so it increases the calories that you burn.
build more muscle = higher metabolism = easier to burn fat = able to eat more food and still lose weight
Most fitness girls I know eat around 1800 calories if not more for their "cutting"/fat loss
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nikkons017 wrote: »buy a food scale and use it to measure out your food in grams to get accurate calories. Never count exercise calories towards what you can eat. You burn very little calories from exercising, just consider the calories you burn as a bonus.
if you are near the 1200 calorie mark, do not go below. 1200 calories is the calorie intake of like a 10 yr old and you are bordering on malnutrition. You need to be lifting weights to build muscle so it increases the calories that you burn.
build more muscle = higher metabolism = easier to burn fat = able to eat more food and still lose weight
Most fitness girls I know eat around 1800 calories if not more for their "cutting"/fat loss
To the bolded, as was explained upthread, the calculation of a calorie goal from MFP excludes exercise, it is a NEAT goal, so the system is actually designed that if you exercise you should eat back at least a portion of those calories.
I'm not sure how on one hand you are stressing the need to eat at an adequate minimum level yet on the other dismissing the idea of eating back exercise calories... isn't that kind of the same thing? If OP exercises and burns 400 calories, and eats those back increasing her total calorie intake to 1680, how is that different than your recommendation to just increase her calorie goal?
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nikkons017 wrote: »buy a food scale and use it to measure out your food in grams to get accurate calories. Never count exercise calories towards what you can eat. You burn very little calories from exercising, just consider the calories you burn as a bonus.
if you are near the 1200 calorie mark, do not go below. 1200 calories is the calorie intake of like a 10 yr old and you are bordering on malnutrition. You need to be lifting weights to build muscle so it increases the calories that you burn.
build more muscle = higher metabolism = easier to burn fat = able to eat more food and still lose weight
Most fitness girls I know eat around 1800 calories if not more for their "cutting"/fat loss
My Fitbit gives me an average activity adjustment of 700-900 calories a day over my MFP goal to maintain. If I didn't eat these, I would get seriously ill.
Some people burn very little through activity. Others burn a lot more. Don't tell people not to eat their exercise calories -- this can set some people up for really serious health and energy consequences. MFP is designed for people to eat back the calories they burn through exercise. Additionally, not eating these calories will put many at low calorie goals netting below 1,200 -- something you acknowledge isn't healthy.6 -
WinoGelato wrote: »nikkons017 wrote: »buy a food scale and use it to measure out your food in grams to get accurate calories. Never count exercise calories towards what you can eat. You burn very little calories from exercising, just consider the calories you burn as a bonus.
if you are near the 1200 calorie mark, do not go below. 1200 calories is the calorie intake of like a 10 yr old and you are bordering on malnutrition. You need to be lifting weights to build muscle so it increases the calories that you burn.
build more muscle = higher metabolism = easier to burn fat = able to eat more food and still lose weight
Most fitness girls I know eat around 1800 calories if not more for their "cutting"/fat loss
To the bolded, as was explained upthread, the calculation of a calorie goal from MFP excludes exercise, it is a NEAT goal, so the system is actually designed that if you exercise you should eat back at least a portion of those calories.
I'm not sure how on one hand you are stressing the need to eat at an adequate minimum level yet on the other dismissing the idea of eating back exercise calories... isn't that kind of the same thing? If OP exercises and burns 400 calories, and eats those back increasing her total calorie intake to 1680, how is that different than your recommendation to just increase her calorie goal?
if you can find any reliable way to accurately measure energy consumed by exercise as all the machines and trainers give you bogus numbers. The amount you burn depends on lots of factors like height, weight, age, gender, muscle mass, muscle adaptation etc... I know people like to look on their cardio machine and it gives them a nice 400 number but it is complete bs. Those formulas also include a portion of bmr which is what you would burn if you did absolutely nothing and just existed, which is near half of that number. This is why they can magically calc your calories burned from just entering your weight knowing nothing else about you (lol). You are not buring 1k+ calories in your body pump/combat/yoga/whatever class, its marketing. If you really wanted to burn over 1k calories you would have to almost full out sprint continuously for 2.5hrs straight with no breaks, then you might get close. Again this doesn't factor in age, weight, etc... We are physically adapted to be efficient when doing exercises/work/hunt and we eat calorie dense foods. This is why humans survived.
