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Hitting my calorie goal and exercising but still not losing weight

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  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 35,316 Member
    Retroguy2000 wrote: »
    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    I'm not sure how big/young you have to be to get a BMR/RMR of around 2500 calories (1 MET = 107), but it's bigger than most of us. If you mean METx1.8 or a lab-measured RMR or something like that, that's a different matter.
    The equation for MET is:

    METs x 3.5 x (your body weight in kilograms) / 200 = calories burned per minute

    I'm 102 kg. BMR is not 24 MET's.

    Agreed this can be a diversion and getting in the weeds. The key point is be wary of over-estimating calories from exercise if you plan to eat back some or all of those. That could contribute to losing less weight than expected, which was OP's issue.

    I agree with being wary of overestimating exercise. But OP is doing cardio 3x a week, eating 1600 calories (reportedly, which is only slightly above the MFP minimum calories for men) and has lost 2 pounds in 45 days. That implies an experiential calorie deficit of about 78 calories. His exercise calorie estimate absolutely could have a material impact on that.

    But METS gross-to-net? Unlikely to be a major issue.

    Even at your estimated 107 calorie one-hour METS, how much does he need to be exercising for METS gross-to-net to be the reason he's not losing faster? If he's exercising 7 hours a week, set at active (so 1.8 x 1 MET per hour that he'd be off), that's about 193 calories a day, or about another 2.5 pounds over the 45 days. Since he's doing cardio 2-3 days a week, that'd be 2-3+ hours of cardio every time to reach 7 hours (possible but unusual).

    Something else is off IMO, unless he's fairly small/light (not 102kg) or old, or maybe targeting 0.5 pounds a week loss in the first place. Yes, it could be the exercise estimate in total creating a problem, but gross-to-net seems like a red herring to me.

    RMR/BMR is an old-school rough approximator for METS, i.e., one MET for one hour is approximately one hour of RMR/BMR. Yes, that's very rough (admittedly outdated method). So, for me, 51 calories per BMR hour, 59 calories per calculated MET-hour - it's still a trivial fraction of meaningful exercise, in context of overall all-source estimating error. How significant it is will vary individually.

    Alternatively, there's a METS calculator here:

    https://metscalculator.com/

    And within that calculator, Activity = Quiet/Light, Description = Meditating will calculate with a 1 MET activity.

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