Going nuts over how to diet

musicfan68

You are so over thinking all of this. Just eat what you like, measure the food so you know what the calories are and eat at your calorie allotment. You are spending way too much time obsessing about this and that is why you keep failing.

PAV8888

Your total activity level based on Scooby's accurate calorie calculator falls somewhere between their two top activity settings.

Their lower activity setting with a 20% deficit has you eating 2500 Cal a day. If you are in the higher activity setting this 20% becomes a larger deficit. Possibly as much or a tad larger than 25%.

Assuming you have the fat reserves that are commensurate with your weight level which verges on the obese category, a 25% deficit for a short period of time would be at the maximum of "few ill effects" weight loss. I would personally move towards a 20% deficit once in the overweight zone.

Hence my suggestion to ignore the exactness of your pickleball figures and concentrate instead on accurately creating a 2500 calorie per day on average way of eating for yourself.

You can then compare your actual mutli-week results to your general food intake and general exercise levels and see if you're losing at the approximate rate you think you should... and adjust based on your results.

If pickleball is MET 6, AT YOUR CURRENT WEIGHT, it "burns" 451 Cal an hour, and if you're setup as lightly active on MFP, you get to eat back 76.67%, i.e. your 345.58 NET burned Cals per hour.

If pickleball is MET 5.5, at your current weight, it "burns" 413 Cal an hour, and if you're setup as lightly active on MFP, you get to eat back 74.55%, i.e. your 308.01 NET burned Cals per hour.

Tennis *doubles* ranges from 4.5 for casual to 6.0 for competitive. Badminton *doubles* is currently pegged at 5.5 and used to be called 4.5 in the past.

Doubles involve quick movements but less court coverage than singles. The cut-off for vigorous activity is MET 6.0. Obviously steady state activities, by their nature, are easier to estimate. Games often involve interruptions while things get sorted out.

And all this discussion as to whether you get to eat back 450 Cal or 300 Cal per hour of pickelball is somewhat irrelevant given that based on your description you currently eat back NONE.

A 2lbs a week weight loss setting (-1000 Cal) may not be an appropriate target for you at this time.

I would aim for -750 at most to start and would quickly switch that to -500 as soon as I started having regular weight drops and i was in the overweight and no longer obese range in order to protect my ability to competitively perform since this obviously seems to be important to you.

EdwardMH2

Should I change my activity level setting in MFP to something else?

jgnatca

However you set your activity level, your net calories per day is adjusted against your posted activities. It won't make any difference. Please do eat your allotted calories daily however.

EdwardMH2

Oh.... I been using that as a guide not to go over so I try to eat less than the allotted. Often times I only got one meal because it would have took me over.

jgnatca

There you go! You have more calories to work with and still lose weight.

nutmegoreo

EdwardMH2 wrote: »

The MFP community is so patient and helpful. Thank you all for putting up with my OCD on this subject. Sadly EVERYTHING in my life is overthought and paralysis by analysis ridden. I always think I have to do things perfect but at the same time no confidence so I loop in and out of doing, not doing everything.

Doing something sort of right most of the time is going to be better than doing it perfectly none of the time.

I know it's overwhelming. Aim for the calories given plus a reasonable portion of the exercise calories and just trust the process for a while. Adjust as needed.

@PAV8888 has given you some more detailed information to keep your detail minded heart happy.

lucerorojo

Just count the calories. It's so much simpler than guessing and doing one of those crazy diets.

dnunny70

I have been aeound for the Atkins Diet, South Beach, Cabnage Soup, LCHF, all the home delivery meals, Richard Simmons Foid Mover, Weight Watchers.

I haven't tried them all. I am doing what works fir me. I will ear lower carb, less fat, keep track of macros. Finding what works fot you is key.

EdwardMH2

Ok please bare with me I learn slower than most. Yesterday I got the most steps ever recorded for a day on my Gear2 watch for you active types it is probably nothing but to me I am STILL tired lol.

I have 18,016 steps.
Now I played nonstop Pickleball in the morning for about hours and again that evening for several hours.
There seems to be disagreements on how many calories Pickleball burns an hour so would be better to just convert the steps to calories burned and log that since it seems to be better to log less than you burned?

Allotted Daily Caloris are 1510 but even with two Irish corned beef meals a hot chocolate and a coke float if I register my exercise as 120 min of Pickleball, 60 min walking dog, and another 180 min of pickleball my ending available calories will be MORE than what I should eat a day.

I have not locked it in but it reads as. CALORIE GOAL 1510, FOOD 931 (And I thought I over ate), EXERCISE 2587 (based on 450 calories an hour) CALORIES REMAINING 3166.

If I use an online step to calories converter at 20 min mile it says my 18,016 steps I walked 9 miles and only burned 1016
Which would be the more accurate? All I know is I was staggering and stumbling the last few hours of the day before I finally went to bed. I was EXHAUSTED.

