Is it as simple as weekly CICO?

Retroguy2000

tldr : If someone maintains a deficit of 400 per day for 6 days of the week, and binges for 2,400 extra for one day, will their weight stay constant? A weekly CICO model would say yes. Is it really that simple?

I've been using a spreadsheet to track my daily net calories and weekly weigh-ins, to get a better estimate of what my actual TDEE is. It would seem my actual TDEE is several hundred calories above my MFP entries, however there are several potential inaccuracies in there:

1. Weekly weigh-in, not daily average.
2. I track everything, but I don't use a scale. I tend to go by % of a container for serving size, so if I've had the whole container over a few days it should all work out. Or I'll have a meal saved for salmon plus green beans say, but the size of the salmon is based on the average size in the pack, and one day it may be broccoli instead of green beans. In the long run, that's noise.
3. I am sedentary except for the workouts, and NEAT can vary significantly from person to person.
4. I use a conservative estimate for my workouts, and those may well be too conservative.

So I freely accept my numbers could be too high or too low in various ways, all the usual suspects we have threads about and I'm well aware of, so let's not get caught in the weeds there, that's not what this topic is about.

I haven't been seriously trying to lose weight, I've been OK with losing slowly. It's more important to me not to gain.

Of the last 10 weeks, 70 days:

48/70 days under MFP TDEE
14/70 days >=1,000 above MFP TDEE
4/70 days >=400 & <1,000 above MFP TDEE

Based on a weekly CICO count, I would expect to have gained 5 pounds in the last 10 weeks, but I've actually lost a few pounds, and that trend has been clear in recent weeks.

I've seen YT videos of people binging, going many thousands over in a day, and it does not translate to fat gain of the amount over TDEE, e.g. going 7,000 over in a day does not mean you'll gain two pounds of fat. You'll burn more calories processing more food, your NEAT will go up, your body will give off more heat, and so on. You'll gain some fat, but not as much as two pounds.

Here's my question. If someone maintains a deficit of 400 per day for 6 days of the week, and binges for 2,400 extra for one day, will their weight stay constant? A weekly CICO model would say yes. Is it really that simple?

Those videos plus my anecdotal data would suggest it's really about the majority of your days, not an average including outliers.

nossmf

My anecdotal evidence for this comes from when I was routinely stopping for donuts on the way to church on Sunday morning, I could easily put away hundreds of calories in under five minutes that way, and my weight stayed very constant despite being under by a hundred or so the other six days. When I stopped the donuts for a few weeks and kept everything else consistent, I lost weight. So for me, I'd say yes, it can be that simple. Note, though, my numbers were a lot less than your example, so unknown if a more extreme swing would have a different impact.

cmriverside

Only way to know is to try it.

MFP has my calories to maintain my current weight at XXXX. I actually eat (over time, and for years..) 300-600 calories more than that every single day. Plus I eat exercise calories. I even go over those calories by 1000-1500 additional calories one or two times a week.

If I used the 3500 calories = one pound "rule" over the last two years, I would be UP by over fifty pounds, but as it is I weigh the same give or take five pounds on any given weigh in.

I think once I made it past that first year in Maintenance everything settled down a lot. In the first year post weight loss I could gain a couple pounds just thinking about pizza.

Now? 14 years in? It takes months of serious over eating to gain weight that sticks - and it's pretty easy to lose it again. Like every year I gain a few pounds with the holiday-DGAF-eating but I always lose it by summer.

Run the experiment. I mean, you're a Special Snowflake! ::eHug::

lynn_glenmont

Yes, but you need to have the correct maintenance number to begin with. Personally, with that much data, I would just calculate it myself, rather than rely on a formula that predicts calories needs for the average person with some set of characteristics (height, weight, gender, age, activity level), but people are going to be distributed around that average point, and the only way to know where you are in that distribution is to look at your own data.