So you can't estimate accurately how much calories you are burning so you can't accurately determine how much "extra" you could theoretically eat. However it is fact that if you are not in a caloric deficit, you will not lose weight according to thermodynamics. So you get 3 options, eat a caloric deficit, eat at maintenance, eat above maintenance. 2/3 of those, you will not be losing weight. I'd rather not guess when the odds are already against me.
Muscle take up more energy to maintain then fat does on your body. As when you crash diet, you are mostly losing muscle/water as its the first thing to go in terms of keeping you alive, thus how you get skinny fat people who are thin but still look frail. If you put on more muscle, you require more energy for your body to maintain that muscle. Thus you are increasing how much you can eat. The amount is determined by your goals and how much previous muscle mass you have. You adjust accordingly by your progress pictures and long-term scale moving averages.
This works the same for exercise. But the key point for exercise/activity level is that is has to be consistent week over week, which is really hard for most people as stuff just happens. If you can do it, great; watch the scale and photos and increase your cals, working towards you goal.
But this is the catch. A pound of fat is about 3500 calories. So for you to lose even 1 pound per week you need to be in a deficit of 500 calories each day for 7 DAYS (minimum). If you cut that to 250 cal deficit then it takes you around 2 weeks to lose 1 lb. So if you mess up your calories adding them back in, you could be losing weight but extremely slow. So if you decide to cheat; 1 medium pizza is ~2k calories, bar of chocolate is around ~900 cal, a normal combo meal from a fast food place is like ~2k cals, its extremely easy to erase what little deficit you had and erase 2 or more WEEKS of progress.
The minimum level is for safety. 1200 is extremely low and it is hard to eat a wide variety of foods to get adequate macro and micro nutrients at that level. If you want to go below that, this is your choice but be warned that you will probably develop nutrition deficiences, you body will go into panic mode cause your starving yourself and will make fat loss near impossible. It will also lower your metabolism to further conserve energy making weight loss harder/slower. You will also be eating mostly muscle and not the fat you wanted to lose.0 -
nikkons017 wrote: »You burn very little calories from exercising, just consider the calories you burn as a bonus.
I couldn't disagree with a recommendation more. I frequently hit 1000 kcal per day of exercising; that's close to half of my maintenance calories.
The best part of the NEAT method, to my mind, is that you get explicitly rewarded for exercising. When I discovered this method, I started exercising to earn more calories. I have been able to eat more and fit in more foods that I love, all the while getting fitter and healthier. I have kept going for almost 5 years.
If someone had told me that I shouldn't count those calories, I would have become discouraged very early on and would likely have not been successful.1 -
nikkons017 wrote: »WinoGelato wrote: »nikkons017 wrote: »buy a food scale and use it to measure out your food in grams to get accurate calories. Never count exercise calories towards what you can eat. You burn very little calories from exercising, just consider the calories you burn as a bonus.
if you are near the 1200 calorie mark, do not go below. 1200 calories is the calorie intake of like a 10 yr old and you are bordering on malnutrition. You need to be lifting weights to build muscle so it increases the calories that you burn.
build more muscle = higher metabolism = easier to burn fat = able to eat more food and still lose weight
Most fitness girls I know eat around 1800 calories if not more for their "cutting"/fat loss
To the bolded, as was explained upthread, the calculation of a calorie goal from MFP excludes exercise, it is a NEAT goal, so the system is actually designed that if you exercise you should eat back at least a portion of those calories.