PAV8888

Your activity level is over the top. Have you anyways been eating as little as you are now, or is this a new thing? Are you now trying to be more active than before at the same time as cutting your food intake?

Basically you are not morbidly obese and need a small adjustment to your energy balance to get to your goal weights.

What you seem to be doing instead is applying big adjustments.

How do you measure your steps? Do you have a fitness band? If you do, stop trying to second guess it and just accept the burn it gives you.

You have concentrated an inordinate relative amount of time worrying about how much your daily burn is.

I hear nothing in there about how you're accurately recording your food intake.

Your goal is not to under eat your goal.

If you set your goals correctly and you measure semi accurately then your goal is to hit your goals.

Between the appreciable length of exercise and probably terrible accuracy of recording food intake I too would join the chorus of only eating back half the exercise calories that you've manually recorded.

I note that this does not apply to daily activity recorded by an exercise band.

So instead of talking about pickleball why don't you tell us number one: **what has your weight been doing this past week?** How many calories have you eaten, based on your loging? Have you logged every single meal and day?

Because my main question is not the pickleball.

You are saying that two Irish corn beef meals (by that I assume more than just the plain corn beef meat without bread or fixings), plus a hot chocolate that is not sugarfree, plus a non diet cola float add up to under 1000 Cal. While remotely possible it would take some pretty tiny portions.

Now you say you have a Gear 2. While I personally was not impressed by the accuracy of the Samsung Health Products when I looked at them a few years ago, what matters is consistency of measurement not accuracy. As long as you have a consistent measurement you can adjust for it.

So stop trying to measure your exercise yourself and let the automated Samsung Gear measure your exercise for you..

Just take your DAILY TOTAL caloric expenditure to be whatever your gear tells you it is ***without** you entering anything.

Concentrate on eating (especially if you're exerting as much as you are) two and a half thousand accurately measured calories.

Plug your daily weight into trendweight or Libra or happy scale.

Examine your rate of loss or gain after three to four weeks if you're a guy, after 4 to 6 weeks if you're a girl, and figure out whether your weight change matches your expected weight change on the basis of 3500 calories equal 1 lb.

Then adjust your intake based on your real life results.

Do you really think that you can be a 200-plus pound person who is on their feet moving by your description more than 6 hours a day and who will feel able to perform on the basis of eating less than a thousand calories?

Sure, on a non active day eat less than 2k cal. Somewhere around 1800 accurately measured sounds like a good deficit based on remembered stats and less than 5k daily steps for ALL reasons including exercise and incidental

But on a totally active day like the one you described you probably should be closer to 3k Cal, if not over.

You're currently worried about the accuracy of calculations when your eating is not even remotely in the general ballpark.

You want a deficit. One that is neither too small nor too large.

Large deficits come with health and performance implications. Small ones mean no weight loss today.

EdwardMH2

When I enter my meals in MFP I do a search for one item at a time and pick what seems to be in the middle of all the different numbers I find in that search. For instance I could not find an actual listing for Corned beef and cabbage dinner so I selected each ingredient (minus seasoning) and guessed at how much it was in portion size. And 70% of my entries are GUESSING.
I will tally this weeks entries and post the. I did for get one day bu will try to restructure it. I tend to do my entries as I am ordering food but again quests work as my exact meal from an exact restaurant is not always in the search list so I pick the 2nd highest entry to be on the safe side.

EdwardMH2

I have always tended to eat one or two meals a day and snack on popcorn or something in the evenings. Occasionally I feel very hungry after playing Pickleball and will go for another meal.

ceiswyn

You don’t do much cooking, so I suspect you have no real idea what 100g of anything looks like. I’m guessing that your ‘guessing’ on portion sizes is way, way out. And also that you’re not logging ‘invisible’ ingredients such as butter and fats used in cooking.

The way to improve your guessing without learning to cook is to do what everyone is telling you to do, and pick a strategy and stick with it for a few weeks and see what happens.

PAV8888

I don't have a simple solution for your guessing issue.

I generally take a picture of what I am about to eat and de-construct what went into it when I am at home. However my guesses are fairly educated, even though I still have trouble eyeballing a cup!

I've done everything from walk into a restaurant with a scale (my all you can eat fish and chip place regularly sees me arrive that way--the scale does look like a tablet if you don't stare at it for a very long time. the waitresses I am sure have a chuckle!), to walking in with measuring cups, to taking an extra 'identical' meal home UNCOOKED (at a mongollie grill), where I carefully separated all the ingredients and weighed them for a mythical "average" mongollie grill meal... and while all this is sort of fun and exiting, it is actually not necessary when all you need is a small adjustment.

Your evening snacks are at home and measurable. You might find to your suprise that a whole meal is less calories than a (family sized) bag of tortilla chips.

