MFP TDEE Calculation

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taziarj
taziarj Posts: 243 Member
edited March 2018 in Health and Weight Loss
I guess this isn't a bad problem to have, but it seems that using the MFP Guided Setup is calculating my calories low. I am male, 5' 11" 200lbs, 42 years old. I exercise, moderately lifting weights three times a week and running for about two miles once a week. Otherwise I am very sedentary day to day; I work in an office job sitting at a desk all day. However, I consistently go over my calorie target. My highest weight back in 2012 was 335lbs. I got down to about 195lbs in a little over a year. That was without exercise.I ended up gaining some of it back and in January 2017 I was up to 265lbs, so I made the decision to start exercising and counting calories again and am now back just under 200 as of today.

Over the past two weeks I have lost 3lbs by consuming 32,452 calories, or an average of 2,318 per day. MFP is calculating my calorie target to be 1,790 based on a 1lb loss per week. So it seems that MFP thinks my TDEE is 2,290 since it is taking 500 calories off for the .5 loss.

However, since I have actually lost 1.5lbs each of the last two weeks, I am thinking that the 2,318 is actually a caloric intake based on 1.5lbs of loss per week. So it would actually put my TDEE at 3,068. The 1.5lbs of weight loss works out to 750 calories per day deficit.

So it would seem that I my daily calorie target for a 1lb loss per week should actually be 2,568? How can the MFP Guided Setup calculation be so far off? I don't think I am underestimating my calories. I weigh about 90% of what I consume. I certainly can't be burning many calories lifting weights three times a week for an hour or so and my two miles of running probably burns at most 200 calories. So what is up? I guess I could start eating more to get my weight loss to the 1lb per week target and set my calorie goal closer to the 2,500 mark. My only concern is that if I do that, I will be consistently over that goal each day and end up maintaining or gaining. My diary is open, so if anyone sees anything out of the ordinary, let me know. I think I have my numbers calculated right.
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Replies

  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,811 Member
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    This isn't a TDEE calculator - it's TDEE minus exercise.

    If you want to use a same every day TDEE goal then to to an external site to get your TDEE (or even better calculate from your own numbers) and manually set that as your goal rather than use the guided setup.

    I preferred to have a variable daily amount that fluctuated in line with my exercise expenditure but that's mostly a preference thing.
  • WinoGelato
    WinoGelato Posts: 13,454 Member
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    MFP doesn’t work off of TDEE but NEAT, which is an estimate of your calorie burn excluding exercise. So if you do exercise, you’re meant to log and eat back some of those calories burned. That may be why you are losing faster than the 1 lb/week goal you entered, you’re exercising and creating additional deficit but not keeping your Net goal the same.
  • taziarj
    taziarj Posts: 243 Member
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    I do understand that MFP doesn't take exercise in to consideration and I don't log my exercise and I don't intentionally eat back any exercise calories. That said, there is no way I am burning about 750 calories a day every day of the week in exercise. I only exercise three days of the week yet MFP is off by 750 a day?
  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,811 Member
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    Did you pick the right activity setting?
    Remember on here the activity setting is different to a TDEE site too which gives different BMR multipliers.

    It's a mistake to pick a goal on here if you aren't going to follow the method of accounting for exercise.
    Align your goals and your methods to use the tools as designed. I'm sure you wouldn't use a screwdriver as a hammer! ;)
  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,811 Member
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    BTW - the 3500 cals equals a pound of weight loss assumes fat loss.

    If you have recently changed your food intake (is it just two weeks of your new diet?) then you may have had a water weight loss which could skew the numbers.
  • Maxxitt
    Maxxitt Posts: 1,281 Member
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    The rule of thumb is, keep data and adjust accordingly. If the # MFP gives you isn't right, adjust. As to why ... I suspect with that big a difference either your settings are not done right or you are an outlier in the metabolism department :)
  • taziarj
    taziarj Posts: 243 Member
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    I picked sedentary in the MFP guided setup. I certainly don't walk over 10,000 steps in a day, even though the ice machine at work is a long way away :) If I account for exercise calories, the machine said I burned 300 calories today running for a little over two miles. Add to that the 300 I burned last week and that is 600 calories. That certainly doesn't add up to the 750x14=10,500 that MFP seems to think I am burning.
  • taziarj
    taziarj Posts: 243 Member
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    This isn't a new diet. I have been going at this for over a year. I am down a little over 7lbs in the past month. So I don't think it is water weight as that should have been gone long ago.