I'm not sure how on one hand you are stressing the need to eat at an adequate minimum level yet on the other dismissing the idea of eating back exercise calories... isn't that kind of the same thing? If OP exercises and burns 400 calories, and eats those back increasing her total calorie intake to 1680, how is that different than your recommendation to just increase her calorie goal?
if you can find any reliable way to accurately measure energy consumed by exercise as all the machines and trainers give you bogus numbers. The amount you burn depends on lots of factors like height, weight, age, gender, muscle mass, muscle adaptation etc... I know people like to look on their cardio machine and it gives them a nice 400 number but it is complete bs. Those formulas also include a portion of bmr which is what you would burn if you did absolutely nothing and just existed, which is near half of that number. This is why they can magically calc your calories burned from just entering your weight knowing nothing else about you (lol). You are not buring 1k+ calories in your body pump/combat/yoga/whatever class, its marketing. If you really wanted to burn over 1k calories you would have to almost full out sprint continuously for 2.5hrs straight with no breaks, then you might get close. Again this doesn't factor in age, weight, etc... We are physically adapted to be efficient when doing exercises/work/hunt and we eat calorie dense foods. This is why humans survived.
So you can't estimate accurately how much calories you are burning so you can't accurately determine how much "extra" you could theoretically eat. However it is fact that if you are not in a caloric deficit, you will not lose weight according to thermodynamics. So you get 3 options, eat a caloric deficit, eat at maintenance, eat above maintenance. 2/3 of those, you will not be losing weight. I'd rather not guess when the odds are already against me.
Muscle take up more energy to maintain then fat does on your body. As when you crash diet, you are mostly losing muscle/water as its the first thing to go in terms of keeping you alive, thus how you get skinny fat people who are thin but still look frail. If you put on more muscle, you require more energy for your body to maintain that muscle. Thus you are increasing how much you can eat. The amount is determined by your goals and how much previous muscle mass you have. You adjust accordingly by your progress pictures and long-term scale moving averages.
This works the same for exercise. But the key point for exercise/activity level is that is has to be consistent week over week, which is really hard for most people as stuff just happens. If you can do it, great; watch the scale and photos and increase your cals, working towards you goal.
But this is the catch. A pound of fat is about 3500 calories. So for you to lose even 1 pound per week you need to be in a deficit of 500 calories each day for 7 DAYS (minimum). If you cut that to 250 cal deficit then it takes you around 2 weeks to lose 1 lb. So if you mess up your calories adding them back in, you could be losing weight but extremely slow. So if you decide to cheat; 1 medium pizza is ~2k calories, bar of chocolate is around ~900 cal, a normal combo meal from a fast food place is like ~2k cals, its extremely easy to erase what little deficit you had and erase 2 or more WEEKS of progress.
The minimum level is for safety. 1200 is extremely low and it is hard to eat a wide variety of foods to get adequate macro and micro nutrients at that level. If you want to go below that, this is your choice but be warned that you will probably develop nutrition deficiences, you body will go into panic mode cause your starving yourself and will make fat loss near impossible. It will also lower your metabolism to further conserve energy making weight loss harder/slower. You will also be eating mostly muscle and not the fat you wanted to lose.
Part of doing this correctly involves learning what your actual net calorie burn is for exercise as many resources are unreliable. This involves keeping good records as well as trial and error. This is one reason why some suggest start by eating back half calories.
My solution is to adjust everything down. Taking my BMR into account and then calculating from my heartrate monitor readings I find that:
1 Hour of moderately intense cardio (not a race or anaerobic workout)=~600-(hourly BMR)
-running, bicycling, Taekwondo, Racewalking, spinning class
1 Hour of moderate cardio=~500-(Hourly BMR)
-Walking 4-4.3 MPH, bicycling at a "touring pace"
Any time I log an activity and MFP wants to give me more calories than this for my workouts and I adjust down. I have used this system to lose 8-10 pounds before a marathon or Bicycle race; and I have used this system (sadly) to lose 70 pounds. I find it to be quite accurate.
But it did take some trial and error to get there.0 -
nikkons017 wrote: »You burn very little calories from exercising, just consider the calories you burn as a bonus.
I couldn't disagree with a recommendation more. I frequently hit 1000 kcal per day of exercising; that's close to half of my maintenance calories.
