TDEE calculators underestimating?

lilac12321

Has anyone found that online TDEE calculators underestimate their maintenance calories? If so, what is your height, weight, gender, activity level, maintenance calories according to online calculators, and maintenance calories in real life?

I'm 5'5, 125lb, female, and pretty active with weight lifting and running. Calculators estimate my maintenance to be 2100-2300ish. I eat that amount and am maintaining my weight... but I feel like I could (and would) easily eat more like 2500-3000 if I didn't count calories and listened to my body. Thoughts?

lorrpb

If you maintain at 2300 and started eating 2800, you’d gain about one pound per week, assuming you’re logging accurately. Experience is the best indicator of how much you need to eat to maintain, gain, or lose.

cmriverside

Yeah, all you can do is experiment. The online calculators are just a starting point.

I eat a full 500 calories per day more than any of the calculators tell me I should be able to eat, but I only found that out by meticulous logging.

Some people can intuitively figure it out. It's up to you, always.

L1zardQueen

How accurate is your calorie counting?

lilac12321

L1zardQueen wrote: »

How accurate is your calorie counting?

As accurate as it can be. I weigh and measure my food.

lilac12321

cmriverside wrote: »

Yeah, all you can do is experiment. The online calculators are just a starting point.

I eat a full 500 calories per day more than any of the calculators tell me I should be able to eat, but I only found that out by meticulous logging.

Some people can intuitively figure it out. It's up to you, always.

That’s good to know. Thank you for your reply!

L1zardQueen

lilac12321 wrote: »

L1zardQueen wrote: »

How accurate is your calorie counting?

As accurate as it can be. I weigh and measure my food.

Weigh is good. How do you measure? Cups and spoons? How do you calculate your calorie burn estimates?

lilac12321

lorrpb wrote: »

If you maintain at 2300 and started eating 2800, you’d gain about one pound per week, assuming you’re logging accurately. Experience is the best indicator of how much you need to eat to maintain, gain, or lose.

Thanks. You’re definitely right that personal experimentation with trial and error is the best way to know my own maintenance. I guess what makes it confusing is that in the past, I have maintained roughly the same weight on anywhere from 1500 to 2300 calories a day (at least, from what I can tell... I don’t have a scale to actually weight myself.. I just go by how I feel).

It seems the next logical step would be to try increasing my calories and see how my body responds. I’m just nervous (scared of gaining weight) and hoping for reassurance from others who have been in a similar boat.

PAV8888

I am picking at nits, i guess, but I am curious about the statement:

lilac12321 wrote: »

if I didn't count calories and listened to my body

Counting calories, for me, is literally there to double check on what "my body" is telling me.

Or rather, and to be more precise, counting calories is there to provide a "supervisory uber-hamster" to the chorus of "eat more good stuff" mind hamsters that are all lying when they swear up and down that the "body hamsters" have informed them them that they're all starving for more ice cream!

I mean, if my mind hamsters weren't 100% invested in playing "broken phone" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers, and if I was reliably willing to actually listen to my body hamsters (who dutifully report their true energy status) then I wouldn't need to invest in supervisory uber-hamsters--would I?

So the big question with your above statement is: is your body telling you you should be eating more?

The question of logging (of both calories in and out) has already been asked. Past that and into more zebra type hoof-beats...

First issue to tackle is that calculators are ESTIMATORS. By the nature of the estimates you are dealing with "best fit curves". Most people fit in there perfectly. Quite a few have estimates that are a little bit off. A very few people have a reality that makes the estimates quite far off.

Even if 1% of the people are very far off the estimates, if you take eight billion people, this would leave 80,000,000 with pretty sucky estimates. And if 0.01% people get supremely extremely sucky estimates, that's still eight hundred thousand people.

Are you likely to be one of them?

Would you undertake a medical procedure with a 99% success rate--and just a 1% risk of serious complications? And a measly 0.01% risk of death?

But you COULD be.

So the answer there is to compare your WEIGHT TREND over 4 to 6 weeks to what your logging indicates your weight should be doing. And to continue doing that while you slowly increase your average caloric intake.

Furthermore, the possibility DOES exist that you could be maintaining weight with fewer calories and still be able to establish a maintenance point where you would be eating more calories without "real/appreciable" weight gain.

The condition would be defined as you currently eating a number of calories that has resulted in some adaptive thermogenesis where both bodily process and activities have slowed down a bit.

By increasing calories you would, potentially, reverse that and bodily processes would resume at a higher level and, quite possibly, activities/exercise would increase and be more vigorous in actual fact.

We are talking here about things that to a large extent are part of NEAT. Fidgeting, flexing muscles while you sit, hoping from leg to leg, skipping and dancing around slightly increased core temperature as compared to what may be a lower than normal for you core temperature if AT has set in, slightly higher heart rate. And other things like that.

Is it likely that all this would amount to 500 Cal? I think that 500 Cal is a bit extreme for that. 500 Cal and the numbers you propose translate to a range of 16% to 23% of TDEE (400/2500, 700/3000). That would correspond to fairly substantial AT. Is that likely? Have you lost a lot of weight and done so by using a steep deficit. How much weight have you lost in recent memory? What sort of deficits did you apply? For how long?

lilac12321

PAV8888 - thanks for writing all of that out. I appreciate it. I’m going to go ahead and bump up my calories and see what happens. I’m excited to push the limits of my metabolism and see what that baby can do (: