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GWH1967

Hello,
I have been on a 2500cal food plan using the intermittent 16/8 window.
I have been strict in my following my 2500 and ONLY eating clean.
I have a job wherein I easily clock up 15000 steps.
I log all my food and timings via the app diary and I only weigh myself once a week.
I am frustrated because everytime I "Complete diary" at the end of the day the app says I'll be such and such a weight in 5wks time.
HOWEVER, I have weighed myself during the course of the last 2wks and my weight is UP by 2kilos.
WTF, I feel like it has all been a waste of time. The app is lying and if I am going to put weight on I might as well eat crap food.
Over it.

goal06082021

The "if every day were like today" thing is BS. There are so many factors at play that made today like today beyond what you ate and how much you moved, that the app cannot possibly account for. Literally all it is doing is this:

* Your calorie budget is 2500. Presumably you're aiming to lose 1lb per week, so that's a 500-calorie deficit off your TDEE.
* Suppose you eat exactly 2500 net calories today, so you burned exactly 500 more calories than you took in from food.
* 500 calories times 35 days is 17,500 calories.
* 17,500 calories divided by 3500 calories per pound of fat is 5 pounds.
* Therefore, if every day were like today, you would weigh [your last recorded weight minus 5 lbs] in 5 weeks.

In real life, though, you're a human person who has to eat and digest food, and retain water to repair your muscles after racking up those 15000 steps a day, and rehydrate after that water does its job and gets peed out. Trust the process. Two weeks is basically five minutes in weight-loss time, you've hardly been at this any time at all yet. If your mental health is up to it, you might try weighing yourself more often (daily?) and using an app like Libra or HappyScale to watch the trend over time. Day-to-day and even week-to-week fluctuations--especially if you do only weigh once a week--are nothing to be upset over, it's the overall trend over a month or two at a time that you should pay attention to.

Beverly2Hansen

Hi, I step 15,000- 20,000steps daily but it won't make me lose weight. If you add your walking as an exercise recalculate your start up activity level as sedentary because your activity level is how active you are minus what you log. I wasted 2 years thanks to not understanding that and had lots of stress. 2500 would be a maintenance calorie allowance for most guys working an active job like a warehouse. So with that I would drop your deficit to 1800 for 2 weeks and see what happens. At least recalculate your start up. If you're a lower weight now than when you started by over 10lbs you need to recalibrate how much you weigh on the deficit plan to.

Fflpnari

So looking at you food diary- it doesnt look like you are weighing every thing in grams. Where did you get 2500 calories from? how tall are you and what do you weigh?

corinasue1143

GWH1967 wrote: »

Hello,
I have been on a 2500cal food plan using the intermittent 16/8 window.
Why 2500?
Intermittent fasting is fine if it works for you but unnecessary if it is hard to do.

I have been strict in my following my 2500 and ONLY eating clean.
“Eating clean” is fine if it works for you but unnecessary if it is hard to do.

I have a job wherein I easily clock up 15000 steps.
That’s great!

I log all my food and timings via the app diary and I only weigh myself once a week.
Good! Logging all foods is important. Weighing once a week is fine if it works for you, but many people think you get a better picture with fluctuations showing less if you weigh daily at the same time and under the same conditions every day(first thing in the morning, after you go to the bathroom but before you do anything else is a good time) and enter your weight in a good weight averaging app. Ignore the actual weight. Use the trending weight.

I am frustrated because everytime I "Complete diary" at the end of the day the app says I'll be such and such a weight in 5wks time.
Many people on MFP don’t close their diary daily to avoid the “weight in 5 weeks” thing. You might avoid frustration too by not closing your diary.

HOWEVER, I have weighed myself during the course of the last 2wks and my weight is UP by 2kilos.
This is something to look at. Stop and think about it. Is there a reason?
I don’t know you at all, so I’m not accusing you, I’m playing devil’s advocate to try to figure it out.
Are you sure 2500 is a good goal for you? How tall are you? How much do you weigh? How old? How fast do you want to lose?
Are you sure you’re logging every little detail? Do you take vitamins? Sugarless gum? Do they have calories? Every little detail.
Are you constipated? This is real. Waste retained in your body has weight.
Are you weighing later in the day after exercising? Drinking a lot of water? Eating? These will affect weight.