The best part of the NEAT method, to my mind, is that you get explicitly rewarded for exercising. When I discovered this method, I started exercising to earn more calories. I have been able to eat more and fit in more foods that I love, all the while getting fitter and healthier. I have kept going for almost 5 years.
If someone had told me that I shouldn't count those calories, I would have become discouraged very early on and would likely have not been successful.
That is great. If you are doing what you enjoy and its working for you them be all means continue. But there is also other ways.
So your maintenance is around 2000-2200 and you have to exercise enough to burn 1k calories (alot)
My maintenance is around 2800 and i only workout 3x/week for 45min-1hr (I probably only burn like 300ish maybe if i'm lucky each time) and sprinkle in some cardio occasionally when I feel like it. I lift heavy weights. I built a solid muscle base. I get to eat more food. I don't have to work out 5-6 days a week. This works for me. When I started, my maintenance was around 2200.0 -
nikkons017 wrote: »WinoGelato wrote: »nikkons017 wrote: »buy a food scale and use it to measure out your food in grams to get accurate calories. Never count exercise calories towards what you can eat. You burn very little calories from exercising, just consider the calories you burn as a bonus.
if you are near the 1200 calorie mark, do not go below. 1200 calories is the calorie intake of like a 10 yr old and you are bordering on malnutrition. You need to be lifting weights to build muscle so it increases the calories that you burn.
build more muscle = higher metabolism = easier to burn fat = able to eat more food and still lose weight
Most fitness girls I know eat around 1800 calories if not more for their "cutting"/fat loss
To the bolded, as was explained upthread, the calculation of a calorie goal from MFP excludes exercise, it is a NEAT goal, so the system is actually designed that if you exercise you should eat back at least a portion of those calories.
I'm not sure how on one hand you are stressing the need to eat at an adequate minimum level yet on the other dismissing the idea of eating back exercise calories... isn't that kind of the same thing? If OP exercises and burns 400 calories, and eats those back increasing her total calorie intake to 1680, how is that different than your recommendation to just increase her calorie goal?
if you can find any reliable way to accurately measure energy consumed by exercise as all the machines and trainers give you bogus numbers. The amount you burn depends on lots of factors like height, weight, age, gender, muscle mass, muscle adaptation etc... I know people like to look on their cardio machine and it gives them a nice 400 number but it is complete bs. Those formulas also include a portion of bmr which is what you would burn if you did absolutely nothing and just existed, which is near half of that number. This is why they can magically calc your calories burned from just entering your weight knowing nothing else about you (lol). You are not buring 1k+ calories in your body pump/combat/yoga/whatever class, its marketing. If you really wanted to burn over 1k calories you would have to almost full out sprint continuously for 2.5hrs straight with no breaks, then you might get close. Again this doesn't factor in age, weight, etc... We are physically adapted to be efficient when doing exercises/work/hunt and we eat calorie dense foods. This is why humans survived.
So you can't estimate accurately how much calories you are burning so you can't accurately determine how much "extra" you could theoretically eat. However it is fact that if you are not in a caloric deficit, you will not lose weight according to thermodynamics. So you get 3 options, eat a caloric deficit, eat at maintenance, eat above maintenance. 2/3 of those, you will not be losing weight. I'd rather not guess when the odds are already against me.
Muscle take up more energy to maintain then fat does on your body. As when you crash diet, you are mostly losing muscle/water as its the first thing to go in terms of keeping you alive, thus how you get skinny fat people who are thin but still look frail. If you put on more muscle, you require more energy for your body to maintain that muscle. Thus you are increasing how much you can eat. The amount is determined by your goals and how much previous muscle mass you have. You adjust accordingly by your progress pictures and long-term scale moving averages.
This works the same for exercise. But the key point for exercise/activity level is that is has to be consistent week over week, which is really hard for most people as stuff just happens. If you can do it, great; watch the scale and photos and increase your cals, working towards you goal.
But this is the catch. A pound of fat is about 3500 calories. So for you to lose even 1 pound per week you need to be in a deficit of 500 calories each day for 7 DAYS (minimum). If you cut that to 250 cal deficit then it takes you around 2 weeks to lose 1 lb. So if you mess up your calories adding them back in, you could be losing weight but extremely slow. So if you decide to cheat; 1 medium pizza is ~2k calories, bar of chocolate is around ~900 cal, a normal combo meal from a fast food place is like ~2k cals, its extremely easy to erase what little deficit you had and erase 2 or more WEEKS of progress.
The minimum level is for safety. 1200 is extremely low and it is hard to eat a wide variety of foods to get adequate macro and micro nutrients at that level. If you want to go below that, this is your choice but be warned that you will probably develop nutrition deficiences, you body will go into panic mode cause your starving yourself and will make fat loss near impossible. It will also lower your metabolism to further conserve energy making weight loss harder/slower. You will also be eating mostly muscle and not the fat you wanted to lose.
You're acting like the stakes are super high if someone is wrong about how much they burn. Frankly, they're not. Assuming that the person who is eating back their exercise calories is also regularly checking their weight, they'll pretty quickly see a trend of no weight loss or weight gain and adjust accordingly.
And the common advice around here is that if you're using the NEAT method and not TDEE-20%, you should be eating back 50-75% of exercise calories. Most people here acknowledge that the burns given on machines and by MFP are far too generous. But you still expend energy when exercising.
I just think it's kind of irresponsible to be recommending to someone already cutting down to 1200 not to eat back ANY exercise calories.
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nikkons017 wrote: »buy a food scale and use it to measure out your food in grams to get accurate calories. Never count exercise calories towards what you can eat. You burn very little calories from exercising, just consider the calories you burn as a bonus.
if you are near the 1200 calorie mark, do not go below. 1200 calories is the calorie intake of like a 10 yr old and you are bordering on malnutrition. You need to be lifting weights to build muscle so it increases the calories that you burn.
build more muscle = higher metabolism = easier to burn fat = able to eat more food and still lose weight
Most fitness girls I know eat around 1800 calories if not more for their "cutting"/fat loss
MFP uses the NEAT method, and as such the system is designed for exercise calories to be eaten back. However, many consider the burns given by MFP to be inflated and only eat a percentage, such as 50%, back.
When I weigh my food on a digital food scale, eat the calories MFP gives me, eat some (but not all) of my exercise calories, I lose as expected over the course of a month.0 -
Thanks for all the advice and help. I definitely learned a lot. As far as my stats go I started at 184.4, currently I am at 175.2. My goal is to be somewhere between 130-150. Right now I have been averaging losing 2 lbs. per week eating as I do which obviously I have not been eating back the exercise calories, however I do not find this amount of calories I am eating hard to maintain which is confusing to me when everyone is saying it should be? I have been eating like this for over a month now and I really have not been hungry. I have been maintaining this amount just fine. If you guys believe this is unhealthy then I will listen to suggestions and up the amount I am eating, but to be honest I have not changed the quantity of foods I am eating at all. I have only changed the quality.
With only 25-45 pounds to lose, 2 pounds per week is an overly aggressive goal. Do dial back to a pound a week.
You start using a food scale, at which point you will learn that you've been eating more than you think, and start eating back a percentage of your exercise calories, or continue as is as the extra consumption is currently balancing out the calories burned via exercise.0 -
nikkons017 wrote: »WinoGelato wrote: »nikkons017 wrote: »buy a food scale and use it to measure out your food in grams to get accurate calories. Never count exercise calories towards what you can eat. You burn very little calories from exercising, just consider the calories you burn as a bonus.
if you are near the 1200 calorie mark, do not go below. 1200 calories is the calorie intake of like a 10 yr old and you are bordering on malnutrition. You need to be lifting weights to build muscle so it increases the calories that you burn.
build more muscle = higher metabolism = easier to burn fat = able to eat more food and still lose weight
Most fitness girls I know eat around 1800 calories if not more for their "cutting"/fat loss
To the bolded, as was explained upthread, the calculation of a calorie goal from MFP excludes exercise, it is a NEAT goal, so the system is actually designed that if you exercise you should eat back at least a portion of those calories.