Anyway. My sub-optimal solution has been to, over time, simplify by choosing to use more 'name brand' fast food outlets (in my case McD's, Wendy's, and Tim Horton's) and order specific things off their menus as opposed to frequent 'ethnic' restaurants as often as I used to. The other thing I do is order specific items whether on or off the menu. So I will often order a 6oz or 8oz steak or grilled chicken breast and steamed/boiled no butter or margarine veggies.

EdwardMH2

Well, it appears my guessing is way way to low on what I eat then even thought I would choose the second highest or in between options that the search brings up so I will try to get more accurate measurements and for a while order the same thing every day until I KNOW what a particular serving size looks like.

PAV8888

EdwardMH2 wrote: »

Well, it appears my guessing is way way to low on what I eat then even thought I would choose the second highest or in between options that the search brings up so I will try to get more accurate measurements and for a while order the same thing every day until I KNOW what a particular serving size looks like.

A guess is a guess.

When you see the words "beef with cabbage one portion or similar" how the blazes do you have ANY clue if the person is talking about an 8" plate, a 6" plate, a 12" plate, heaping mountains of food or a barely cover my plate portion?

Even when you see "3 egg omelette" how do you know if the place in question is adding a half cup of pancake batter in the omelette? Or the cook is throwing a SOUP laddle of margarine on the flat-top before putting the omelette on it?

When you order toast and it come pre-buttered... again... how do you know how much margarine they laddled on there before putting it on your plate?

That's why you see so many people order dressing on the side, toast dry, cook more at home etc.

If you are ordering out from a place with ZERO nutritional information... even if you get the same plate again and again, how are you going to figure out what you've eaten.

Frankly the best solution in your case (especially if you weren't actively gaining on what you were eating) would be to eat NORMALLY. Just like you NORMALLY would (to be honest the act of trying to record and watch your calories by itself will push you to make more calorically conservative choices thus creating a deficit.

Then review your weight results vis a vis what you logged... and adjust from that.

You need to take a deep breath and re-thing some of this.

Start with how much weight you want to lose. Why. How you're planning to maintain the loss and not regain.

write down what you eat normally. As mentioned, especially if you snack at home at night as you said... let's get a handle on the snacks.

If they are 500 Calories or something like that... that's one thing. But if you're eating a couple of thousand calories worth of snacks... well, we would then know what you could work on by replacing the snacks with lower calorie filling options or working on an extra meal that might be less calories but more satisfying than the snacks.

EdwardMH2

I have a food scale I will try to weigh what I order, for today I will just have one meal as I am supposed to have 1510 but am already over 1700 calories. This time I picked the lowest calories burned entry for walking 60 min which was 2.0 mph instead of the higher walking dog one so it would report less calories burned. And picked the highest calories count I could find for what ever I ate. So I won’t be cheating.i have no other activities today so might as well close out the day’s entry. Tomorrow I will wait for the restaurant to have a slow period and go eat so I can get help measuring food and not interfere with the staff. Shame lol I so wanted one more Corned beef and cabbage meal tonight hehe.

PAV8888

Edward: I am concerned that you may be misinterpretting something pretty basic to the whole MFP concept.

You are supposed to have X amount of calories (in your case you claim 1510) in order to generate a Y amount of deficit (I suspect you have chosen 2lbs a week weight loss which requires a deficit of 1000 Calories a day) BASED ON THE ACTIVITY LEVELS YOU'VE DECLARED (in your case you've said lightly active) ASSUMING you do not perform any additional activity or exercise ABOVE your declared level.

BUT THIS IS NOT THE CASE.

You both exercise and move more than your declared level based on your description. In fact you exercise and move even more than a very active person would.

So you need to eat MORE calories than the (declared) lightly active person would in order to not, by accident, create a larger than 1000 Cal deficit.

Counter-intuitive as it may sound, you DON'T want to create a larger deficit. in fact even a 1000 Cal deficit may be excessive for you.

On top of all that you already have a fitness watch, your Samsung Gear 2.

if you leave things alone and do not log any exercise by yourself on MFP, your gear 2 should be spitting out a single figure saying how many calories it thinks you have spent by the end of the day.

What is that figure?

Take a 20 to 25% cut from that figure and EAT the remaining 75% to 80% Calories to create a sane and sustainable deficit.

EdwardMH2

Sadly I chose 2 pounds a week to loose as much as I can faster. On my watch I had only been looking at steps never checked the Samsung health app. Do I leave it at default or are there settings I can/should adjust to personalize it?
Yesterday I did very little activity it says I burned 1,894 cal but I was not wearing the watch, the day before with 18,016 steps it says I burned in 13 hours 25 min 1,708 cal on one screen the second screen gives a total of 2,539 calories. There are 3 shoe icons one flat, one slightly raised and one raised high which I assume is low medium and high activity levels ALL my 13 hours are listed as Medium activity.

Today is a dull rainy day so no activity, also not eating anything as I have not felt hungry all day.