WTF, I feel like it has all been a waste of time. The app is lying and if I am going to put weight on I might as well eat crap food.
Over it.

AnnPT77

@GWH1967, without knowing your age, height, weight and activity level, it's hard to say what kind of deficit 2500 would theoretically be. Did you get it from MFP, and if so, what activity level did you tell it? What weight loss rate did you request?

For sure, 2 weeks isn't long enough to know whether weight loss is happening or not, because water fluctuations can be crazy, not to mention changes in digestive system contents that are on their way to becoming waste.

FWIW, intermittent fasting is optional for weight loss, though it's much hyped right now. So is eating clean optional, under any definition (since it seems like everyone defines it differently). What matters directly for weight loss is calories, though overall nutrition is important for health and food choices can indirectly affect weight loss by way of affecting satiation or energy level (either of which can affect calorie intake/expenditure). If IF/TRE or eating clean help you manage appetite, and aren't difficult/annoying for you, that's great. If they *are* difficult or annoying, and don't help, they're not essential. Picking an easy and sensible course is helpful to avoiding a sense of deprivation and other such sources of frustration, IMO.

Also, I see that your exercise calories are coming from an iOS calorie adjustment. Two things: 1. Do you have negative adjustments enabled? 2. Some people find that Apple handles the calorie exchange with MFP improperly, and get more reliable results by synching Apple to the Pacer app, and Pacer to MFP. I'm not an Apple gal, so I'm just reporting what others have said, and it's a matter of mild disagreement in any case.

Of course, logging is a skill that takes most of us some time to get right. I see that your diary is open: Thank you, that's helpful. It looks like you've listed weights for most foods when eating at home, but maybe not all, and they're often very round numbers. If there's estimating going on with portion sizes, that can cause some surprising amounts of variation. There are certain calorie-dense things listed in cups/spoons (like nuts), which can be a bit less precise.

However, unless there are things you haven't logged, it looks like you're eating *under* your 2500 fairly often, sometimes quite a bit under, even by hundreds of calories. That can be counterproductive, either by negatively affecting energy level, or by leading to extra water retention that confuses things on the scale, especially over short time periods. I does suggest that imprecise portioning is less likely to be a factor in why you're not seeing loss on the scale yet, assuming 2500 is a good goal for your circumstances.

As an aside, it looks like you're well under your protein goal a lot of days. That doesn't directly affect weight loss, but it can hamper holding on to muscle while losing fat, and many people find protein satiating, so helpful. You'd be the judge of that; it's just something I noticed, FWIW.

If the scale stresses you, then it's fine to weigh only once a week (or less often, even), but the once a week frequency, with a short number of weeks, can have you accidentally catch a low point on the first weigh-in (in terms of meaningless fluctuations of water weight and soon-to-be-waste in digestive transit), and a high point on the 2nd week, and make you think you're not losing fat when you actually are.

If looking at the scale isn't stressful for you, it's fine to weigh yourself daily (consistent conditions, like first thing in AM after bathroom, before eating/drinking, in your birthday suit or similar-weight PJs). You can use a trending app (they aren't magic but can be useful), but even without, daily weigh-ins let you *see* the random fluctuations, and maybe begin to understand them.

I know a lot of blogs and such recommend not weighing daily, but weekly instead; but I think it's a personal style thing, not a hard and fast rule. I've weighed daily for years, and feel like understanding the daily fluctuations is helpful, for me. However, daily weighing for some feels obsessive, or fluctuations may some people feel stressed. For them, daily weighing is probably a bad idea. Only you would know how it is for you.

Mainly, I think what will help here is a couple of weeks more data. If you'd be happier eating the same calories on a different eating schedule, or with some "unclean" things in there (but decent overall nutrition), making those changes should be immaterial to loss rate.

Best wishes!