Activity level is a real problem, in that these formulas use a single number as a multiplier that has to account for people who are spread along a continuum, not all massed together at four or five distinct points on that continuum. I.e., if the formula is using 1.3, 1.5, 1.7, and 1.9 as the activity multiplier, there are going to be an awful lot of people who should be 1.2 or 1.4 or 1.8 or 2.0.

You say you are sedentary, but are you really 1.3 sedentary? Maybe you're 1.45 -- or maybe in trying to be conservative about it, you're ignoring the fact that you're really lightly active, and a 1.6 lightly active (instead of 1.5) at that. And on top of that you're deliberately attempting to underestimate your exercise burns.

tl;dr -- If you've lost 5 lbs in seven weeks when you thought you were eating at maintenance, your maintenance, according to the way in which you're choosing to log, is about 350 calories higher than you've been assuming it is.

Mine, based on about 10 years of pretty meticulous, as accurate-as-I-can-manage data, is hundreds of calories more than MFP thinks it is (my recollection is that it's close to 500 calories more than MFP thinks, but since I don't use MFP's numbers anymore -- I use the numbers that I get from my own data -- I couldn't swear to the exact figure).

cmriverside

Exactly what lynn_glenmont said.

Data is best when self-collected and then using the body weight scale to check your work.

Retroguy2000

In 10 weeks I've lost 3.5 pounds while a weekly CICO calculation of my net calories (incl workouts) would have me at +5 pounds. So either my actual average TDEE is about 425 calories above what I previously assumed, which it may well be, it's possible, or it's more about the majority of the days being in a deficit rather than simply adding up total net calories which include the outlier days. Or perhaps it's a bit of both.

cmriverside

Yeah, my calories went up in the years after weight loss. I sit at (like I said) 300-600 above what it was in that first year post weight loss.

I don't know if it's even possible for me to eat the same amount day in and day out. So far I haven't been able to master that task. Some weeks my average overage is 300, some weeks its 900. Not sure I even care at this point. Moar cream in that coffee for us!

PAV8888

Not sure @Retroguy2000 what the core question is.

Individual numbers collected in a consistent manner allow you to make individual decisions. There is too much variance from the individual calories from the activity level and how it is captured from how average you really are even from the type of food you eat and TEF to make too much of a comment beyond that.

We can choose to get lost in the "but we don't know exactly with 100% certainty" or we can accept that with the averages that we deal with, we can actually make some fairly good decisions with remarkable precision based on individually consistent logging.

Of course if your logging is all over the place (NOT THE CASE WITH YOU, this is a general comment), if your logging is all over the place and you don't have a reasonable weight trend you won't be able to make the fairly good decisions because you don't have useful data as of yet.

If your question is "can I binge without penalty" the answer is much more varied and I think that on the balance of probabilities it is a terrible decision to make moving forward as it tends to backfire for the vast majority of people who have found themselves on MFP.

My personal observation, and take that for what it is, is that there is some slack space on EITHER end both going down and going up in weight. And that slack is absorbed by changes to the body (temperature, activity, desire to move, cellular activity, nails and hair growing or not growing even) before the weight changes. And this does give SOME credence to your what I "customary" do model. To add to that, there is also the obvious issue that depending on the type of food you eat, some of your 9999 binge calories will go in one end and out the other before they have time to be absorbed. And yes, calories from donuts will potentially get absorbed faster than calories from nuts during that trip.

So. For purposes of NORMAL use, and reality, our weekly/monthly/yearly caloric balance will determine what happens with our weight. Will one single day either way result in an appreciable change to our weight? Probably not. Think of the one big walking day, one big buffet day, one eat nothing because I am having surgery day... it is ONE day. Not going to do much.

Would I use this as a weight management strategy and "permission" to engage in potentially problematic behavior once a week or even once a month with predetermination? I don't think that would be a good idea--I have enough problems without setting out to create new ones! I prefer to aim for an even keel and smallest possible adjustments consistent to meeting goals

PAV8888

Assuming that most theories of adaptive thermogenesis are correct, it would make a lot of sense that at maintenance there will be a point where maintenance calories increase without corresponding weight increase as prior AT issues resolve. This has been consistent with my personal observation a good year+ post major deficits.