    I may adjust my goal to the 2,500 based on the two weeks of data. Is two weeks of data enough or should I look back a month? I suspect it will still come out around the same number.
  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,811 Member
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    taziarj wrote: »
    This isn't a new diet. I have been going at this for over a year. I am down a little over 7lbs in the past month. So I don't think it is water weight as that should have been gone long ago.

    I may adjust my goal to the 2,500 based on the two weeks of data. Is two weeks of data enough or should I look back a month? I suspect it will still come out around the same number.

    I would adjust now (and I prefer manual adjustments rather than guided), but my intention is always to eat as much as possible while still hitting my goals.
  • WinoGelato
    WinoGelato Posts: 13,454 Member
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    Most people, even with a desk job, aren’t Sedentary and it doesn’t take 10k steps to bump up the setting to lightly active if you really aren’t Sedentary. You seem determined to ignore the advice you are getting and overthink things... but one more time here is my advice:

    Set MFP to lose 1 lb/week if you have more than 25 lbs to lose. If less, go with 0.5 lb/week.
    Use the calorie goal MFP provides as the target but when you exercise, eat back at least a portion of those calories.
    Log everything as accurately as possible, ideally using a food scale.
    Monitor and adjust if you aren’t losing at the desired rate after 4-6 weeks.
  • Horsekeeper
    Horsekeeper Posts: 21 Member
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    Check out this study of overfeeding of identical twins, from the New England Journal of Medicine. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199005243222101
    What is interesting is that, even after controlling for exercise, and being fed the same surplus of calories, different pairs of identical twins gained different amounts of weight. Each pair of identical twins had pretty much the same gain, but there was considerable difference between non-related individuals on the same regimen. Note that this was even after controlling each individuals exercise.

    This suggests to me that different individuals, even those with similar physical characteristics, may have differing TDEE numbers. There is also evidence to suggest that increasing your muscle mass (as with your weights workout) will increase your metabolism.

    Maybe the MFP TDEE is just a place to start? Given that you are carefully measuring what you eat, and observing different results, your own observations may be more accurate than MFP's estimate. I'd recommend sticking with what you observe, and working off that. If you find yourself plateauing or gaining, you can adjust your calories down. Good luck, in any case - it sounds like you are doing great.
  • ITUSGirl51
    ITUSGirl51 Posts: 192 Member
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    I found that MFP calories are too low for me too. I was losing 1.5 to 2 lbs a week on the calories it gave me and starving all the time. I guess I’m more active than sedentary or the calorie reduction it gave me for being 51 was too extreme. I use my Apple Watch for exercise calories and eat most of those back too. I don’t eat all active calories, just the exercise calories. I manually adjusted the daily calories up 130 calories and I’m still losing about 1.2 lb a week.

    The calculator is not perfect. I suggest manually bumping up the daily calories 100 - 200 calories a day and see how that works.
  • corinasue1143
    corinasue1143 Posts: 7,467 Member
    edited March 2018
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    sijomial wrote: »
    I'm sure you wouldn't use a screwdriver as a hammer! ;)


    spoken like a man. I just had to laugh out loud. I hung a mirror and a shelf today, as well as put together a new vacuum cleaner I just bought. All with a Phillips screwdriver, cause that's what I could find.
  • taziarj
    taziarj Posts: 243 Member
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    WinoGelato wrote: »
    Most people, even with a desk job, aren’t Sedentary and it doesn’t take 10k steps to bump up the setting to lightly active if you really aren’t Sedentary. You seem determined to ignore the advice you are getting and overthink things... but one more time here is my advice:

    Set MFP to lose 1 lb/week if you have more than 25 lbs to lose. If less, go with 0.5 lb/week.
    Use the calorie goal MFP provides as the target but when you exercise, eat back at least a portion of those calories.
    Log everything as accurately as possible, ideally using a food scale.
    Monitor and adjust if you aren’t losing at the desired rate after 4-6 weeks.

    Who said I am ignoring anything? I am wondering if you actually read all of my OP. I am using a food scale to weigh most of my food. I certainly don't think I am underestimating my caloric intake, though it is possible but probably not to the tune of 750 calories a day. I really don't know what exercise calories I would eat back. I always read that you don't really burn calories with weight lifting, and my weightlifting isn't by any means heavily exhausting. Just a beginners dumbbell routine. Sure I could eat back half of those 300 calories burned on the treadmill, but that is only 150, not 750.

