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Calories question

jtaylor_cis
jtaylor_cis Posts: 5 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I am new to this app and still trying to figure it all out. I’m trying to learn about macros etc.. so I am supposed to consume about 2500 cals per day, but I also workout so that was 1600 cals.. then subtracted my food but I still needed to eat about 2300 calories??! Is that right? So I need to eat more because I burn so many calories? I thought the point was to burn more than I eat. I am just confused.. it doesn’t seem right to eat that much food when I’m trying to lose.

Replies

  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 10,116 Member
    Like Lietchi said: I think we need a bit more information from you in order to help you with your question. Weight loss in itself is simple, but calorie estimates aren't.
  • jtaylor_cis
    jtaylor_cis Posts: 5 Member
    I am 33, 6’4 290 lbs. I’m trying to lose about 50 lbs at least. I got the calorie goal from this app based on my current weight goal. Lately I’ve been going to the gym twice a day, that’s why the calories burned is so high. I do cardio and weights, usually burn about 800 calories each time I go to the gym. I’m not sure how I’m calculating activity level I’ll go look at that…
  • JBanx256
    JBanx256 Posts: 1,479 Member
    jtaylor_cis wrote: »
    usually burn about 800 calories each time I go to the gym.

    Where are you getting that number? Because...uhmmmm....

  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,809 Member
    edited March 2022
    jtaylor_cis wrote: »
    I am 33, 6’4 290 lbs. I’m trying to lose about 50 lbs at least. I got the calorie goal from this app based on my current weight goal. Lately I’ve been going to the gym twice a day, that’s why the calories burned is so high. I do cardio and weights, usually burn about 800 calories each time I go to the gym. I’m not sure how I’m calculating activity level I’ll go look at that…


    Good effort but unless you are at the gym for 2hrs each for those two a day workouts those numbers seem very high.
    Weights in particular are a low calorie burn rate exercise. Often people make the mistake of using heart rate devices for calorie expenditure during weight training and that leads to incorrect numbers.

    Yes a high volume exerciser needs to take their exercise into account but it's more important for a big exerciser to make those exercise estimates reasonable and unfortunately yours, with the limited information available, seem at face value dubious.

    As regards activity remember that on MyFitnessPal activity and exercise are completely separate items if using the app as designed. Here's the Help text on how to do your initial goal set up....

    https://support.myfitnesspal.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032625391-How-does-MyFitnessPal-calculate-my-initial-goals-
  • westrich20940
    westrich20940 Posts: 921 Member
    Ok...so without knowing how you calculated your daily caloric need or your calories burned through exercise I'm just using a TDEE calculator and using 'sedentary' as your activity level for simplicity's sake.

    If you did no intentional exercise you would (theoretically) need to eat ~2600 calories per day to stay the same weight. If you are wanting to lose weight...how you are logging/calculating things will matter in order to talk about next steps.


    So...before giving you any advice on what number of calories you *should be shooting for per day --- I'd need to know how are you calculating your calories burned via exercise? And - are you using MFP to log your calories burned through cardio activity?


    Example: There are a couple ways you can log things in MFP and it just depends (IMO) on what's easiest/makes the most sense for you. I personally used my TDEE as 'sedentary' when I was actively trying to lose weight bc that's what made sense to me at the time. So...I got an estimate of my TDEE -- I then subtracted like 150/200 calories from that and manually set that as my daily calorie goal in MFP (I didn't have as much wiggle room between my TDEE and BMR as you do). I continued with my physical exercise but logged my calories burned during cardio (I used my running app estimate as well as my HRM estimate) in MFP as well, which added those calories back to my daily goal and I ate them back (typically 70-100% of them, depending on how hungry I was during that day.

    *This will be different for you depending on how you are getting your calories burned estimate and how you are logging those calories burned using MFP*

    Now that I am in maintenance I've switched to eating my TDEE daily (in which case I'm probably somewhere in between 'lightly active' and 'moderately active' depending on the week. So, some more information about how you are logging things will help for people to give you any advice.
  • jtaylor_cis
    jtaylor_cis Posts: 5 Member
    I didn’t know my calories were incorrect so thank you for telling me. I just go off of my Apple Watch so I’m sorry if what I said seemed ridiculous or far fetched. I don’t know enough about burning/eating calories to know that was unreasonable. I workout 5 days a week, in the morning I do cardio for 20-30 minutes then lift weights for an hour. I do the same at night, but I understand that is probably overkill. I used to play basketball so I’m familiar with a workout routine in the gym, I’m just at a loss with the food part. I did estimate my TDEE and that’s how I got that number (2500) to start with. I’ll redo because it seems that’s probably too high.. I’m not trying to maintain this weight. I do use the MFP to calculate my calories burned through exercise. I synced it with the health app which is synced to my Apple Watch. Should I take that off since calories are inaccurate?
  • jtaylor_cis
    jtaylor_cis Posts: 5 Member
    fycqokbn8qlx.jpeg


    I took a picture of my watch from this morning.. that’s what I was getting my calories burned from
  • westrich20940
    westrich20940 Posts: 921 Member
    jtaylor_cis wrote: »
    I didn’t know my calories were incorrect so thank you for telling me. I just go off of my Apple Watch so I’m sorry if what I said seemed ridiculous or far fetched. I don’t know enough about burning/eating calories to know that was unreasonable. I workout 5 days a week, in the morning I do cardio for 20-30 minutes then lift weights for an hour. I do the same at night, but I understand that is probably overkill. I used to play basketball so I’m familiar with a workout routine in the gym, I’m just at a loss with the food part. I did estimate my TDEE and that’s how I got that number (2500) to start with. I’ll redo because it seems that’s probably too high.. I’m not trying to maintain this weight. I do use the MFP to calculate my calories burned through exercise. I synced it with the health app which is synced to my Apple Watch. Should I take that off since calories are inaccurate?


