RECOMP how do I set goal, maintain/ loss? Confused.

BeastlyMaple

Female, 31.
5'7" Currently 270. ( Was 220 in September befor starting meds). Stopped Meds in March at 250.

Hi there! I was on MFP many many years ago, I lost 30lbs at the time and was doing well. Fast forward a good 10+ years and after many health emergencies and long term SSRI meds ( nerve meds after being paralyzed) I'm finally med free and ready to kick some *kitten* and body recomp. The last 6 months or so I have gained 40lbs after med changes/ withdrawal. However, I have gained a lot of muscle, shoulder and biceps are starting to be visable when flexing. The endless squats and RDL's to relieve stress have helped, legs are getting more solid, butt is firmer. Of course I am naturally very bothered by the weight gain, my measurements are going down, the belly however seems to be gaining an extra roll.

Simple question though. I do not understand what " goal" to set for me. I understand the concept of maintenance calories, training calories and rest calories with a recomp. I've done the math, but I don't know what to set for my goal. Do I leave it at maintenance, set it for -1lb a week like I did years ago? I really just don't know. Or do I write it somewhere separately, ignore the caloric goal for the day and go by if it's a rest/ training day?

Also next question, do I add in cardio calories lost?

Any detailed help would be wonderful, I have a lot of determination but this stuff is really holding me up with confusion and I feel like is my weakest area.


maintenance calories: 2,760 ( for 270)
Training Day : 3,174
Rest Days: 2,484

AnnPT77

BeastlyMaple wrote: »

Female, 31.
5'7" Currently 270. ( Was 220 in September befor starting meds). Stopped Meds in March at 250.

Hi there! I was on MFP many many years ago, I lost 30lbs at the time and was doing well. Fast forward a good 10+ years and after many health emergencies and long term SSRI meds ( nerve meds after being paralyzed) I'm finally med free and ready to kick some *kitten* and body recomp. The last 6 months or so I have gained 40lbs after med changes/ withdrawal. However, I have gained a lot of muscle, shoulder and biceps are starting to be visable when flexing. The endless squats and RDL's to relieve stress have helped, legs are getting more solid, butt is firmer. Of course I am naturally very bothered by the weight gain, my measurements are going down, the belly however seems to be gaining an extra roll.

Simple question though. I do not understand what " goal" to set for me. I understand the concept of maintenance calories, training calories and rest calories with a recomp. I've done the math, but I don't know what to set for my goal. Do I leave it at maintenance, set it for -1lb a week like I did years ago? I really just don't know. Or do I write it somewhere separately, ignore the caloric goal for the day and go by if it's a rest/ training day?

Also next question, do I add in cardio calories lost?

Any detailed help would be wonderful, I have a lot of determination but this stuff is really holding me up with confusion and I feel like is my weakest area.


maintenance calories: 2,760 ( for 270)
Training Day : 3,174
Rest Days: 2,484

It sounds like you still have body fat you want to lose. How much? If it's still in the tens of pounds, but you're not at a weight that is in itself an acute threat to your health, then you would want to lose slowly. Losing slowly maximizes your odds of some muscle/strength gain alongside loss.

How slowly depends on how much weight you have to lose. I'm guessing that you could go for a pound a week for at least a while, but half a pound a week would be OK if you don't have weight-related health issues yet. Depending on your body composition (body fat percent, rough estimate), you might even be able to go faster than a pound a week for a bit, since you're female, relatively young, and at a BMI that's technically obese. But it's not necessary to go faster, unless your doctor says you should for some health reason.

There are two methods you could use to set a calorie goal, loosely call them "MFP method" and "TDEE method". Which to choose is subjective, has to do with preferences (mostly) and exercise schedule (somewhat).

With MFP method, you set your MFP activity level based on your life excluding intentional exercise (job, home chores, etc.), then carefully estimate exercise calories when you exercise, add and eat those calories, too (whether cardio or strength training). That keeps you at the calorie deficit you asked MFP to create, for weight loss (pound a week, or whatever). You can also synch a tracker, rather than logging exercise manually. (I'd suggest enabling negative calorie adjustment, if you do that.)

That will result in your eating different numbers of calories on exercise days than non-exercise days. Some people prefer that, subjectively. Some people have more variable or unpredictable (such as weather dependent) exercise schedules (vs. consistent), and the arithmetic works better for them this way.

