Calorie confusion, am I under eating?

aliepickwell26

Hi,
I'm a shade confused with the calorie counting. I've being using the app a while and not seeing consistent weight loss.
I eat around 1400cal a day, burn between 300-700 on a week day, closer to 1500 at the weekend.
I'm just wondering if I am under eating? Maybe I should eat closer to 1800?

tomcustombuilder

Are those burn numbers what you think you're burning with exwecise? If so that is most likely too high of an estimate.

Loss is not linear. You may go a few weeks with no progress. If no progress after 4 weeks your weekly calories are too high for your activity level.

Raising calories wont cause fatloss unless the added calories are offset by that much more activity and then some.

cmriverside

Your daily calories are calculated based on your gender, height, current weight, Goals (lose? gain? maintain weight?) and then a daily activity multiplier is used to account for your daily regular activity not including purposeful exercise.

If you do purposeful exercise, this site expects you to account for it in the Exercise section...whether using a device or calculating your exercise-earned calories yourself.

You don't mention whether you are hitting your weight Goals and you don't mention how you arrived at your numbers, so...here, read this explanation including the hyperlinks within it
https://support.myfitnesspal.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032625391-How-does-MyFitnessPal-calculate-my-initial-goals:

AnnPT77

aliepickwell26 wrote: »

Hi,
I'm a shade confused with the calorie counting. I've being using the app a while and not seeing consistent weight loss.
I eat around 1400cal a day, burn between 300-700 on a week day, closer to 1500 at the weekend.
I'm just wondering if I am under eating? Maybe I should eat closer to 1800?

Not enough information to answer. (Height, weight, age, sex, exercise type(s) and intensity, activity level outside of that exercise, how long you've been eating "around 1400" (and what "around" means), whether you do/log "cheat days" . . . .)

Also, how long is "a while". It takes 4-6 weeks (whole menstrual cycles if you have them) to know whether a new eating/activity regimen is working or not.

Short of that, water weight fluctuations can confuse the matter - fat loss may be linear at consistent calories/activity, but scale weight loss won't be. Even when losing fat fast, fat loss is a few small ounces (very small fraction of a kg) daily on average. Water retention (and digestive contents that will be waste) fluctuate by several pounds from one day to the next, potentially even over multiple weeks. That fluctuation (in weight that isn't fat related) can mask fat loss on the scale for a surprisingly long time - weeks. But if the routine is right, the scale will drop eventually. (The scale ups and downs have a lower trend.)

If you haven't read it, this (especially the article in the first post) may be informative:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10683010/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-fluctuations/p1

While it may be the case that there's a sweet spot in calorie intake for best fat loss, it's incredibly rarely the case that someone's weight loss will slow to imperceptibility because of too-low calories. If we eat too few calories, it can increase health risks, and it can cause fatigue, obvious or subtle. If we're fatigued, we drag through the day, and burn fewer calories than expected, so weight loss may be slowed.

But fat loss won't stop because we're eating too few calories. That's a myth. If it did stop, no one would ever starve to death. Sadly, very many people die of starvation worldwide every day, and they aren't fat when that happens, beyond the distended belly that starvation/malnutrition may cause in some cases (which isn't fat).

If you've been at this, consistently eating 1400 calories for many weeks, and have seen literally zero loss, a much more probable explanation is that either 1400 is maintenance calories (only plausible if you're older and quite petite, sedentary), or there are logging accuracy issue. That is not a diss. Calorie counting can be a surprisingly subtle skill, and most of us doing it long term have had face-palm moments where we realized some systematic error.

If you'd like other experienced MFP-ers to look at your diary and see if anything jumps out, please set your diary to be viewable (public) to all MFP users, and let us know here that you've done so. That's an offer, BTW, not an order! :flowerforyou: Your call.

Best wishes!

frannyupnorth

Did you try resetting your goal based on your current weight? As you get lighter you need to eat less to achieve the same loss. Also a bit of dieting fatigue can set in, sometimes it's helpful to do a week to just maintain current weight then restart afresh the following week.

Dreamroper

I agree with tomcustombuilder. It takes a tremendous amount of exercise to burn 300-700 calories. I bet this could be part of your problem.

AnnPT77

OP, @aliepickwell26, when you say you burn 300-700 calories daily, is that just estimated exercise calories, or is it the total daily "active calories" from a fitness tracker? Are you eating those calories in addition to your 1400, or not?

300 calories of exercise daily isn't a crazy-big number, especially if the exercise is weight-bearing and the person is overweight (or just plain big). An hour of something normal (cycling, rowing, running) can easily burn that much and more, even for a li'l ol' lady like me (133 pounds, age 68).

700 exercise calories daily is getting to be quite a few, where I'd question what it is you're doing, for how long, and at what intensity and body size. But if it's active calories from a tracker, for all day in a normal, varied life with an active job or home life - that's not out of the normal range.

Since you're reporting 1500 calories on the weekend, I'm assuming this is significantly from intentional exercise, but it could be because you're . . . I dunno . . . remodeling your house or doing some landscape project? 1500 calories per day from intentional exercise would be very high, beyond what most typical people would be able to burn, unless doing something like cycling or running for several hours, or something like that.

springlering62

“Consistent” caught my eye.

By any chance, to you, does “consistent weight loss mean a straight loss line down”?

It doesn’t work like that. Weight loss is more like the frog trying to cling out of the well. Climb a couple feet, slide down a foot. Repeat.

That’s how a normal weight loss graph would look. There is no day to day, or often not even week to week “consistency”. Lose a couple, “ gain 1 or 3. Lose another couple gain 1. Lose 2.

As long as the long term trend is down, you’re good.

As others have said, we need more info. Would be helpful if you opened your diary. No one is going to laugh, wag fingers or criticize. Gosh if that happened around here, I’d be a quivering jelly of shame at least once a week, yet I manage to maintain. 🤷🏻‍♀️ All you’ll get is encouragement and advice. 👍🏻

kshama2001

aliepickwell26 wrote: »

Hi,
I'm a shade confused with the calorie counting. I've being using the app a while and not seeing consistent weight loss.
I eat around 1400cal a day, burn between 300-700 on a week day, closer to 1500 at the weekend.
I'm just wondering if I am under eating? Maybe I should eat closer to 1800?

Many have questions about your exercise burns. I'd like to look at both your exercise and food diaries. This can save us from playing 20 questions

There are mistakes that people commonly make that cause them to not lose weight that we might be able to spot if you change your Diary Sharing settings to Public. In the app, go to Settings > Diary Setting > Diary Sharing > and check Public. Desktop: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/diary_settings

PAV8888

springlering62 wrote: »

By any chance, to you, does “consistent weight loss mean a straight loss line down”?

It doesn’t work like that.

Good catch!