Weight, activity and calories

crewahl

I mentioned on another post that I was trying to understand why the perceived level of effort associated with my normal activities has gone down. Because of that, I’ve been playing with some of the data captured by my Apple Watch over the past three years, and it shows some interesting things - not necessarily surprising, but interesting.

I’ve been working my way back to goal since the start of the pandemic, so what’s here is my weight, number of minutes of exercise, calories burned in exercise, calories burned other than exercise, total calories burned per day, and calories burned per minute of activity. Each number is as of the end of June for that year.



So what’s interesting is that my active calories per day have gone down even as my active minutes have gone up. Also, my resting (non-active) calories have gone down. The calories I burn per minute of exercise has declined, even though I feel I’m putting as much into the it as before.

So this seems to show that a leaner body does not have to work as hard to produce the same or greater result. It also supports WW's approach of taking away points as you lose weight in order to maintain a consistent caloric deficit.

cakeman21k

Don't forget that as we age our basic metabolic rate tends to slow down causing changes in how we burn calories and thus how many we need in a day.