Eating between 1200-1375 calories a day, not losing weight.
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You have some good advice here. To sum it up, here's what is probably going on:
1. Underestimating your calories by not weighing/measuring your food accurately.
2. Overestimating your exercise calorie burn.
3. Eating back your deficit on your cheat day.
And here's what I would do:
1. Get a food scale and a good set of measuring cups. Use the food scale for solid foods and the measuring cups for liquids. Measure everything you can measure.
2. If you're relying on database estimates for your exercise, then only eat back half of your exercise calories. The database tends to overestimate calorie burn. If you have a more accurate method of measuring, such as a heart rate monitor, then you should eat more of your exercise calories.
3. Log the cheat day, if not scale it back or eliminate it.
^^^^ This! ^^^^
Personally, I wouldn't have this 'cheat day', especially if you are not logging it. If you want foods you would only have on your cheat day, FIT THEM INTO YOUR DAILY ROUTINE. If they don't fit into your numbers, adjust your day or wait until the next day.1 -
I'm 5'3". I log everyday and eat anything I want within 1250+exercise cals and I've lost 25lb in 13 weeks, if that's any help!
P.S MFP says 1700 for my maintenance cals which seems sadly low2 -
1. Get a food scale and a good set of measuring cups. Use the food scale for solid foods and the measuring cups for liquids. Measure everything you can measure.
How would you recommend measuring home-cooked meals with a variety of ingredients? For example, I have a pot of chili in the fridge made with turkey sausage, tomato soup, black beans, and onions. I have every ingredient (except spices) logged into a Meal in MFP, but since I don't know what the cooked weight of the overall recipe is, measuring out, for example, 200g of chili doesn't really tell me what percentage of the total recipe I'm eating, and the recipe doesn't have a "serving size" per se. So far I've been estimating based on the fact that I've made this recipe hundreds of times and know roughly how many meals it'll give for a given portion size, but that's still just a rough estimate.
Also, I have basically the same question for solid foods where the serving size is listed by volume rather than by mass. For example, my bag of rice says that one serving is 3/4 cup, but doesn't list the equivalent mass. Given that you can pack rice pretty tight, or leave it pretty loose, it seems like there's some variation in how much rice is actually contained in 3/4 of a cup.
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kellysnewlife2 wrote: »1. Get a food scale and a good set of measuring cups. Use the food scale for solid foods and the measuring cups for liquids. Measure everything you can measure.
How would you recommend measuring home-cooked meals with a variety of ingredients? For example, I have a pot of chili in the fridge made with turkey sausage, tomato soup, black beans, and onions. I have every ingredient (except spices) logged into a Meal in MFP, but since I don't know what the cooked weight of the overall recipe is, measuring out, for example, 200g of chili doesn't really tell me what percentage of the total recipe I'm eating, and the recipe doesn't have a "serving size" per se. So far I've been estimating based on the fact that I've made this recipe hundreds of times and know roughly how many meals it'll give for a given portion size, but that's still just a rough estimate.
Also, I have basically the same question for solid foods where the serving size is listed by volume rather than by mass. For example, my bag of rice says that one serving is 3/4 cup, but doesn't list the equivalent mass. Given that you can pack rice pretty tight, or leave it pretty loose, it seems like there's some variation in how much rice is actually contained in 3/4 of a cup.
Use the recipe builder and weigh out each of the ingredients. Weight the entire cooked meal and use this number for your serving sizes which should be in grams. Then weigh out your portion and log in grams.
As far as the rice issue - use a food scale. There will always be a weight measurement for the serving size as well even if it says the cup amount. Disregard the cups/spoon measurements and go with the weight/volume.1 -
kellysnewlife2 wrote: »1. Get a food scale and a good set of measuring cups. Use the food scale for solid foods and the measuring cups for liquids. Measure everything you can measure.