    I don't have any type of watch that would keep track of calories so I don't know how those work --- is your watch able to tell you the total amount of calories you used in a day? Maybe there an issue with it's synching to MFP?

    I don't think you need to recalculate your TDEE...25-2600 is probably correct IF you are sedentary, which you clearly aren't. I'd suggest trying to see if you could look up online sources for avg. calorie burn for the cardio activities you are doing and compare that to your watch's estimate. I'm not sure on how many calories are burned doing strengthening/weight lifting, but you should be able to find some ballpark estimates for most cardio activity - especially if your watch can tell you (accurately) your HR during that activity.

    But know that sometimes that stuff is just inaccurate. My running app (using my stats) estimates how many calories I burn on a run -- and I also have a HRM with a chest strap that also gives an estimate of calories burned. If I do a more intense run, often I find my HRM's estimate is 100-150 calories higher than my running app....so one or both of them are inaccurate. I usually just pick a number in between.
  • Bridgie3
    Bridgie3 Posts: 139 Member
    jtaylor_cis wrote: »
    I didn’t know my calories were incorrect so thank you for telling me. I just go off of my Apple Watch so I’m sorry if what I said seemed ridiculous or far fetched. I don’t know enough about burning/eating calories to know that was unreasonable. I workout 5 days a week, in the morning I do cardio for 20-30 minutes then lift weights for an hour. I do the same at night, but I understand that is probably overkill. I used to play basketball so I’m familiar with a workout routine in the gym, I’m just at a loss with the food part. I did estimate my TDEE and that’s how I got that number (2500) to start with. I’ll redo because it seems that’s probably too high.. I’m not trying to maintain this weight. I do use the MFP to calculate my calories burned through exercise. I synced it with the health app which is synced to my Apple Watch. Should I take that off since calories are inaccurate?

    You will have very high maintenance calories because you're 6'4", and weigh 280lb. I just put that into an online calorie calculator and maintenance would be around 5000 calories a day for you with the extreme exercise you do. So if you wanted to lose, you'd still be able to eat 4000 calories a day.

    To me that's incredible - but you're very tall and very muscle dense. How much of that 280lb is actually fat, and how much is muscle?

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 35,342 Member
    jtaylor_cis wrote: »
    I didn’t know my calories were incorrect so thank you for telling me. I just go off of my Apple Watch so I’m sorry if what I said seemed ridiculous or far fetched. I don’t know enough about burning/eating calories to know that was unreasonable. I workout 5 days a week, in the morning I do cardio for 20-30 minutes then lift weights for an hour. I do the same at night, but I understand that is probably overkill. I used to play basketball so I’m familiar with a workout routine in the gym, I’m just at a loss with the food part. I did estimate my TDEE and that’s how I got that number (2500) to start with. I’ll redo because it seems that’s probably too high.. I’m not trying to maintain this weight. I do use the MFP to calculate my calories burned through exercise. I synced it with the health app which is synced to my Apple Watch. Should I take that off since calories are inaccurate?

    (Replying to this and your watch photo. Since you say you took the watch photo in the morning, I'm going to assume that was the calories from one round each of cardio and strength, not both of the two-a-days.)

    First: Apple doesn't necessarily synch correctly with MFP (Apple doesn't send the right data), but whether that affects you depends on some details I don't have (not an Apple user). Reportedly, synching Apple to the Pacer app, and Pacer to MFP, is more reliable in more cases.

    For 20-30 minutes of cardio for someone as large as you are, 239 calories isn't out of the realm of possibility).

    But 997 calories for an hour of strength training? That seems very improbable. Is it normal reps/sets strength training with rests between sets? If so, get an estimate from the MFP database ("Strength training" in the "Cardiovascular exercise" part of the database. That's actually one of the better sources for strength training estimates.

    If you're doing circuit training - high reps, lower weight, continuous - it's a little more plausible, but still quite high. Compare to one of the "Circuit training" or "Calisthenics" entries in MFP, whichever seems closest. (MFP's a little shakier for those, but probably likely to be closer than a heart-rate-based estimate, which is quite possibly what Apple is giving you. HR is a poor way to estimate strength training.)

    If you get a TDEE estimate, and tell the place you get the estimate about your exercise, it's already in the 2500, and shouldn't be added. If you have a TDEE estimate, it's OK to synch a tracker, if the synch works correctly, and you've enabled negative calorie adjustment in MFP for that synch (because of the way the tracker and MFP reconcile the math for calories, this works out). If you want to add exercise separately, get your calorie estimate from MFP for a realistic activity level setting that doesn't include your intentional exercise (just your job, home life, non-exercise hobbies or incidental walking, etc.), then it's OK to add exercise.
  • JBanx256
    JBanx256 Posts: 1,479 Member
    AnnPT77 wrote: »

    But 997 calories for an hour of strength training? That seems very improbable. Is it normal reps/sets strength training with rests between sets? If so, get an estimate from the MFP database ("Strength training" in the "Cardiovascular exercise" part of the database. That's actually one of the better sources for strength training estimates.

    Referencing this study:
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30768553/

    Greg Nuckols stated, "Lifting may burn anywhere from 75-300+ calories per workout, based primarily on work performed; volume load is our best proxy for work." He then went on to say that a VERY high volume session for a VERY strong lifter could burn up to 500 calories, but that's by FAR the exception, not the rule.




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