Is there Proof?

jakea1963

Since the first of the year I am down 13% of body weight. I lost the first 10 with smaller portions with a focus on eliminating sugar and refined carbs. Took me a month and a half.

In the last month and half I have dropped 20 with IF and very few refined carbs.

So at this point all the easy weight to lose is gone. The water weight is long good. I have not gone up and down. I have had a few days that I stayed the same but no stalls.

Last week I was shocked. I dropped 4lbs. But here is the funny thing. I avg a 20 hr fast each day but I ate at no more than 100 calorie deficit. I have done min workouts in this time. Once a week with training focusing on stretching and MMA drills.

So my question is - if it CICO than how at this late date in the cut did I lose 4 lbs with almost no deficit??? And no water weight to lose and not having been stalled???

So it got me looking. What proof is there that a 3500 calories deficit leads to a one pound loss??? Once I looked I was shocked to find out that there much disagreement that one pound = 3500 calories.

For years I have found that 3500 calorie deficit week after week produced min results for me. I had to go much lower. But now to drop with almost no deficit really has messed me up.

I have no faith in the meaningfulness of a “calorie” other than its a representation of something that matters but in and of itself it does not tell the whole story.

Sorry for the long post but I am truly am interested in others opinions. Not looking for nasty debate. Just true personal opinions. Thanks.

kimny72

Everybody can have water weight swings, not just people who first go low carb. Your body retains and then releases water, sometimes as much as 5 lbs or more for all sorts of perfectly natural and normal reasons. There is also digestive fluctuations, sometimes you have more partially digested food moving through you, sometimes less.

There is all sorts of stuff in your body other than fat, and it's all a part of your weight.

It wouldn't surprise me if you were to gain some or all of those 4 lbs back over the next week or two.

magnusthenerd

jakea1963 wrote: »

So my question is - if it CICO than how at this late date in the cut did I lose 4 lbs with almost no deficit??? And no water weight to lose and not having been stalled???

"If the butler did it, how can I be the murderer since I'm not the butler?"
The simple answer is you probably have an inaccurate assumption. Your ability to know your actual deficit and what water weight you have available is pretty limited. Frankly, the idea that anyone can claim to not have water weight they could lose while they're alive and made of 60-70% water seems an odd one to me.

Given your comments about not losing a pound a week when you thought you had a 3500 calorie deficit, and now having a large loss even though you didn't stall sounds like water shifts. Sometimes when fat cells lose their fatty acids, the glcyerol remains and holds water. Not sure why, it might be part of the cell remodeling to keep structure until the cell can reduce the cell membrane size, but that's just my own just-so storytelling. You may have had some of that going on and your body finally released the waters.
Or perhaps you had a change in sodium or other salt intake across your diet.

There's a lot of possibilities if one relaxes the assumptions instead of trying to insist there has to be a contradiction.

kgeyser

My best guess would be two possibilities. One, the smaller deficit and reduced exercise gave your body a break from the dieting that you have been doing for months. I would see significant drops during rest weeks where it wouldn't make sense since I wasn't carrying a larger deficit through activity. It was almost as though my body was relaxed enough to drop the weight.

Two, the whoosh idea stated above. Here's the article that talks about it: https://bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/of-whooshes-and-squishy-fat.html/

Remoth

It is well known that fat contains about 9 calories per gram. Whether you eat it or burn it. Just like how carbs and protein have around 4 calories per gram. If you multiply 454 grams (one pound) by 9. You get around 4000 calories. Now your fat cells dont totally dissapear, they just shrink. So the structural parts of the cell remain which include proteins and such. This makes up for the 500 calorie increase that is in this number. Subtract that from the 4000 and you get 3500. Science.

Note that these numbers are generalizations. They may alter a little. They are meant to be guidelines that work very well. Whatever fluctuations you saw in a dramatic exercise routine change and diet change was mostly water weight.

riffraff2112

From everything I read, 3500cal is about as good as an estimate to a lb of weight loss as there is. The important thing is to burn more than you eat in a given time frame. By tracking accurately you can tweak this number so that it works for you, kind of irrelevant what everyone else's number is.
From a pacing perspective, it is safe and best to lose about 1lb a week (for most people), so a good starting point is to reduce 500 cals a day.

Unfortunately we do not live in a lab, and we are going to have to use estimations for many things (cardio sessions, daily expenditure, 'actual' calories in food). The 500 cal a day rule works pretty darn well for people trying to lose 1 lb a week but is it exactly 3500 cal per precisely one pound??? Probably not

snickerscharlie

You will eventually be the weight you deserve to be. Just not perhaps at the time you think you deserve it.

missysippy930

kimny72 wrote: »

It wouldn't surprise me if you were to gain some or all of those 4 lbs back over the next week or two.

I agree with this. And it may happen even if you eat at a deficit during this time.

PAV8888

Poof goes the proof!

SummerSkier

I think it's a legitimate question and one to think about. There are just way too many variables in each individual's weight journey to be absolutely certain. And I think CICO works, but I agree that the 3500 # could also be variable. I mean as a petite woman my TDEE is certainly not going to be the same as a 6 ft male, so why would the 3500 # be the same for both of us too?

Good point to ponder but of course we could drive ourselves crazy with the math of it all too.