How would you recommend measuring home-cooked meals with a variety of ingredients? For example, I have a pot of chili in the fridge made with turkey sausage, tomato soup, black beans, and onions. I have every ingredient (except spices) logged into a Meal in MFP, but since I don't know what the cooked weight of the overall recipe is, measuring out, for example, 200g of chili doesn't really tell me what percentage of the total recipe I'm eating, and the recipe doesn't have a "serving size" per se. So far I've been estimating based on the fact that I've made this recipe hundreds of times and know roughly how many meals it'll give for a given portion size, but that's still just a rough estimate.
Also, I have basically the same question for solid foods where the serving size is listed by volume rather than by mass. For example, my bag of rice says that one serving is 3/4 cup, but doesn't list the equivalent mass. Given that you can pack rice pretty tight, or leave it pretty loose, it seems like there's some variation in how much rice is actually contained in 3/4 of a cup.
It's actually really easy. I'll use an example of what I do:
Let's say I'm making a quiche. I get my ingredients ready and pull out my trusty notepad and food scale.
I dice the onions and weigh them and they're 200g. I write "onions - 200g" on my notepad. I place a bowl on my scale, tare it, and crack eggs into it. 250g of eggs - check!
I use a prepackaged pie crust because I'm lazy, so I just write down the calorie count from the box.
I use a measuring cup for the milk and write down the value in cups.
I don't bother writing down the salt or seasoning amounts because they're negligible.
I assemble my quiche and bake it. When it's out of the oven and cooled, I place a plate on my scale, tare it, then place the quiche (only the quiche - no baking dishes) on the scale. Let's say it comes out to 800g.
I go into the MFP Recipe Builder, input all my ingredients, and set the "Servings" to 800.
Now, whenever I have a slice of quiche, I put my plate on my scale, tare it, put the piece of quiche on it, and set the serving as the weight.4 -
As far as the rice issue - use a food scale. There will always be a weight measurement for the serving size as well even if it says the cup amount. Disregard the cups/spoon measurements and go with the weight/volume.
My rice package says the serving size is "1/4 cup (45g) - makes 3/4 cup prepared". The way it's written suggests that the 45g is before cooking, and it doesn't include a prepared mass, which will be higher due to water absorption. That's why I'm confused.0 -
You weigh rice before you cook it.2
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a cheat day can definitely slow your progress. i've been there and what i thought was a 2400 calorie cheat day was really like 3500 when i ACTUALLY tracked it. You should track on ALL days. if you go over, so be it, but you still need to know what kind of damage you did so that you can eat lighter the next few days. i now only do a true "cheat" day 1-2 a month. they are too damaging.2
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kellysnewlife2 wrote: »As far as the rice issue - use a food scale. There will always be a weight measurement for the serving size as well even if it says the cup amount. Disregard the cups/spoon measurements and go with the weight/volume.
My rice package says the serving size is "1/4 cup (45g) - makes 3/4 cup prepared". The way it's written suggests that the 45g is before cooking, and it doesn't include a prepared mass, which will be higher due to water absorption. That's why I'm confused.
Because rice absorbs a variable amount of water during cooking, it's more accurate to weigh it before you cook it. If you do decide to weigh it post-cooking, I would find a database entry for cooked rice and use that (double-checking it for accuracy against the USDA database to ensure it is accurate).0 -
jessrudnicki wrote: »HellYeahItsKriss wrote: »How are you getting your calorie info? do you weigh your food on a scale?
Is your cheat day a day? is your meal massive? If you don't have much weight to lose, it would take about.. 1.5 hours to burn approx 700 calories IF you were doing continuous cardio... how are you determining that calorie burn?
I don't weigh my food, I estimate mostly. Occasionally I'll measure. My cheat day is a full day, but I almost never go over 2,000 calories. The kickboxing class is a cardio kickboxing class, 60 minutes, and it is an estimated 700 calories.
Could it be that I'm low balling my calories?