AnnPT77

Beverly2Hansen wrote: »

Hi, I step 15,000- 20,000steps daily but it won't make me lose weight. If you add your walking as an exercise recalculate your start up activity level as sedentary because your activity level is how active you are minus what you log. I wasted 2 years thanks to not understanding that and had lots of stress. 2500 would be a maintenance calorie allowance for most guys working an active job like a warehouse. So with that I would drop your deficit to 1800 for 2 weeks and see what happens. At least recalculate your start up. If you're a lower weight now than when you started by over 10lbs you need to recalibrate how much you weigh on the deficit plan to.

Good point about double counting in general, but it looks like OP has some kind of tracker synched, and I didn't see other exercise logged, though I only spot-checked a couple of days with relatively higher exercise calories. 🤷‍♀️

2500 would be the approximate maintenance calories for a 54 year old (not so young), 5'10" (average height), 200 pound (overweight but below obese weight) man with a slightly active job and exercise life. Give him a very active job, like construction, and it becomes 2700-2800 or so. 15000 steps is pretty active. Besides, it looks like OP isn’t eating all 2500 calories, fairly often.

As a woman, I have really poor intuition about what men's TDEEs are likely to be at various ages/sizes. I've noticed lots of them are the same nonintuitive way about women's calorie levels. While I'd advise OP to get a calorie goal from MFP (based on daily life activity) - as he possibly has - and log exercise separately in the MFP way, it's possible to get ballpark numbers for thread-discussion purposes from a decent TDEE calculator. The estimates above came from Sailrabbit:

https://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/

bubus05

2500 calories/day seem to much. I am doing weight maintenance, dont even want to lose more weight but I can't eat that much food. Not with 15.000 steps anyway, I tried it. To burn that much excess cals I had to do 50K rides and massive HIITs every day, not sustainable long term, unless you are a pro athlete.

Redordeadhead

bubus05 wrote: »

2500 calories/day seem to much. I am doing weight maintenance, dont even want to lose more weight but I can't eat that much food. Not with 15.000 steps anyway, I tried it. To burn that much excess cals I had to do 50K rides and massive HIITs every day, not sustainable long term, unless you are a pro athlete.

Are you the same height, weight, age and gender as the OP? Individual's calorie needs vary.

bubus05

Redordeadhead wrote: »

bubus05 wrote: »

2500 calories/day seem to much. I am doing weight maintenance, dont even want to lose more weight but I can't eat that much food. Not with 15.000 steps anyway, I tried it. To burn that much excess cals I had to do 50K rides and massive HIITs every day, not sustainable long term, unless you are a pro athlete.

Are you the same height, weight, age and gender as the OP? Individual's calorie needs vary.

I have no idea. Agreed, individual calorie needs vary. But I am curious has anyone ever lost weight on a daily intake of 2500 calories? And I mean long term success.
Personally I would be equally pissed off if following the advice given to me by an app not only not lose weight but put on an extra 2 kg. I think in this case either the 2500 cals too much or the 15.000 steps too little. Probably both.

wunderkindking

bubus05 wrote: »

Redordeadhead wrote: »

bubus05 wrote: »

2500 calories/day seem to much. I am doing weight maintenance, dont even want to lose more weight but I can't eat that much food. Not with 15.000 steps anyway, I tried it. To burn that much excess cals I had to do 50K rides and massive HIITs every day, not sustainable long term, unless you are a pro athlete.

Are you the same height, weight, age and gender as the OP? Individual's calorie needs vary.

I have no idea. Agreed, individual calorie needs vary. But I am curious has anyone ever lost weight on a daily intake of 2500 calories? And I mean long term success.
Personally I would be equally pissed off if following the advice given to me by an app not only not lose weight but put on an extra 2 kg. I think in this case either the 2500 cals too much or the 15.000 steps too little. Probably both.

Yep. My husband works in a factory - as a chemical engineer but on his feet a lot. 50 years old, 6'3", was 260. He lost well on 2500 calories a day. Actually lost initial weight pretty well at 2800/day. He's lost most of the 45 or so he's lost over the past year he's lost on around 2500 though.