I'm not sure how on one hand you are stressing the need to eat at an adequate minimum level yet on the other dismissing the idea of eating back exercise calories... isn't that kind of the same thing? If OP exercises and burns 400 calories, and eats those back increasing her total calorie intake to 1680, how is that different than your recommendation to just increase her calorie goal?
if you can find any reliable way to accurately measure energy consumed by exercise as all the machines and trainers give you bogus numbers. The amount you burn depends on lots of factors like height, weight, age, gender, muscle mass, muscle adaptation etc... I know people like to look on their cardio machine and it gives them a nice 400 number but it is complete bs. Those formulas also include a portion of bmr which is what you would burn if you did absolutely nothing and just existed, which is near half of that number. This is why they can magically calc your calories burned from just entering your weight knowing nothing else about you (lol). You are not buring 1k+ calories in your body pump/combat/yoga/whatever class, its marketing. If you really wanted to burn over 1k calories you would have to almost full out sprint continuously for 2.5hrs straight with no breaks, then you might get close. Again this doesn't factor in age, weight, etc... We are physically adapted to be efficient when doing exercises/work/hunt and we eat calorie dense foods. This is why humans survived.
So you can't estimate accurately how much calories you are burning so you can't accurately determine how much "extra" you could theoretically eat. However it is fact that if you are not in a caloric deficit, you will not lose weight according to thermodynamics. So you get 3 options, eat a caloric deficit, eat at maintenance, eat above maintenance. 2/3 of those, you will not be losing weight. I'd rather not guess when the odds are already against me.
Muscle take up more energy to maintain then fat does on your body. As when you crash diet, you are mostly losing muscle/water as its the first thing to go in terms of keeping you alive, thus how you get skinny fat people who are thin but still look frail. If you put on more muscle, you require more energy for your body to maintain that muscle. Thus you are increasing how much you can eat. The amount is determined by your goals and how much previous muscle mass you have. You adjust accordingly by your progress pictures and long-term scale moving averages.
This works the same for exercise. But the key point for exercise/activity level is that is has to be consistent week over week, which is really hard for most people as stuff just happens. If you can do it, great; watch the scale and photos and increase your cals, working towards you goal.
But this is the catch. A pound of fat is about 3500 calories. So for you to lose even 1 pound per week you need to be in a deficit of 500 calories each day for 7 DAYS (minimum). If you cut that to 250 cal deficit then it takes you around 2 weeks to lose 1 lb. So if you mess up your calories adding them back in, you could be losing weight but extremely slow. So if you decide to cheat; 1 medium pizza is ~2k calories, bar of chocolate is around ~900 cal, a normal combo meal from a fast food place is like ~2k cals, its extremely easy to erase what little deficit you had and erase 2 or more WEEKS of progress.
The minimum level is for safety. 1200 is extremely low and it is hard to eat a wide variety of foods to get adequate macro and micro nutrients at that level. If you want to go below that, this is your choice but be warned that you will probably develop nutrition deficiences, you body will go into panic mode cause your starving yourself and will make fat loss near impossible. It will also lower your metabolism to further conserve energy making weight loss harder/slower. You will also be eating mostly muscle and not the fat you wanted to lose.
I think that you are failing to understand that MFP calculates a NEAT calorie goal for individuals based on BMR + Non Exercise activity - such that the deficit for weight loss is built into the goal that MFP provides, and one can lose weight according to their goal even if they do no exercise whatsoever. Adding back in some exercise calories (and most people, myself included, recommend only eating back a portion of any estimated calorie burns to compensate for potential inaccuracies until a consistent baseline data set can be established by an individual) helps to ensure that the deficit is not too large. The deficit isn't coming from exercise, so your example of inaccurate burns throwing off the progress is not an issue here.