I'd tend to discount that 700, even if the class is intense. I'm 5'5", was obese (around 185 pounds) for a decade during which I was training hard/regularly as a competitive athlete (rower). Because I was using heart rate based training methods, I normally wore a heart rate monitor.
At 2000 meter race pace, I was burning calories at around 850 per hour. Thing is, that's absolutely the highest pace I could sustain for a little over 8 minutes (near death experience - LOL), no way it could happen for an hour at a time. Sustainable but very challenging steady pace for an hour continuously, completely wrung out at finish, would've been more like 600, tops, at an intensity (pace) around the 75-percentile level for my age/weight class.
While I haven't done cardio kick boxing specifically, I do respect the intensity, and have done various forms of intense cardio other than rowing, and spent 8 years doing kung fu regularly, so I'm not speculating with no respect for your workout - far from it! - or with zero relevant background.
If your class is typical, it may include some lower intensity minutes, too, like warm-up, cool-down, or stretching. I'd guess at more like 500 for an hour, at the outside, on that basis.
That's a great workout though: Well worth doing. Go, you!
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I used to estimate calories and it was an eye opener how much over my calorie goal I was actually eating. A quarter cup of cashews is about 10 nuts and 170 calories, and I was snacking on a few small handfuls at a time. And an ounce of cheese is smaller than you might think. A $20 kitchen scale helps so much!!1
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janejellyroll wrote: »jessrudnicki wrote: »HellYeahItsKriss wrote: »How are you getting your calorie info? do you weigh your food on a scale?
Is your cheat day a day? is your meal massive? If you don't have much weight to lose, it would take about.. 1.5 hours to burn approx 700 calories IF you were doing continuous cardio... how are you determining that calorie burn?
I don't weigh my food, I estimate mostly. Occasionally I'll measure. My cheat day is a full day, but I almost never go over 2,000 calories. The kickboxing class is a cardio kickboxing class, 60 minutes, and it is an estimated 700 calories.
Could it be that I'm low balling my calories?
If you're just estimating your food intake, then it's likely you're eating more than you think. Your 1,200-1,375 a day could be much more and your 2,000 cheat days could be more too. This is probably why you're not seeing the results that you want.
Agreed.
Even if your estimates/logs are fairly reasonable, 1 cheat day can very easily wipe out an otherwise good week. A bad day for me takes about 3 weeks to make up for.
Yikes. Maybe I'll go sans cheat day.0 -
I was reading about this - and apparently for packaged foods, their calorie count can be off by 20% and still be FCC approved. So imagine if you eat a breakfast bar or whatever and it says 200 calories. It could actually be up to 240 calories in reality. So for all the packaged food you eat, your estimates could be off by 20% which is a huge disconnect. Keep that in mind when you are logging. Personally i'm not ready to weigh things yet but I am thinking that I need to leave a bigger buffer between what I eat and my daily goal, to account for these fluctuations.
Good to know! Thank you!0 -
700 calories burnt for an hour of exercise seems a bit high. That's about the equivalent of a person running a 10k (without any breaks) in an hour. Is your class non-stop high intensity?
As for measuring your food intake, a digital food scale is extremely important. They're only $20 or so, definitely worth the investment. Estimating just doesn't cut it for most people.
It is high intensity with one 5 min water break and the last 5 mins spent stretching. But I probably am shooting too high on the amount of calories burned.0 -
I'd never lose with one "cheat day" a week. I know because I've tried it. Unless the cheat was under X amount of calories and consistent, in which case I guess I wouldn't call it a cheat, it would just be my overall plan.
If you're not weighing and measuring, sure, you could be wiping out your deficit this way.
And you say you've been estimating even on non-cheat days, so...
If I am not certain for recipes I weigh everything, divide it to serve and enter that amount by doing the math. Then I enter it all individually. That may sound like it takes a lot of time, but here we all are farting around on MFP instead so I'd say most of us have SOME extra time.
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