More calories when sick?

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  • sdavis484
    sdavis484 Posts: 160 Member
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    xxzenabxx wrote: »
    sdavis484 wrote: »
    cwolfman13 wrote: »
    sdavis484 wrote: »
    Humans reducing calories by 15% got 2 years - "The study found that calorie restriction decreased systemic oxidative stress, which has been tied to age-related neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, as well as cancer, diabetes, and others."

    This is important to me. Reducing Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases as well as cancer and diabetes....VERY important but of course, YMMV. In 2001 I had a severe traumatic brain injury and was in a coma for 2 weeks. Subsequently, I was diagnosed with Narcolepsy. My resting heart rate is very slow, it feels like my entire body is slowed bc I'm constantly tired. I'm hypothyroid. I'm short, 5'3. Narcolepsy is thought to slow metabolism, which makes me twice as likely to be obese. Besides being more likely to be obese, having such a severe traumatic brain injury makes me much more likely to develop neurological diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. Additionally, I had gestational diabetes in 2 of my 3 pregnancies which puts me at a much increased risk of developing diabetes someday.

    Reducing your calories by 15%-20% of TDEE is what is typically recommended for safe and healthy weight loss. If you consistently stayed at a 15% deficit from TDEE, you would ultimately wither away and die...so I think there needs to be some context there.

    Let's also say your TDEE is a mere 1800 calories which would be about average for a sedentary female but unlikely for someone very overweight or obese...a 15% cut would be 270 calories giving you a target of 1,530 calories. A 20% cut would be a 360 calorie reduction which would give you a target of 1,440 calories. This is why people are questioning whether 1200 is really appropriate...namely it is the lowest default for a women selecting sedentary on MFP and 1.5-2 Lbs per week weight loss target which is a pretty aggressive target. Nobody is saying 1200 calories is wrong in all instances, but it is often overly aggressive and has you starting at the floor of what is considered to be minimum calories for a sedentary female not under medical supervision. A lot of the responses you are getting are from people who've had a lot of success and have a lot of experience using MFP.

    Apparently you did not read the post about my health. My metabolism is already low. My TDEE is not an average TDEE

    So I’m 5’ 4” F and 156lbs and with PCOS. Apparently I had a slow metabolism but turns out I was wrong! In 2018 I dieted with 1500 calories and lose my sanity. My hair fell out, my muscles hurt, joint pain, constipation, mood swings, got anemic (again) just because of undereating. And I felt fine in the first few months. The reason why I went so low in calories was because I assumed that with PCOS I HAD TO eat between 1200-1500 calories. Now after many months of figuring out my TDEE, through trial and error, I found out it’s around 2350/2450 depending on my activity levels. That’s 500 more than my predicted TDEE of 1900/2000. Undereating is no joke. But you seem like you know what your doing right?

    No, I don't know what I'm doing just like you when you started your journey. But thanks to the kind, helpful, supportive advice that I've received, I know a lot more now!
  • sdavis484
    sdavis484 Posts: 160 Member
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    Yes, my apologies as I did notice it later.
  • Danp
    Danp Posts: 1,561 Member
    edited February 2020
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    sdavis484 wrote: »
    Thank you for all your help everyone! I appreciate it so much!! I have one more pressing question. Every Sunday, my family and my sister's family go to my mom's house for a big home cooked dinner and dessert. It's such a fun tradition! The meals are cooked from scratch and would be too difficult to track but only losing one pound a week, I could blow my weight loss very easily. Can I save calories during the week? How much would you recommend? One pound doesn't have a lot of wiggle room and feels restricted.

    I just wanted to offer some reassurance with regards to the bold statement above.

    Assuming you stick more or less to your calorie target the rest of the week in order for this meal to blow your weight loss you'd need to eat 3500 excess calories during that meal. This would need to be 3500 calories above and beyond the normal amount of calories you would have eaten. As you can imagine that's no mean feat!

    So yes, you can bank calories throughout the week in order to maintain your rate of loss. Alternatively you can stick to your calorie targets throughout the week and just simply indulge and enjoy the meal. Even if you go over your calorie target by, lets say 350cals because of this meal it will only have a minimal impact on your progress. We're talking about your weight loss slowing at a rate of about 4lbs or 5lbs over the course of the entire year. Not a lot in the grand scheme of things!
  • mgalsf12
    mgalsf12 Posts: 350 Member
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    aokoye wrote: »
    mgalsf12 wrote: »
    I'm just getting over the flu. I drank tea and water for several days, no food, I just couldn't keep anything down. So should we consume more calories when we're sick? I suppose it depends on what you are sick with.

