Time to revive this group
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Beowolf95
Posts: 42 Member
I would like to see this group come back to life. I have read quite a few of the old discussions and it seems that a lot of good information was shared on here at one time. Been an on again off again user of MFP for several years, but have made the commitment to take it to the next level. Would be nice to have some real discussions without too much sappy, motivational hooplah.
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I'm still here. Had a knee replacement operation late last year and stopped my daily solo postings here.
Knee is back in working condition so bring it on.0 -
That's good to hear!0
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So, what real discussions did you have in mind?
Not much into sports myself, but I have started blacksmithing as a hobby.
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I'm a huge Forged in Fire fan. She thinks that show is incredibly boring and asks how can I watch it. I told her to watch these guys take a hunk of metal and do what they do with it is awesome. And way better than any Housewives show! I told my wife I was going to put a forge in the garage and she shot that down in a hurry!0
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I've seen clips from FiF but never seen a full episode.
Keep in mind FiF is an entertainment show, not a how to. Lot of stuff goes on behind the scenes that are just not TV worthy. Other stuff that is very dramatic, is not good blacksmithing.
Lot of guys use propane forges in the garage with no issues, keeping the door open while it is going. Others roll everything out onto the driveway when they forge and then back into the garage when they're done.
Mine is a solid fuel forge, will burn charcoal, coal, or dry whole feed corn. Currently I prefer the corn as it is cheaper and burns slightly cooler than coal so less chance of burning the steel.0 -
True. It's interesting and entertaining though. When i see looking out the posts in this group one of the things you guys did was weeklies. I understand the weight part, but what were the other numbers? Ems like folks were going strong then everything just died off.
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And it was monthlies, not weeklies.0
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Yeah, guys come and guys go.
While I'm fairly quiet in person, I tend to ramble on in posts. I've spliced together a couple of posts I've made to other groups explaining my process. Apologies in advance for a long rambling post.
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I like the Monthly updates and still do them on other groups. I'm kind of a numbers geek and I noticed something early on about counting calories. It's all guesswork… and by that I mean we don’t really KNOW how many calories are in the foods we actually eat nor how many calories we actually burn doing activities. We can look up those numbers in some database somebody, somewhere, put together. We can weigh the foods we eat and wear activity trackers to try and get better guesstimates of calories in versus calories out, but it is still nothing but the purest guesswork. Which is why we can do everything "right" and still not lose the weight we want.
So I came up with a method to "fix" it.
The one tool I have that isn't guesswork is the bathroom scale. So I started there. Sure, there are issues with the scale bouncing around from day to day, even hour to hour, but those are not coming from the scale. No. Most scale have acceptable accuracy. The issues from weighing ourselves comes from our own bodies.
We are ninety some percent water. Eat too much salty foods and our bodies retain water and our weight jump up. Workout too long without hydrating and our bodies dry out and our weight drops like a rock. The real useful information is hidden by static caused by... the water variable.
So how can we filter out the static to get to the usable information from the only source that isn’t guesswork?
The answer is, we can trend our daily weight to remove the water variable.
A good book to read on this subject is The Hacker's Diet by John Walker (You can find it free online at http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/ ) with many good tips for weight management.
The True Weight trend uses a sophisticated moving average called an Exponentially Smoothed Moving Average. (This is discussed in depth in the book I referenced in the opening of this thread under the chapter 'Signal and Noise'.) This type of weighted moving average gives the newest day's number more weight to effect the trend than the previous day's. And each day after that even less. But a data point never drops out of the equation, it just fades away with time.
The trend equation used in this challenge is:
cT=pT+((cW-pT)/tF)
Where:
cT = current Trend weight
pT = previous Trend weight
cW = current Weight
tF = trend Factor
First time, current weight is entered as current trend.
The trend Factor (currently set at 7.1) works like a radio receiver gain knob. The higher the factor, the lower the noise but the trade-off is it takes longer for the algorithm to find your True Weight. The lower the factor, the quicker it finds your True Weight but it also lets more static from the water variable through.
The book mentioned above started with a trend factor of 10 which produced a nice stable True Weight but one that took too long to adjust to my weight loss (although it may work better for maintainers). 5 was quick to respond to weight changes but was too noisy, always bouncing up and down. I like 7.1 as a nice compromise. This trend factor will not change during this challenge.
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Now I have something concrete I can work with. Time to take a look at the guesstimation errors.
I'm going to use some of my historic numbers as an example. Here are my TDEE, Intake and Deficits (all guesstimates) for a two week period. Next to it are my scale weights and True Weights.
Time for some math!
My guesstimated Deficit for those two weeks sum to 8,551 calories, or 611 cals/day.
By dividing the sum by 3,500 cals/lb we can calculate a guesstimated weight loss.
8,551/3,500 = 2.4 lbs Guesstimated Weight Loss.
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Now let's check that guesstimation with our actual True Weight Loss for the same period.
200.9 - 199.1 = 1.8 lbs.
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0.6 lbs LESS than I was expecting in just two weeks. That's about one pound a month LESS than MFP's said I would be losing.
So, what to do?
The answer is easy enough as we already have everything we need to "fix" the problem.
The problem is not in MFP's guideline nor in how we are following them. The problem is in the guesses of our TDEE, or our guesses of our Intake, or both. And it truly doesn't matter which.
We'll simply calculate a daily Adjustment factor.
Going back to the math, 0.6 lbs multiply by 3,500 cals/lb is 2,251 calories, divide by 14 days gives 322 cals/day.
My gIntake is low by 322 cals per day, or my gTDEE is high by 322 cals per day, or some combination of both is off.
Doesn't matter. All I have to do is add an item to my diary called "Adjustment" (it is in the database), edit the servings to give me 300 calories, and continue to add it everyday.
(ETA: I've added a new Adjustment item to MFP;s database where 1 serving is 100 calories. Makes the calculation easier to figure the number of servings than the one in the above image.)
I do this in my first meal of the day, as it is pretty much the same thing everyday, and I simply copy everything from one day to the next. First meal works for me so I see my "adjusted" Net the rest of the day. No worries. I don't need to change any other MFP setting (and then have to remember to 'fix' them if any other setting change). Just keep adding my Adjustment to my first meal of the day.0 -
So, I started reading this book, and while it contains pretty much a basic truth, calories in calories out, I really like the no nonsense approach he uses. Plain, basic terminology and straight forward. It really makes you look at weight loss and management in a different, and what I think is a more realistic, way. Thanks for the suggestion!1