L1zardQueen

PAV8888 wrote: »

Poof goes the proof!

Pudding!

jakea1963

Thanks everyone. Makes me happy that there can be a good civil discussion on here sometimes. I appreciate all the opinions. However I truly hope not to give any back. I would like to drop another 20 but not my body will allow me to get that low. Or I should say that I am not sure I am willing to do what it would take.
Thanks again.

pierinifitness

Time will tell.

One can fall into a false sense of precision that honestly is hard to achieve because of measuring error. Hopefully over the long haul, the net sum of these errors is zero.

I’ll tell you this based on my current journey, discipline, patience and perseverance wrapped with impeccable consistency will give you the results you want.

PAV8888

If you have been in a deficit for a very long time you should have a look at the re-feeds and diet breaks thread which is one of the stickies.... here it is... the first post gives you the gist of things quite effectively: https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10604863/of-refeeds-and-diet-breaks/p1

Story time:

During my second year of logging on MFP I lost 11.1 (weight trend according to trendweight.com) lbs

I logged an average deficit of 204 Cal a day, which using the 3500 Cal figure proved to be a deficit of only 106 Cal a day, for an error equal to just about 3.14% of my estimated TDEE

In early 2019 I still haven't found that 11.1lbs.

I am not missing them.

I couldn't care less that they ended up costing me 74,460 "2016 Calories", instead of the 38,850 Calories the equations "promised".

MelanieCN77

Water weight doesn't just go off at the beginning of someone starting to cut calories, it's always coming and going and we should all be glad of it! I'll drop fake pounds if I eat an exceptionally bland day as far as my usual food goes, because my body hasn't needed to keep any fluid to balance out the salt and whatever in the sassy snacks I had. It comes right back if I eat normally again, but isn't a gain in my weight any more than the lower scale number was a loss. It's why I see my abs in the morning when I'm dehydrated from sleeping but they disappear after breakfast for the most part. Come back, abs

JohnnytotheB

First off, great job on your very positive journey overall! Great job!

I have seen several posts from friends about how they have encountered very similar things. This has also happened to me! I weight lift and I know that when a routine becomes stale, you end up stalling out with weight & muscle growth. IMO, this is the same with all the other routines. You have to shake things up so the body does not get accustomed to the same thing over and over.

echmain3

While I was actively losing weight I would ignore up and down “spikes” and focus only on the long-term average.

I had my weight loss rate in MFP set at 1lb/week and lost 60 pounds in 60 weeks. Exactly as calculated.

But if you look at my graph week to week there are some pretty crazy swings.

I once lost 5 pounds over 5 days and gained 3 pounds in a single day even though I tracked calories exactly the whole time. I can’t explain those drastic changes but the average still worked out.

PAV8888

echmain3 wrote: »

While I was actively losing weight I would ignore up and down “spikes” and focus only on the long-term average.

I had my weight loss rate in MFP set at 1lb/week and lost 60 pounds in 60 weeks. Exactly as calculated.

But if you look at my graph week to week there are some pretty crazy swings.

I once lost 5 pounds over 5 days and gained 3 pounds in a single day even though I tracked calories exactly the whole time. I can’t explain those drastic changes but the average still worked out.

There is nothing to explain unless you really want to look into it in detail and re analyse your daily events hoping to understand water weight swings.

That's why so many of us use a weight trend app or web site to help us better discern our underlying weight trends.

johnslater461

echmain3

For every expert there’s an equal and opposite expert.

lalalacroix

I keep 2 spreadsheets along with my weight loss app, my calorie app, and several exercise apps. Recently I looked at all my data for this year which was for most of the year so far. I was curious if there was any data that was absolute (like calories, protein) that would show why my weight loss was exceptional for January and February and crappy for March.

Calories were actually all over the place. Some weeks I adhered to my 1500 calorie goal, some weeks I ate at around 1800 calories and some weeks were at maintenance. So that really didn't align with my losses at all. Actually when I had good adherance I didn't necessarily have a good loss that week or the week after. I also looked at protein levels, which varied between lower 70s to over 100 for weekly averages. Nothing there. Finally I checked out my exercise data. That didn't correlate at all to my good losses or slow losses. But I wasn't surprised there because I usually eat every single earned calorie.

Maybe I don't have enough data to come to any conclusions. But one thing I did realize is that I thought I had water weight masking a month of pretty crappy losses. And when 3 pounds fell off last week I realized it must have been true. (I'm premenopausal and hadn't had a period for 3 months and didn't know when it would happen. Period came, weight fell off.)

Looking at my data kinda drives me crazy because I very much want to see the patterns, but there just doesn't seem to be any. Except for one. The weeks that I ate at maintenance I didn't lose weight except for maybe .02 of a pound. I've had several maintenance weeks this year and never have losses, but that could also be masked by water gain and just having more food in digestive track.

If my maintenance calories have been correct, and who really knows actually?
I gain a lot of exercise calories which could be throwing off all of this data. Then my general deficit has been only on average 400-100 per day this year. I have lost 21 pounds this year which is over 1 pound per week. My deficit ≠ my losses.

Conclusion: I have no *kitten* clue whatsoever. Lol. But something is working right so I'm gonna keep on eating at a deficit.