Though to me this was more clearly seen via "resting heart rate" as observed by Fitbit. with larger deficits resulting in lower resting hr, and overages increased. maintenance for me tends to fall within a range of just three resting hr beets centered at 64 or 65 at times. Above means gaining slowly. Below means losing slowly. obviously the HR is the result not the cause of the excess or deficient energy intake.

AnnPT77

Weekly CICO is close enough IMO. But details matter. It's probably really a combination of majority of days plus averages, not either/or, but I'm guessing.

Personal observation suggests to me that a rare day (or maybe a few) way above maintenance has little impact on scale weight, i.e., less than it should, but not necessarily none. (To be clear, I'm fully capable of consuming 2-3x my estimated TDEE for - say - a long weekend, so it's not necessarily some piddling amount over estimated needs.)

Speculating, some of it is likely, as you say, increased NEAT and other adaptive factors. (I get worse hot flashes for a say or so after a way-over-goal day, for example; and my resting heart rate usually goes up a couple of beats.) I'm wondering if there's also some level of (metaphorically) the untrained-to-excesses body going "WTF!" and not managing to metabolize all the input before it becomes output.

I wonder, though, if one day a week is rare enough, and an extra 2400 calories extreme enough, for that stuff to kick in? Still speculating, response might be individualized. Anecdotally, it seems like some people experience more of calorie needs increasing when they go to maintenance calories (suggesting reverse adaptive thermogenesis, maybe), and other people experience relatively little of calorie needs increasing in the same situation (habits rule NEAT, too, bigger effect than AT, maybe?). I do think bodies tend to get good at what we train them to do, so I'm not sure what the "six days at goal, one day way over goal" training might trigger. Also, if there are genetic variations that affect body weight, one set of those might be how much the body tends to burn up vs. store unusual excess?

If it isn't obvious that I'm just shooting the breeze above, not advancing well-thought-out theories . . . let me underscore that about eight times.

If you haven't, I do think you (OP, @retroguy2000) really do need to base your calorie estimates on your history, not on MFP. MFP (or any other calculator) is a blunt instrument, spitting out population averages. Clearly, you're an individual, and doubtless one much, much better than average in every way, right? (I forget the exact stat, but something like 80% of people think they're better than average drivers.)

Fitness trackers are maybe a slightly less blunt instrument, but it's still averages under the covers, just more nuance-adjusted ones.

I've said it before, will say it again: I eat hundreds more calories every day, like 25-30% more, than MFP predicts I need for any given weight-management goal. That's compared with almost 8 years of logging my weight, eating, and exercise pretty meticulously. I make errors in those like everyone else does, but I feel pretty sure they don't add up to several hundred calories less eating or more activity than I'm logging. (I don't make intentional errors as some do, trying to overestimate eating and underestimate exercise/NEAT. I try to be as accurate as I can. My daily step count is usually around the sedentary/lightly active border.) This overall result is rare, statistically speaking, but obviously not impossible.

My fitness tracker - good brand/model that others report as pretty accurate for them on all-day calories - estimates my calorie burn at about the same level MFP does - maybe a little lower, even. My fitness tracker thinks my current 7-day average burn is 1660. I've eaten 1850+exercise, so 2000-2300 gross intake. I'm reasonably weight stable, over the long term, if I stick with that, maybe even losing ultra-slowly, like 100-150 deficit. (Usually I throw in some indulgences occasionally on top of my daily goal, so don't lose, or even creep up ultra-slowly sometimes. Meh.)

Once I started using my own data to estimate calorie needs, my weight changes became very predictable. I even got so I could usually predict my water-weight effect on top of fat impacts from something like a party weekend - how long it would take to get back to baseline scale weight afterward. That adjustment - using my own data as the basis - happened in year 1, shortly after starting to use MFP, when I lost way too fast for my own good at MFP-recommended calories (with accurate profile entries). It was change or fail, at that point.

