Weight loss

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BritishDean
BritishDean Posts: 8 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I’m a 32yo male and this is the first time in my life that I am putting serious effort into shedding weight. A few years ago, I was 180lbs with a BMI of 24, but over the past few years I’ve let myself go and peaked at 242lbs (BMI 33).

My goal is to lose roughly 60lbs and get back to my healthy BMI by the end of this August. I have recently started to exercise daily, around 90mins per day using my indoor bike. On average per day, I am burning 1,300 calories exercising and consuming 1,000 calories.

Is my goal achievable or do I need to make adjustments?
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  • SweatLikeDog
    SweatLikeDog Posts: 272 Member
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    You're not eating enough calories. Your basal metabolic rate based on your age, height around 6 ft, and current weight is around 2200 cal/day. On the days that you burn 1300 cal, your total calories burned is around 3500. If you're only eating 1000 cals per day, your metabolism is going to shut down and you'll be burning muscle in addition to fat. Your target cals should be 10-15 percent below maintenance or around 3000 cals or workout days and 1900 cals on off days.
  • westrich20940
    westrich20940 Posts: 876 Member
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    How tall are you? How are you coming up with 1300 calories burned from 1.5 hours of cycling?

    If I use 5'10" (~average male height) to calculate your TDEE...even if you were sedentary you should be eating ~2400 calories per day to maintain your current weight.

    Your BMR alone would be 2000...so you should NOT being eating below that.

    On top of that, if you are cycling 1.5 hours per day ... then you are not sedentary and your TDEE is more like ~3500 calories per day.


    ---- so, how are you coming up with your numbers so you can get a better idea of what your caloric needs are.

    I am so much smaller than you and a female and 1000 calories per day is SIGNIFICANTLY too low for me. So there's no way you're eating enough and absolutely you should make some adjustments.
  • BritishDean
    BritishDean Posts: 8 Member
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    westrich20940 wrote: »
    How tall are you? How are you coming up with 1300 calories burned from 1.5 hours of cycling?

    If I use 5'10" (~average male height) to calculate your TDEE...even if you were sedentary you should be eating ~2400 calories per day to maintain your current weight.

    Your BMR alone would be 2000...so you should NOT being eating below that.

    I am 6’ exactly. The 1,300 cal burned is referenced from myfitnesspal account.

  • ReenieHJ
    ReenieHJ Posts: 9,724 Member
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    Is it achievable? Yes. IF you want to feel lethargic, miss a lot of nutrients, lose lots of muscle. Too much too soon, at the risk of staying healthy. :( Those 'lose fast' methods never work for long, without many negative side effects. Your body is a machine that needs good working parts to keep on working. The fuel you put into it matters a great deal, to keep it running as well as possible and to be able to stay on course. With such low calorie amounts, you're bound to run out of steam in all ways.
    Change it up a bit and give yourself time. Losing weight is never good as a sprint. Good luck!!
  • westrich20940
    westrich20940 Posts: 876 Member
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    OK, so --- your BMR is ~2000 so you shouldn't eat less than that.

    I'd say that it's possible that the calorie burn estimate for 1.5 hrs of cycling is a little high - but that really will depend on how intense you are cycling. 1300 might be right --- but it also might be more like 900-1000. The database for calorie burn can vary from being accurate to very inaccurate so it might be worth it to try to find some other sources of the calorie burn and see how close they are.

    If you are using MFP to log your workout (if will automatically add those calories back to your daily goal) --- I'd set your daily goal to ~2300 or so and eat back all (or at least some of) your exercise calories depending on your hunger.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,070 Member
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    deanpodesta1989 wrote: »
    westrich20940 wrote: »
    How tall are you? How are you coming up with 1300 calories burned from 1.5 hours of cycling?

    If I use 5'10" (~average male height) to calculate your TDEE...even if you were sedentary you should be eating ~2400 calories per day to maintain your current weight.

    Your BMR alone would be 2000...so you should NOT being eating below that.

    I am 6’ exactly. The 1,300 cal burned is referenced from myfitnesspal account.

    MFP's research-based method of estimating exercise calories (METS) is reasonable for some activities, very unpredictable for others, and (IMO) pretty terrible for some.

    Cycling is in the unpredictable to terrible spectrum someplace, IMO.

    You say you're indoor biking. Does your bike have an average watts display? That would be a much more reliable way to estimate stationary biking calories.

    I hope you're at least using the "stationary bike" entries, not the "bicycling" ones.

    A key problem with the stationary bike ones is that intensity is subjective. Someone who's out of shape will find X pace "very vigorous" (for example), when a same-sized fit person going at the same objective pace (as reported by the same bike) would find that pace "light". They're both burning roughly the same number of calories, when going at the same pace for the same amount of time. It feels different subjectively because of the difference in fitness, that's all.

    What intensity level are you logging your cycling at? If going for a continuous 90 minutes, and resuming such exercise after a long hiatus (or increasing lots from recently), I'd suggest logging as "Stationary bike, general" or at most "Stationary bike, moderate", no matter how it feels. (Maybe you're already doing that, I dunno. MFP would give me 571 calories for 90 minutes at moderate, but I'm roughly half your size, and size matters to METS estimating . . . but not much to stationary biking, if mostly seated, so there's another potential issue with METS in this case.)

    I don't mean to deprecate your efforts, not at all. 90 minutes of stationary biking at any intensity is a really excellent thing, assuming one is fit enough to complete it at a given frequency without exhaustion. (Exhaustion is counterproductive for both fitness and weight loss.) I'm saying that because a general physiological truth is that if we're capable of doing something for 90 minutes, that's unlikely to qualify objectively as "very vigorous" for us regular folks who are not trained, fit, endurance cyclists.

    It's pretty obvious why the bicycling entries shouldn't be used for stationary bike: Very different activity, and the mph/kph reported by a stationary bike are . . . imaginary, theoretical . . . for the lack of better terms. The bike is going nowhere. You're not moving the stationary bike or your body weight through physical space, so it's different load. Even on an actual bike, 10 mph/kph is a very different calorie demand on an efficient racing bike vs. a heavy hybrid, different on hills vs. flat, different in wind vs. calm, etc. There are better ways to estimate calories for these things.

    IME, compared to better estimating sources, the MFP estimates for both cycling types tend to run high. (There's also a theoretical problem in how MFP uses METS estimating that overstates most exercises by a bit, but that's the least of the issue for some of the entries. The theoretical problem matters more for some activities than others. The details are irrelevant here.)

    All of that said, if you're eating 1000 calories, you're eating way, way too little - less than half of what it takes me to maintain a weight in the 120s pounds as a 5'5" 66 y/o woman. I'd lose close to 3 pounds a week at 1000, until it put me in the hospital, which would be quite quickly. You're 7" taller, less than half my age, almost twice the weight, and 100% more male. You need more calories than I do (even though I'm a mysteriously good li'l ol' calorie burner for my demographic)

    If you're eating the 1300 calories back, so grossing 2300, that would actually be a good thing for health in your case, even if the 1300 is wrong/overstated. If you're actually eating only 1000 calories total, you're jacking up your health risks way, way into the red zone. Don't.

    Find a path of thriving while losing weight and gaining fitness . . . not a path of deprivation, exhaustion, and extreme health risk. Work on establishing healthy habits you can sustain so you're not back here - like so many people - having lost some weight with extreme measures, then gaining back those pounds with friends.

    Stay healthy!

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