Can I check I'm doing this right?

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sarahcandlin9118
sarahcandlin9118 Posts: 9 Member
in Getting Started
Hi there
I have worked out that (at rest) my BMR is 1600 calories, I'm 5ft 8 and overweight.
I am eating the minimum of this and then I use my fitbit to track my activity throughout the day.
I eat a little of the extra activity calories back.
Is this the correct way of doing this?

Thanks in advance.

Replies

  • NovusDies
    NovusDies Posts: 8,940 Member
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    sarahcandlin9118 wrote: »
    Hi there
    I have worked out that (at rest) my BMR is 1600 calories, I'm 5ft 8 and overweight.
    I am eating the minimum of this and then I use my fitbit to track my activity throughout the day.
    I eat a little of the extra activity calories back.
    Is this the correct way of doing this?

    Thanks in advance.

    It might be but if you are new you are better off using MFP the way it was designed and let it give you a calorie goal based on your BMR and non exercise activity and then eat back a portion of your exercise calories (50 percent) until you decide if you need to be eating more or less of them.

    I suggest going through the guided set-up. If you are overweight and not obese you should select to lose no more than 1 pound per week.

    If you need to go the TDEE route for some reason let us know and we can help you check it.
  • Nony_Mouse
    Nony_Mouse Posts: 5,646 Member
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    drlaithali84 wrote: »
    You can reduce calories intake to reduce weight, increase calories burn or both.But you should never starving because calories burning will stop.

    What the what?? Calorie burning only stops when your dead (though, that is obviously the end result of starving).
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 13,763 Member
    edited January 2020
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    @NovusDies I think you missed that the "exercise" calories in question are from her Fitbit device.

    MFP integration works such that these "exercise" calories are essentially a TDEE adjustment to the TDEE extrapolated by the device based on the inputs it has collected.

    As such the 50% could be bang on or totally off depending on how big the TDEE error is, and how big the adjustment!

    Example: 3000 TDEE, 5% error, 150 Cal. Adjustment is 750 from sedentary. Eat-back should be 80% of adjustment. Adjustment is 250 from active. Eat back should be 40%. Adjustment is 0 from very active... adjustment should be.... leaving 150 on the table! :open_mouth:

    This, of course, would be adjusting from MFP's settings... which re-reading the OP is not what is happening here as I totally nonchalantly change tack mid-stream pretending I intended to all along! :blush:

    So the OP's BMR is 1600 and they won't eat below that. This is a sensible pre-caution even when sedentary, because MFP's sedentary is defined as 1.25 x BMR.

    So eating at BMR is already a 20% deficit.

    If I were doing what the OP is doing (which I am and did--except for the detail where the explicit BMR is not that relevant), I would be going with a MAXIMUM 25% deficit from the final daily number on my Fitbit if I had fat reserves such that I would be correctly classified as obese. And a MAXIMUM 20% deficit from my TDEE number (the final daily number from Fitbit) if I had fat reserves such that I would be correctly classified as overweight or normal weight.

    The assumptions there are correct logging of food using weights and correct detections by Fitbit and the person closely matching the means of the equations used by all the predictive models.

    In practice, you eat at that level for several weeks. If male you probably have enough data to start correcting based on your own weight trend (if using fitbit you may want to check out trendweight.com as an adjunct to MFP for your weight trend, happy scale is used by many iphone users, and libra by many android users, and I am sure there are others including peoples' own spreadsheets) after about 3 weeks or so. If female and subject to hormonal water retention during the month, you may want to wait 4 to 6 weeks so that you can take into account such retention.

    At that point you compare your actual weight trend change in lbs * 3500 Cal per lb of change to your expected change based on your logging and your Fitbit TDEE, and arrive at a % error that you can apply to your eating moving forward.

    Activities not being static you just keep logging and correcting till you get to where you want to be :smile:

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