With the TDEE method, you use an outside calorie estimator, a TDEE calculator, to get a calorie goal, making sure to include both daily life and planned exercise in the activity level setting, and input your target loss rate. This calculator makes that a little clearer than some do:

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

In that case, once you have a calorie goal, the exercise calories from planned exercise are averaged into a daily goal, and you'd eat the same number of calories every day, exercise or not. Some people prefer that approach. You'd just put your calorie goal into MFP explicitly, by hand, and go with it.

Either way, you want to go for 4-6 weeks, monitoring eating/exercise, plus changes in body weight. Then, assess your average weekly weight change, and see how that compares to your desired loss rate. (Look at the same relative day in two or more different menstrual cycles, if that applies to you. Hormones cause weird water weight effects, for some women.) If you're on target, keep going that way. If you're far enough, adjust intake using the "500 calories per day is roughly a pound a week" assumption. Then keep going, and keep monitoring.

After you lose some weight, like every 10 pounds or so, redo the math. A lighter body tends to burn fewer calories, if activity level stays the same.

Since you seem to have athletic goals, losing relatively slowly would support those goals. Also, to support that, getting overall good nutrition, especially but not exclusively adequate protein, is a good plan, too. You don't have to be nutritionally perfect on day one, you can chip away at reaching the point you want to reach, over a couple of weeks or so. That can be an easier way to remodel eating patterns, vs. trying to be instantly perfect.

In fact, you don't need to be exact on nutrition (or calories) even in the long run. Close is good enough, and averaging right around sensible numbers over a few days is fine, too: Bodies don't reset at midnight, even if MFP does.

Does that help? I hope so.

(In case it matters to you to know who's giving you advice: I'm female, 5'5", much older than you (66), quite active, a bit more muscle mass than average for my demographic but not a bodybuilder, formerly obese, now at a healthy weight for the past 6+ years.)

BeastlyMaple

AnnPT77 wrote: »

It sounds like you still have body fat you want to lose. How much? If it's still in the tens of pounds, but you're not at a weight that is in itself an acute threat to your health, then you would want to lose slowly. Losing slowly maximizes your odds of some muscle/strength gain alongside loss.

How slowly depends on how much weight you have to lose. I'm guessing that you could go for a pound a week for at least a while, but half a pound a week would be OK if you don't have weight-related health issues yet. Depending on your body composition (body fat percent, rough estimate), you might even be able to go faster than a pound a week for a bit, since you're female, relatively young, and at a BMI that's technically obese. But it's not necessary to go faster, unless your doctor says you should for some health reason.

There are two methods you could use to set a calorie goal, loosely call them "MFP method" and "TDEE method". Which to choose is subjective, has to do with preferences (mostly) and exercise schedule (somewhat).

With MFP method, you set your MFP activity level based on your life excluding intentional exercise (job, home chores, etc.), then carefully estimate exercise calories when you exercise, add and eat those calories, too (whether cardio or strength training). That keeps you at the calorie deficit you asked MFP to create, for weight loss (pound a week, or whatever). You can also synch a tracker, rather than logging exercise manually. (I'd suggest enabling negative calorie adjustment, if you do that.)

That will result in your eating different numbers of calories on exercise days than non-exercise days. Some people prefer that, subjectively. Some people have more variable or unpredictable (such as weather dependent) exercise schedules (vs. consistent), and the arithmetic works better for them this way.

With the TDEE method, you use an outside calorie estimator, a TDEE calculator, to get a calorie goal, making sure to include both daily life and planned exercise in the activity level setting, and input your target loss rate. This calculator makes that a little clearer than some do:

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

In that case, once you have a calorie goal, the exercise calories from planned exercise are averaged into a daily goal, and you'd eat the same number of calories every day, exercise or not. Some people prefer that approach. You'd just put your calorie goal into MFP explicitly, by hand, and go with it.

Either way, you want to go for 4-6 weeks, monitoring eating/exercise, plus changes in body weight. Then, assess your average weekly weight change, and see how that compares to your desired loss rate. (Look at the same relative day in two or more different menstrual cycles, if that applies to you. Hormones cause weird water weight effects, for some women.) If you're on target, keep going that way. If you're far enough, adjust intake using the "500 calories per day is roughly a pound a week" assumption. Then keep going, and keep monitoring.

After you lose some weight, like every 10 pounds or so, redo the math. A lighter body tends to burn fewer calories, if activity level stays the same.

Since you seem to have athletic goals, losing relatively slowly would support those goals. Also, to support that, getting overall good nutrition, especially but not exclusively adequate protein, is a good plan, too. You don't have to be nutritionally perfect on day one, you can chip away at reaching the point you want to reach, over a couple of weeks or so. That can be an easier way to remodel eating patterns, vs. trying to be instantly perfect.