    Note, just because you can't get anything other than water and tea down doesn't mean that you shouldn't a. try or b. be concerned. I ended up in the ER twice during one rather epic UTI turned kidney infection because I couldn't keep down water, let alone food. Needless to say, in addition to the IV fluids (and antibiotics via IV), I was also given an antiemetic while there and a script for them to pick up after I left. Yes part of that was that I needed to be able to drink water, but also becuase I needed to be able to eat at least a minimal amount of food.

    I was able to keep down water and tea...I kept hydrated and just slept for days. Sorry you ended up in ER.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,055 Member
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    sdavis484 wrote: »
    WinoGelato wrote: »
    sdavis484 wrote: »
    Duly noted. My base cals are set to 1200 but I eat back approx half my "exercise" cals (even when I don't exercise, Fitbit counts steps/increased in hr as exercise)

    FitBit is an activity tracker, and for many of us, a darned accurate one. It estimates your total calories burned from all activity, NEAT and purposeful exercise alike. This is an estimate of your TDEE and if you have it synced with MFP and are seeing large adjustments, it’s an indication that you are more active and burning more calories than the calculations that MFP derived from your inputs would indicate.

    I've found that my Fitbit tends to estimate my cardio lower (seemingly more accurately?) than my Polar chest strap? Everyone says the chest strap is more accurate but I'm not so sure anymore. Anyone have this experience? Maybe I should make this it's own discussion lol

    I don't know if you've made this a separate discussion. If you have, and I didn't see it/respond/realize that, I apologize for coming back to it here.

    I think you're conflating 2 separate ideas here.

    People say that a chest strap is a more accurate way of capturing heart rate. That's because there can be missed beats with a wrist monitor for a variety of reasons, from arm flexing during exercise that causes disconnects, to dark skin tones that don't work as well with the wrist-based optical sensor. The chest belt monitors heart rate more directly, so it's less likely to have those problems. That difference is an issue of how reliable the wrist vs. chest sensor is.

    The accuracy of calorie estimates is really a separate issue. Heart rate is a reasonable (though still imperfect) correlate of exercise intensity for some activities (like moderate steady-state cardio with relatively little strength component to it) and a terrible one for others (like strength training or high intensity intervals).

    The old-school Polar heart rate monitors measured heart rate only, and used that (plus some statistical data about average people, and some algorithms) to estimate calories.

    Modern fitness trackers, depending on the specific model in use, can be measuring lots of things: Arm movements, altitude changes, heart rate, GPS-based coordinates when outdoors, and more. They still rely on statistical data about average people to make assumptions, and they still use algorithms to estimate calories based on the measurments they have.

    There are some limitations to using heart rate to estimate calories, one of which I mentioned above. Others are that using "average people" statistics means that the estimates are likely to be less accurate for people who are much fitter than the studied average people, or much less fit; and that most people don't know their true maximum heart rate, so the devices usually use age estimates, which can be very wrong for a large fraction of people (fit or unfit - it's mostly genetic). That limits the accuracy of the calorie estimates based on heart rate, even beyond the basic problem of heart rate not correlating all that well with all-forms calorie burn in the first place.

    The modern tracker devices, with more data than just heart rate, have the theoretical potential to make better calorie estimates. However, whether they accomplish that improvement or don't is largely a function of the assumptions and algorithms programmed into the devices. Those tend to be proprietary, so the companies don't reveal them. All we can do is read scientific review of the accuracy (as compared with better calorie-consumption measurement by specialized lab-based equipment), or learn from our own and others' experiences (which is very subject to inaccurate inferences). It seems extremely likely that they're more accurate for some exercise types than others, and more accurate for some people than others.

    Overall, I'd expect a multi-measurement device (like a Fitbit using heart rate plus other measurements) to be slightly more likely to be accurate than a heart-rate-only device, but that's a pretty tentative conclusion. And it's separate from the question of whether the heart rate data is accurately gathered in the first place (the sensor question).
  • sdavis484
    sdavis484 Posts: 160 Member
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    Thank you for that enlightening reply! That was a lot of information you spent time typing out and I appreciate it!!

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