CICO: It's Science, but it works like Magic

Mr_Knight

So I've been logging very consistently now for about six weeks. Figured that was enough time to suck all the calories consumed and weighing data into Excel (actually Google Docs, but whatever) and see how well things were tracking.

I had Excel calculate running averages of the daily weigh-ins to smooth out the usual variations. Looking back over the past month, the drop in weight came out to 3.9 pounds, or roughly a pound a week. I was a bit disappointed by that, but there was still the calorie side of the equation to do.

The various methods of calculating TDEE all converged to around 3300 calories/day, so that's what used. I created a column that tracked net daily caloric deficit based on that TDEE, and then summed that column over the last month to determine the gross caloric deficit. This was then divided by 3,500 to get an estimate for expected fat loss. The result: a deficit equivalent to 4.1 pounds.

For the level of accuracy involved, expecting to lose 4.1 pounds and actually losing 3.9 is astoundingly accurate.

One key - there were a couple of "bad" days in there when we had company from overseas and blew right through TDEE level of eating. It is important to be as honest as possible on those days and LOG THOSE CALORIES, otherwise it is not possible to accurately track things. Days where you blow through TDEE not only undo what was done earlier, they require a number of days to make up for going forward. In all, those two days of badness required approximately a week to undo.

To re-iterate - throwing up of hands in a "what's done is done" attitude will not allow a meaningful understanding of what is actually happening - even the bad bad days needs to be logged!

Having gone through this exercise, I will now go make a support request to MFP so we can download our data in an Excel-compatible format.

EDIT: The next step will be to add body fat percentage data, to ensure that the weight being lost is actually fat, and not muscle.