What do you think?

2

Replies

  • beatthebinge3464
    beatthebinge3464 Posts: 25 Member
    MFP says I should lose weight eating and exercising this way, but will I really?

    According to what I understand based on your various posts, it looks like you calculate that you are burning about 2,850 calories in a day including your BMR and exercise calories. On this particular day, you ate about 2,725 calories. That is about a 125 calorie deficit. If these are typical days and your methods for calculating your BMR, exercise calories burned, and calories consumed are all pretty precise, you will have a 875 calorie deficit for the week. Based on the idea of it taking a 3,500 calorie deficit to lose a pound of fat, you would be projected to have a loss of .25 pound.

    Whether or not you really lose that depends on the accuracy of the numbers you are inputting. You'll have to ignore MFP's projections, though, as you are not using their formula correctly. Its calculations will be based on you burning an additional 1300 calories through exercise, as you are entering your BMR as exercise.

    But if I am netting 125 , thats way under 1200 calories ( the typical calorie intake for weight loss)
  • GottaBurnEmAll
    GottaBurnEmAll Posts: 7,722 Member
    MFP says I should lose weight eating and exercising this way, but will I really?

    According to what I understand based on your various posts, it looks like you calculate that you are burning about 2,850 calories in a day including your BMR and exercise calories. On this particular day, you ate about 2,725 calories. That is about a 125 calorie deficit. If these are typical days and your methods for calculating your BMR, exercise calories burned, and calories consumed are all pretty precise, you will have a 875 calorie deficit for the week. Based on the idea of it taking a 3,500 calorie deficit to lose a pound of fat, you would be projected to have a loss of .25 pound.

    Whether or not you really lose that depends on the accuracy of the numbers you are inputting. You'll have to ignore MFP's projections, though, as you are not using their formula correctly. Its calculations will be based on you burning an additional 1300 calories through exercise, as you are entering your BMR as exercise.

    But if I am netting 125 , thats way under 1200 calories ( the typical calorie intake for weight loss)

    You're using a sort of hybrid TDEE method, so you wouldn't be talking about net calories then.

  • PickledBeets8
    PickledBeets8 Posts: 13 Member

    But if I am netting 125 , thats way under 1200 calories ( the typical calorie intake for weight loss)

    You are misunderstanding how this works.

    1200 calories is the minimum calorie intake for women, usually geared toward petite sedentary females who don't have a lot to lose. Such an individual might burn about 1700 calories per day when BMR and activity are combined. That would give this person a daily deficit of 500 calories, which would equate to a weekly deficit of 3500 calories and a projected weekly weight loss of 1 pound of fat.

    Your daily burn is very close to your daily intake, which results in a very small daily deficit. Since you are already at a healthy weight, going for a small deficit is appropriate. It also means that you need to measure/weigh all that you consume very precisely and make sure that your estimated calorie burn from exercise is very accurate, as you have very little room for error.

  • Psychgrrl
    Psychgrrl Posts: 3,177 Member
    I didnt want different approaches , I just wanted to know if my approach would work

    I don’t think you will lose weight this way, since your MFP calorie goal includes BMR and you’re adding it in again and therefore “double dipping.”

    Your calorie burns outside of that, for exercise, are very high for someone with your current height, weight, and gender as some have already commented. How are you calculating those? Your 3000 calories a day doesn’t seem to be setting you up to lose weigh, especially only 20 pounds.
  • SCoil123
    SCoil123 Posts: 2,111 Member
    How many calories do you estimate that you burn when you run 5k?
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,242 Member
    In your method as described, the first number is not relevant to anything at all.

    The second is what you have eaten and logged

    The third is what you have burned for the day from exercise plus being alive (btw you need to multiply BMR by an activity factor to accounting stuff that burns more than BMR but is not formally recorded exercise)

    To lose weight the second number has to be smaller than the third!!

    The fourth is again not relevant to you.

  • collectingblues
    collectingblues Posts: 2,541 Member
    teranga79 wrote: »
    This may well be the most confusing post I've ever read on here (and I read a lot of them!) Fwiw, if I'm understanding the OP correctly, I predict a pretty rapid weight gain as those numbers are just ridiculous.

    That's what I was thinking. If the OP is eating 3000 calories worth, but only burning 2800 or so... it's not going to be rapid weight gain, but there's going to be weight gain.

    And, it's hard to say whether that's actually a 2800-calorie burn. They say they run and cycle, but not how much.
  • beatthebinge3464
    beatthebinge3464 Posts: 25 Member
    I use a Garmin Forerunner 235 for HR tracking and calorie burn
  • jjpptt2
    jjpptt2 Posts: 5,650 Member
    Lets see; when MFP completes my day it completes it off of my info entered. So, its taking into account the 3000 calories I have consumed and the 2800 calories I have burned through exercise and bmr...

    Taking those numbers at face value... no that will not lead to weight loss.
  • jjpptt2
    jjpptt2 Posts: 5,650 Member
    OP's approach is fine (her numbers may not be, but her approach is fine). She's basically doing TDEE, just not explaining it very well.
  • collectingblues
    collectingblues Posts: 2,541 Member
    Well, I am down 5.2 pounds

    That's great. This is water weight. Think it through. You're weighing weekly. To lose 5.2 lbs of fat in a week, you'd have to create a deficit of 2600 calories per day. You're eating 3000 calories a day so you'd have to burn 5600 calories every single day. Does that sound right to you?

    This. Unless the deficit is that great -- which we know by it isn't, at least based on what the OP said -- it's mostly water.

    When you see losses that great, you need to step back and do the math. Did you have a deficit of 2600 calories a day? If you didn't, you didn't lose 5.2 pounds of fat.