In fact, you don't need to be exact on nutrition (or calories) even in the long run. Close is good enough, and averaging right around sensible numbers over a few days is fine, too: Bodies don't reset at midnight, even if MFP does.

Does that help? I hope so.

(In case it matters to you to know who's giving you advice: I'm female, 5'5", much older than you (66), quite active, a bit more muscle mass than average for my demographic but not a bodybuilder, formerly obese, now at a healthy weight for the past 6+ years.)

Thank you so very much for the time you took to write this. I've overwhelmed myself with reading articles posts and all these different opinions, and I'm thankful you've helped clean it all up and presented it in a way that made sense to me. A little bit of context for me, in case it makes a difference. Apparently, = according to the smart scale, however accurate that is I'm around 40% body fat, and a healthy weight for my BMI is 165lbs. I'm not all that concerned about " ideal weights" as long as I'm healthier and feel better, that's my main concern. My personal goal is to be physically stronger, I work with special needs and being able to lift and transfer someone easily and just knowing I have that strength and stability is huge for me. A lot of this need for strength/ independence comes from having to start over when an illness happened and I had to learn to walk/ move again. Completely made me learn that my lifestyle before was stubbornness and adrenaline and not actually muscle "strength". So now going forward and doing all the strength-building things is important, and truly just expanding on physiotherapy that I needed anyway. So to answer your question of how much I have to lose, I have no idea, what people would go for in this case, but I figured it would be best to set a "smaller goal" so I set it for 200. It was previous 165 for a healthy BMI, but because I'm after strength and I know that comes with a higher weight, I'm just not sure.

Thank you for the advice with a tracker, and also for the two different methods you suggested. My workouts are at home and mostly outside for heavier things. I have a program built, but the activity itself ranges depending on the weather ( yay Canada), and my lifestyle with whatever I can fit in that day. I think your option of using MFP seems simpler, with my in/out ranging daily, so I will give that a go and see what happens. I have enjoyed the challenge of adding strength training to my life, I find it really helpful. Cardio well, haha, if I could train myself to breathe better and not get overwhelmed, that would be wonderful. With having to rebuild my body from the ground up from paralysis, and also having weight to lose, recomp makes complete sense for me... the diet portion and tracking was for sure my weak spot. Thank you so much for this, it's been stressing me out for the long while. I had been sticking with the same caloric goal, regardless of my activity level, and found myself starving on more active days but wouldn't eat. Meanwhile struggling to eat enough on my rest days because I just wasn't hungry. Having the weight go up, but all measurements go down, yet feeling a and looking more belly bloated probably makes more sense now. Anyway, if any of what I shared changes your views of how I should proceed, please let me know, I'd love to hear your advice! You've been a huge huge help, and I'm so thankful

AnnPT77

BeastlyMaple wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

It sounds like you still have body fat you want to lose. How much? If it's still in the tens of pounds, but you're not at a weight that is in itself an acute threat to your health, then you would want to lose slowly. Losing slowly maximizes your odds of some muscle/strength gain alongside loss.

How slowly depends on how much weight you have to lose. I'm guessing that you could go for a pound a week for at least a while, but half a pound a week would be OK if you don't have weight-related health issues yet. Depending on your body composition (body fat percent, rough estimate), you might even be able to go faster than a pound a week for a bit, since you're female, relatively young, and at a BMI that's technically obese. But it's not necessary to go faster, unless your doctor says you should for some health reason.

There are two methods you could use to set a calorie goal, loosely call them "MFP method" and "TDEE method". Which to choose is subjective, has to do with preferences (mostly) and exercise schedule (somewhat).

With MFP method, you set your MFP activity level based on your life excluding intentional exercise (job, home chores, etc.), then carefully estimate exercise calories when you exercise, add and eat those calories, too (whether cardio or strength training). That keeps you at the calorie deficit you asked MFP to create, for weight loss (pound a week, or whatever). You can also synch a tracker, rather than logging exercise manually. (I'd suggest enabling negative calorie adjustment, if you do that.)

That will result in your eating different numbers of calories on exercise days than non-exercise days. Some people prefer that, subjectively. Some people have more variable or unpredictable (such as weather dependent) exercise schedules (vs. consistent), and the arithmetic works better for them this way.

With the TDEE method, you use an outside calorie estimator, a TDEE calculator, to get a calorie goal, making sure to include both daily life and planned exercise in the activity level setting, and input your target loss rate. This calculator makes that a little clearer than some do:

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

In that case, once you have a calorie goal, the exercise calories from planned exercise are averaged into a daily goal, and you'd eat the same number of calories every day, exercise or not. Some people prefer that approach. You'd just put your calorie goal into MFP explicitly, by hand, and go with it.