    I do also have MFP setup to lose 1lb a day. I am probably under the 25lbs still to lose right now, but even if I adjusted to .5, it would only be a 250 calorie difference.

    All that said, I did adjust my daily calorie goal to 2,500 and will see how that plays out over the next couple weeks. I would like to stay on a 0.5 to 1lb per week loss.
  • taziarj
    taziarj Posts: 243 Member
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    taziarj wrote: »
    All that said, I did adjust my daily calorie goal to 2,500 and will see how that plays out over the next couple weeks. I would like to stay on a 0.5 to 1lb per week loss.

    Thanks for all the advice everybody. I went in and tweaked my daily goal a little bit and changed it to 2,325 per day. I had an outlier day where I had 5500 calories (Olive Garden Endless Classics :)) and it was the first day of the two weeks I was using for the new calculation. After removing that outlier, I landed on the 2,325. I didn't want to take the chance and stop the progress. I figure I can sit there for a couple weeks and see how everything goes.
  • MegaMooseEsq
    MegaMooseEsq Posts: 3,118 Member
    edited March 2018
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    I found that MFPs calculator was under for me as well, but again, it’s just a starting point. I have a desk job so I set it to sendentary, but I also get around 7000-10000 steps a day walking to and from my carpool pick up, running short errands, and walking the dogs. It doesn’t seem like much, but apparently the step cap for sedentary is something like 3000 steps? I also tend to walk briskly and am a bit of a fidgeter. There are some fascinating studies out there about the caloric differences that come from you non-exercise movements - we really have no way to measure the difference between someone who genuinely does not move much when they’re working and someone who, for example, paces while on the phone, taps a leg to their music, and is prone to nervous finger drumming. All of those things take energy, and energy is calories! The body is pretty fascinating, when you get down to it.

    On the exercise side, you may be burning a bit more than you think. My Apple Watch gives me about 225 calories burned for fifty minutes of beginner dumbbell weight lifting (including 5 minutes moderate cardio warm up and 5 minutes stretching), and 170 for 20-25 minutes slow jog. It’s not a lot compared to 90 minutes on an treadmill, but it’s enough for a glass of wine and some jelly beans in the PM.
  • taziarj
    taziarj Posts: 243 Member
    edited March 2018
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    So this week I increased my goal in MFP to the 2,325 and stuck pretty close to that averaging 2316 over the past 7 days. I did underestimate my TDEE a little bit because I was worried about the one +5,000 calorie outlier day in that past average. It seems that wasn't an outlier after all. This week I lost 1.9lbs. The 1.9lbs is about a 6650 calorie deficit over the week which is 950 per day. If I add the 6,650 and the 16,212 calories that I consumed this week, I come out to 22,862 total TDEE calories for the week. When looked at daily it works out to 3,266. Not far off my number from last week which I calculated at 3,068.

    I suspect I am actually more active than the sedentary that I have MFP set at, but I have decided to leave it at sedentary and continue to manually input my calorie goals based on my own calculations. It seems like the more accurate way to determine your calorie goal. They key is that you have to be on point with your food diary logging.

    I am actually going to increase my calorie goal to 2,400 this week as I want to get closer to a 1lb per week weight loss. I know that probably isn't enough, but I want to also slowly work myself up to maintenance and then beyond with bulk.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,174 Member
    edited March 2018
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    taziarj wrote: »
    So this week I increased my goal in MFP to the 2,325 and stuck pretty close to that averaging 2316 over the past 7 days. I did underestimate my TDEE a little bit because I was worried about the one +5,000 calorie outlier day in that past average. It seems that wasn't an outlier after all. This week I lost 1.9lbs. The 1.9lbs is about a 6650 calorie deficit over the week which is 950 per day. If I add the 6,650 and the 16,212 calories that I consumed this week, I come out to 22,862 total TDEE calories for the week. When looked at daily it works out to 3,266. Not far off my number from last week which I calculated at 3,068.

    I suspect I am actually more active than the sedentary that I have MFP set at, but I have decided to leave it at sedentary and continue to manually input my calorie goals based on my own calculations. It seems like the more accurate way to determine your calorie goal. They key is that you have to be on point with your food diary logging.

    I am actually going to increase my calorie goal to 2,400 this week as I want to get closer to a 1lb per week weight loss. I know that probably isn't enough, but I want to also slowly work myself up to maintenance and then beyond with bulk.

    Of course it's enough. Slow and steady is healthy and sustainable, especially if you don't have a big bunch to lose. Within 10 or so pounds from goal, 0.5/week is even better.

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