Heck, I'm a 5'5" 45 year old woman already at a healthy weight and my loss calories right now are about 2000 based on my own loss results given my summer activity level. (that is not what mfp would give me. MFP would give me about 1600-1700, but I've done this enough to be able to math backward from my actual loss vs calories I track)

wunderkindking

OP:

Give yourself two full months of tracking to whatever calorie goal MFP gave you. See what happens, then do math.

If you truly maintain for TWO MONTHS (not weeks, months), subtract 500 calories.

If you do lose, the math you want is number of pounds you lost X 3500 = Y. Take Y and divide by number of days in your 2 month period. That's your actual daily deficit, and your actual TDEE is the daily deficit + the number MFP gave you. You can then add/subtract from there.

natasor1

Simple answer. I suprise you, but those 2500 cal you calculated your body consumes for the day, The body gonna burn it anyway, if it comes from the food or from your own spare tires. The fat, by nature, is specifically created to use it in the time of shortage. So, just let your food be at 2000 cal, while your own fat supplies the rest , 500 cal. That creates the deficit of 500cal a day for your loss of 1lb a week.

abarocio

Very good advise and insight by the previous responses. I was overestimating my activity level and calorie burn so when I first started using the app, I was either not losing weight or gaining weight. I agree to change the setting to not active and log all the exercise you do for an accurate calorie count. For men in general, do not go below 1800 calories since men have more muscle and bone mass and therefore need more calories.

Good luck and don't give up.

penguinmama87

bubus05 wrote: »

Redordeadhead wrote: »

bubus05 wrote: »

2500 calories/day seem to much. I am doing weight maintenance, dont even want to lose more weight but I can't eat that much food. Not with 15.000 steps anyway, I tried it. To burn that much excess cals I had to do 50K rides and massive HIITs every day, not sustainable long term, unless you are a pro athlete.

Are you the same height, weight, age and gender as the OP? Individual's calorie needs vary.

I have no idea. Agreed, individual calorie needs vary. But I am curious has anyone ever lost weight on a daily intake of 2500 calories? And I mean long term success.
Personally I would be equally pissed off if following the advice given to me by an app not only not lose weight but put on an extra 2 kg. I think in this case either the 2500 cals too much or the 15.000 steps too little. Probably both.

Not sure what you mean by long term success, but my TDEE hovers right about 3000 calories and has for several months, so 2500 daily would give me an average of 1lb weight loss per week. The only slightly unusual thing here is that I'm breastfeeding, but lots of women do that. I'm 5'6", 34 years old, and in the high 170s. I don't exercise excessively (running 30 minutes 3x/week is not pro athlete level) and have a fairly active lifestyle - I walk most places and am on my feet much of the day.

I choose to eat a little under that 2500 mark most days, and eat above it on the weekends. Still losing weight, actually averaging closer to 1.5 lbs/week. I won't be able to do it forever, because I'll weigh less and this baby will wean, but the couple of times I've veered closer to 2000 it hasn't been sustainable for more than a couple of weeks - I get very fatigued and cranky and there's a huge drop in my activity.

Maybe I just burn a lot more calories than the average woman, but really - I'm a boring housewife who is not super tall or super athletic or morbidly obese. I don't think my circumstances are very unusual.

PAV8888

bubus05 wrote: »

I have no idea. Agreed, individual calorie needs vary. But I am curious has anyone ever lost weight on a daily intake of 2500 calories? And I mean long term success. Personally I would be equally pissed off if following the advice given to me by an app not only not lose weight but put on an extra 2 kg. I think in this case either the 2500 cals too much or the 15.000 steps too little. Probably both.

Would 2560 Cal a day average and 72.5 lbs over a period of a year, 6 years ago serve as an example?



(yes, I've been logging a bit more loosely starting late April 2018)

goal06082021

Just popping back in here to also add to my original post at the top of the thread-

You also don't have to close the diary. It doesn't do anything except show you that stupid little message and maybe post to your news feed if you have that enabled. If seeing that little "if every day were like today" BS frustrates you, then just stop closing the diary and you don't ever have to see it again.