Either way, you want to go for 4-6 weeks, monitoring eating/exercise, plus changes in body weight. Then, assess your average weekly weight change, and see how that compares to your desired loss rate. (Look at the same relative day in two or more different menstrual cycles, if that applies to you. Hormones cause weird water weight effects, for some women.) If you're on target, keep going that way. If you're far enough, adjust intake using the "500 calories per day is roughly a pound a week" assumption. Then keep going, and keep monitoring.

After you lose some weight, like every 10 pounds or so, redo the math. A lighter body tends to burn fewer calories, if activity level stays the same.

Since you seem to have athletic goals, losing relatively slowly would support those goals. Also, to support that, getting overall good nutrition, especially but not exclusively adequate protein, is a good plan, too. You don't have to be nutritionally perfect on day one, you can chip away at reaching the point you want to reach, over a couple of weeks or so. That can be an easier way to remodel eating patterns, vs. trying to be instantly perfect.

In fact, you don't need to be exact on nutrition (or calories) even in the long run. Close is good enough, and averaging right around sensible numbers over a few days is fine, too: Bodies don't reset at midnight, even if MFP does.

Does that help? I hope so.

(In case it matters to you to know who's giving you advice: I'm female, 5'5", much older than you (66), quite active, a bit more muscle mass than average for my demographic but not a bodybuilder, formerly obese, now at a healthy weight for the past 6+ years.)

Thank you so very much for the time you took to write this. I've overwhelmed myself with reading articles posts and all these different opinions, and I'm thankful you've helped clean it all up and presented it in a way that made sense to me. A little bit of context for me, in case it makes a difference. Apparently, = according to the smart scale, however accurate that is I'm around 40% body fat, and a healthy weight for my BMI is 165lbs. I'm not all that concerned about " ideal weights" as long as I'm healthier and feel better, that's my main concern. My personal goal is to be physically stronger, I work with special needs and being able to lift and transfer someone easily and just knowing I have that strength and stability is huge for me. A lot of this need for strength/ independence comes from having to start over when an illness happened and I had to learn to walk/ move again. Completely made me learn that my lifestyle before was stubbornness and adrenaline and not actually muscle "strength". So now going forward and doing all the strength-building things is important, and truly just expanding on physiotherapy that I needed anyway. So to answer your question of how much I have to lose, I have no idea, what people would go for in this case, but I figured it would be best to set a "smaller goal" so I set it for 200. It was previous 165 for a healthy BMI, but because I'm after strength and I know that comes with a higher weight, I'm just not sure.

Thank you for the advice with a tracker, and also for the two different methods you suggested. My workouts are at home and mostly outside for heavier things. I have a program built, but the activity itself ranges depending on the weather ( yay Canada), and my lifestyle with whatever I can fit in that day. I think your option of using MFP seems simpler, with my in/out ranging daily, so I will give that a go and see what happens. I have enjoyed the challenge of adding strength training to my life, I find it really helpful. Cardio well, haha, if I could train myself to breathe better and not get overwhelmed, that would be wonderful. With having to rebuild my body from the ground up from paralysis, and also having weight to lose, recomp makes complete sense for me... the diet portion and tracking was for sure my weak spot. Thank you so much for this, it's been stressing me out for the long while. I had been sticking with the same caloric goal, regardless of my activity level, and found myself starving on more active days but wouldn't eat. Meanwhile struggling to eat enough on my rest days because I just wasn't hungry. Having the weight go up, but all measurements go down, yet feeling a and looking more belly bloated probably makes more sense now. Anyway, if any of what I shared changes your views of how I should proceed, please let me know, I'd love to hear your advice! You've been a huge huge help, and I'm so thankful

That all sounds good to me. Just give things a try for that few weeks, don't worry if progress is weird at first (that's kind of normal), just stick with it until you have the several weeks to average things out. (Normal = ups and downs along the way, but overweight weight down over multi weeks, if a good loss rate is dialed in on the eating side.)

The one thing I'd add, given what you say about cardio, is that you don't need to do some major, exhausting thing. It's a common myth that we have to do something intense or exhausting, maybe even miserable/punitive, in order to make progress. Keep it manageable, ideally fun, at least tolerable. If it's a little bit of a challenge, but manageable, that's perfect. It doesn't have to be some gym-y thing, can just be walking or dancing or active video/VR games - anything that involves movement, is enjoyable for you. As you get fitter, you can gradually increase the challenge, still keep it manageable: That's how progress happens.

Best wishes!