Use your own data to estimate, once you have enough accurate data, 4-6 weeks or so (whole menstrual cycles for women). Obviously, keep watching after that to make sure something isn't off, but use your own data for that, too.

Someone is out in the tails of the bell curve, even though it's a tiny proportion of the population. You may just be a bit off the peak of the bell curve, or even pretty far off, as an individual. I think I am, at this point.

I know it's hard to accept the possibility that you may need more calories than predicted, especially given the relatively small standard deviation of BMR/RMR. For the longest time, I didn't want to even mention it, because I was afraid "someone" would notice and somehow take back my nice extra food. You may not even see any obvious reasons why you'd be unusual. Doesn't mean you aren't.

Retroguy2000

@PAV8888 Oh I'm definitely not looking for binge permission, nor would I recommend such to anyone. I'm really wondering about the veracity of weekly CICO tracking as a weight change predictor.

I think you're right that it works both ways. If someone has a firm grasp on their TDEE and that's 2,500, and they go +500 on any 5 days of the week, maintenance for another day, and full day fast for the remaining day, to pick an extreme example, weekly CICO says they're flat but my guess is they'd gain weight. Likewise at the other end of the spectrum, we can see YT videos of people going +6,000 in a day and doing lab and caliper tests over the next two weeks and only gaining a fraction of that in fat, due to more food processing by the body digesting, higher NEAT and higher body temp etc. So if they were -6,000 with consistent daily deficit for the rest of the week, they'd probably lose weight even though weekly CICO would be flat.

Bottom line, I'm wondering if outlier days partially invalidate a weekly CICO trackers assumed effect on weight change.

sollyn23l2

Retroguy2000 wrote: »

@PAV8888 Oh I'm definitely not looking for binge permission, nor would I recommend such to anyone. I'm really wondering about the veracity of weekly CICO tracking as a weight change predictor.

I think you're right that it works both ways. If someone has a firm grasp on their TDEE and that's 2,500, and they go +500 on any 5 days of the week, maintenance for another day, and full day fast for the remaining day, to pick an extreme example, weekly CICO says they're flat but my guess is they'd gain weight. Likewise at the other end of the spectrum, we can see YT videos of people going +6,000 in a day and doing lab and caliper tests over the next two weeks and only gaining a fraction of that in fat, due to more food processing by the body digesting, higher NEAT and higher body temp etc. So if they were -6,000 with consistent daily deficit for the rest of the week, they'd probably lose weight even though weekly CICO would be flat.

Bottom line, I'm wondering if outlier days partially invalidate a weekly CICO trackers assumed effect on weight change.

It depends entirely on how frequent those "outlier" days are. At a certain point, no, your body will not be able to compensate for it.

ETA: those youtube videos have a history of being faked in one of two different ways: the youtuber doesn't actually eat it, or the youtuber throws it up after they are off screen.

PAV8888

Retroguy2000 wrote: »

Bottom line, I'm wondering if outlier days partially invalidate a weekly CICO trackers assumed effect on weight change.

By definition, if they are outlier days in the sense that they don't happen often enough, then they don't invalidate anything, because they are outliers!

In the end if you have a 10-15-20% even larger disconnect on the one outlier day... does that affect your ability to make decisions? Month to month I have a "fitbit error" (I call it that; but it isn't, it's an overall error), of up to 8.9%, even 10% let's say. if I consider only one month. Even wider on a weekly basis. But on a yearly basis the error has never exceeded 5% when I've run through the data. Sure 5% is about 150 Cal in my case. But it is still a number I can work with to make day to day decisions.

TaariniNeelam

I am new to the acronyms so it is an interesting reading exercise for me. I accidentally binge or do it while traveling or enjoying few savory entrees while out at eateries. This question has been walking around in my mind. Unfortunately for my body type etc this would result in a gain. However, everyone is different

paperpudding

What do you mean "for your body type"?

I would say everyone who eats at weekly amount will acheive the same whether they spread that evenly over 7 days or not.

Leaving aside extreme type scenarios - but for real people in real life thats what would happen