Eating too much on my off-days?

margussytt

I'm 31-years old, 191cm/6'3 and I weigh 94kg/207lbs. My current fat % is about 20-22%. My main goal is to loose fat and gain muscle. But to be honest, what I struggle the most with is understanding my daily caloric intake in order to lose fat but gain muscle.

My Apple Watch is telling me that on the days I lift weights I burn around 3900 cal, out of which 700-800 cal is strength training (1h of weight lifting, no cardio). On off-days I burn around 3100-3200 cal. Yet what got me confused was one particular experiment. I started eating around 3500 cal of high quality food (a lot of veggies, meat, some fruit, etc.) every day. My goal was to be in a slight caloric deficit. I ate around 290g of protein a day and noticed that I'm gaining muscle mass with 3-4 times a week weight lifting. But the problem was that I visually gained more fat as well.

So, I'm thinking my main problem is either that I'm eating too much on my off days, thus I need to lower calories during my off days. Or, my Apple Watch is overestimating my actual calorie burn and I'm in caloric surplus during my gym days as well. Online EETD calculators aren't helping a lot, hence I'm curious if anyone has some advice.

moonangel12

When you put all your info into MFP, what caloric info does it give you? How do you have your activity set based on day to day activity (not including exercise)? Are you accurately weighing and measuring your food? A lot of people on MFP eat back half of their exercise calories due to overestimates by the app and fitness watches.

tony56pr

At 6-3 and 207 pounds, I dont think your bf% is correct. But even if it is, I wouldn't have off days. 7 days a week with a small (500 calories) weekly deficit is most i would go. Do 12 week blocks at a time, between deficit and maintenance and take your time. To keep from burning up more muscle than needed.

How much lifting experience do you have? Are you a newbie or have you been lifting for years? Because I'm sorry very unlikely that you will build muscle and lose fat at same time unless you are a newbie.

Finally, how much sodium do you eat? Water weight can fluctuate and sodium is a big cause, so even if scale goes up, may not be actual weight gain.

Dont over estimate your calorie burn, see a few people here who report 1100 calories burned for 60 minute gym workout, I've done 3 hour work outs and didnt like saying I burned that much. First thing is set mfp with your weight etc at beginning of week and say you want maintenance/maintain. And log everything for a week, this means weighing your food and not just guessing. For a week try to eat what it says and log exercise too (just use the lower end of calorie burned, not extreme but not 500 for 15 min walk). Pay attention to your sodium intake and then at end of week weigh yourself and see. Do this for a few weeks. If you end up losing weight then increase what you are burning, if you stay the same then you know estimate should be close, and finally if you gained you know 1) you aren't working as hard as you think or 2) need to decrease daily calories.

errollmaclean

You really need to figure out your maintenance calories first, then you can adjust up or down as needed.

Your Apple watch estimates seem incredibly high. I would ignore them and watch what your weight does on the scale, that is the ultimate arbiter of your calorie intake. If your weight is going up, your estimates and or logging is inaccurate.

Start with a digital food scale to make sure you're eating what you think your eating. Then watch what your weight does. If it's going up too fast, you're eating too much. Going down, you're eating under maintenance for your activity level.

Duck_Puddle

How are you determining that you gained muscle?

It’s almost impossible to build muscle while also losing fat.

Losing fat means to be consuming fewer calories than your body burns - which means your body will need to break down parts of itself in order to make up the energy difference (that’s when we burn fat - sort of).

Building muscle requires eating more calories than your body burns-and also doing progressive resistance training to encourage the body to use those extra calories to build muscle (rather than store as fat).

There’s not really a circumstance where you can do both at the same time.

You can gain strength while losing fat (recruiting more muscle fibers, etc). But you can’t really gain actual muscle mass.

I would suggest you spend some time (4 weeks or so) weighing and logging all your food intake, and monitoring your change in weight and figure out what your TDEE is.

Granted, I’m a 5’4” woman who weighs 160 pounds, but I burn about 150 calories in an hour of weightlifting. I would expect your numbers to be higher than mine-but 700-800 seems....very (very) high.

MikePTY

I think the issue is that you are eating at a surplus. I am highly skeptical of your apple watch burns. It is extremely unlikely you burn 700-800 calories an hour just weight lifting. It is likely less than half that.

I plugged your stats into a TDEE calculator, and chose moderately active as your exercise level, and it gave me maintenence calories of 3070. So that means at 3500, you would be in a surplus of almost a pound a week. It's easy to imagine you could gain both fat and muscle eating st that level.

margussytt

I'm skeptical as well of my Apple Watch data. For instance, a few days ago I had a very sedentary day in the office and later I went to the gym. Lifted weights only for 20-minutes and burned a total of 223 calories + 12-minutes of cardio and burned a total of 181 calories. By the end of the day, my Apple Watch totaled 3 302 calories burned. That seems a bit too much.

In fact, I chanced Fitbit for Apple Watch because I thought it provided me unrealistic data. But the same numbers continued on Apple Watch. I have also considered that maybe my metabolic rate actually is higher than normal because I sweat A LOT during my weight lifting sessions and my heart rate is relatively high. For example, one of the recent sessions I burned 819 calories within 55-minutes and my average heart rate was 147bpm.

AnnPT77

I think what you're seeing is an over-report of calorie burn for weight training, based on your high heart rate. If the Apple watch is using heart rate to estimate weight training calories in that scenario, it's almost certainly wrong. Heart rate is a pretty terrible estimator of weight training calories, and that would be even more true if your HR runs high.

This is a good write-up on the subject (the date is a few years back, the content is still true):

https://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/Azdak/view/hrms-cannot-count-calories-during-strength-training-17698