I also still don't understand why you are saying that the OP needs to eat more than the 1200 minimum (which I agree with) but don't think she should be eating back exercise calories. You are basically describing a TDEE method in which a calorie goal is based off of total calories burned including exercise, and a deficit from that number, in which case no, an individual wouldn't eat back exercise calories. But this OP is using the MFP NEAT method and so eating back those calories burned helps with satiety, overall nutrition, and total energy while maintaining a moderate deficit from the calorie reduction in her initial goal (which I personally think is too aggressive for the amount of weight she wants to lose).
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I wrote something not to long ago to help someone else understand how MFP works, I might just link it here if you want to check it out. Explains some terms you might be seeing on these forums, help you to understand what they are and what MFP is doing in a way that will help you make intelligent informed decisions about your diet.
http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10454792/what-mfp-does-when-it-calculates-your-goal#latest
I will echo everyone else and say from your screencap you are misinterpreting what you are supposed to be doing. From the information you supplied MFP it calculated your NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) which is the amount of calories your body requires without additional exercise. From that it then asked how much you wanted to lose. You said 2 pounds which is a 7000 calorie weekly deficit or 1000 calorie daily deficit so it took your NEAT and subtracted 1000 to arrive at your goal which it gave as 1280. You are supposed to eat 1280 to have a 1000 calorie deficit and if you do additional exercise you are supposed to eat those calories back.
The only trick is that estimates of calories burned from exercise can be pretty innacurate so a lot of time people opt to just eat back about 50% of the estimate (so if a calculator tells you you burned 500 calories eat 250 more that day). If you end up over time losing too quickly you can always eat more.2 -
kshama2001 wrote: »Thanks for all the advice and help. I definitely learned a lot. As far as my stats go I started at 184.4, currently I am at 175.2. My goal is to be somewhere between 130-150. Right now I have been averaging losing 2 lbs. per week eating as I do which obviously I have not been eating back the exercise calories, however I do not find this amount of calories I am eating hard to maintain which is confusing to me when everyone is saying it should be? I have been eating like this for over a month now and I really have not been hungry. I have been maintaining this amount just fine. If you guys believe this is unhealthy then I will listen to suggestions and up the amount I am eating, but to be honest I have not changed the quantity of foods I am eating at all. I have only changed the quality.
With only 25-45 pounds to lose, 2 pounds per week is an overly aggressive goal. Do dial back to a pound a week.
You start using a food scale, at which point you will learn that you've been eating more than you think, and start eating back a percentage of your exercise calories, or continue as is as the extra consumption is currently balancing out the calories burned via exercise.
This. I have similar stats to you. I started at 190, currently weigh 175 and am aiming for 140. I've set MFP to give me a loss of 1 pound/week, and it tells me to eat about 1600 cals/day (for lightly active). Before exercise. I work out twice a week, so actually averaged eating 1750 cals/day in August. And lost 10 pounds that month.
Setting a 1 pound/week goal gives you a little more flexibility. You "get" to eat more so you can decide whether or not you want to eat back some or all of your exercise calories (assuming not too huge of a burn). It's also important to realize that it's the overall average that matters. I rarely want to eat back my exercise calories that day, but sometimes I want them the next day.
Regarding figuring out how many calories your body *really* burns, that's easy enough to work out after a while by comparing your weight loss to the number of calories consumed. I weigh everything so I know my CI very accurately, and measuring my weight loss longterm will tell me where my CI-CO is at. I can work out CO from that.0 -
At the end of the day I have an extra 500-800. This is after I work out and I don't eat out my exercise calories. I thought you need to have a deficit of 1000 a day?
You're doing this wrong....
You're supposed to HIT the number that MFP gives you, not stay 500-800 under it. It's quite possible that being under your goal by 500-800 cals per day, if logged accurately, your deficit is well over 1000 cals per day and far too steep for long term success.
Would it be possible to get your ht / wt / calorie goal / exercise routine so we can possibly help you understand further? Also, is it possible to look at your diary?
Like Malibu said, MFP gives you the calorie goal assuming you do no exercise per day so you're supposed to eat those calories back (or at least some of them).
I was just about to ask how everyone was coming up with all these calculations without knowing the important information like the height weight calorie goal exercise routine excetera.0
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