Fasting, Gym and tracking data. How do you handle calories?

jhotunh3ll

Hello, apologies if the question is not very descriptive, I am a bit confused how to approach this. I have recently started to count calories with the app and I am getting better and better doing it. I have been doing fast 16:8 for some weeks before and I going to the gym in the mornings. So now I see the calories I eat vs what I should be eating.

I have a goal of 1600 cal a day based on my data. I can eat all those calories in the eight hours period, but I always seem to come short considering what I burn at the gym which is usually 500-600 cal. This means that every day when I close the diary I am under the goals I should.

How do you manage this? Should I not take in count the cals burnt at the gym? How can I eat so much healthy food in such sort amount of time?

I know the solution would be "eat more", but I would need some advice how to handle eating so much as it is really though for me specially at the end of the day when I get home. Eating the base 1600cal is not a big problem, it's the extra 600cal what kills me.

Thanks!

Retroguy2000

Re the IF, you could have a light pre-workout breakfast, e.g. banana, or oatmeal, or yogurt, etc. That gets you some calories in to help with the lifting, and means you don't have to fit as many during your IF window. OK so you wouldn't technically be "IF" at that point, but you're basically doing it for adherence anyway.

jhotunh3ll wrote: »

In regards to the negative calories, I do not think I have explained myself well. If you look at the screenshot there is on top Base Objective 1600, food 1728 and exercise 1028. So in total it says I am missing 900cal to reach the Base Objective-food+exercise. What I do not understand, and pardon my stupidness on this, do I need to eat the extra calories I burned from the exercise? Could I stop at the 1600 and be fine? What If the exercise is not tracked?

According to MFP, yes. I disagree with their methodology here, but I won't get into that. At the end of the day/week, you can do whatever you want. There is what you are burning (TDEE), and what you are consuming. Everything done here is just accounting. You can average 1900 per day and do consistent exercise and never track it, or eat 1600 then also eat 50% of the tracked exercise calories.

That's why ultimately all that matters is your weight change over time, and your tracked calories in. That tells you what your actual TDEE is, and also what your actual deficit is. If you're losing one pound per week while consuming X calories, then you can infer your TDEE is X+500. If you aren't losing weight after a few weeks then you can infer that X is your TDEE. Note that your TDEE will drop a little as you lose weight.

cmriverside

That's not really enough info for anyone to have a good answer for you.

But:

1. Why do you have to do IF? Giving yourself a longer eating window could help.

2. Depending on your current weight and general activity - you probably should try to eat at least some (maybe half?) of your Exercise calories. Here's why: https://support.myfitnesspal.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032625391-How-does-MyFitnessPal-calculate-my-initial-goals

3. If you're overweight now, I'm guessing you do know "how" to eat more. So...have a cheeseburger, or some peanut butter or some added cheese or butter. All food is allowable, and under-eating won't help you in the long run - but again, we don't know anything about you including whether or not 1600 is reasonable for you.

Retroguy2000

500-600 at the gym sounds like a high estimate. Doing what, and how heavy are you? And is that the amount burned, or did you subtract 1 MET to account for the calories already in your daily MFP allowance?

It sounds like your issue is the timing of your workout and the timing of your IF are not in sync. If you can't get them in sync, then my question would be, why is IF so important? As far as weight loss is concerned, IF is irrelevant. There is also no benefit to a fasted workout, in fact you may end up worse off due to potentially not being able to work out as hard.

You've been doing this for a few weeks you say. How is your weight changing? That's the true barometer of what your actual calorie deficit is versus what you think it is.

Btw, you don't need to close your diary. The only thing that does is get you an estimate of, "If you continue at this rate you'll lose X by Y.", which many people complain is wrong.

jhotunh3ll

Thanks for your replies. Here is some more info. Im 46yo, 175cm heigh and 86.7kg. My goal is to reach 70kg at some point. Whe I started I was 86, I guess the 0.7 could be muscle gain, not sure though, I really do not know much about all of this.

I am doing fasting because it helps inmensely. I work at home and the only way I have found that can keep me out of snacks and trashy food is IF. It also makes me enjoy food much more. I did it in the past for some months and while I did not do it for weight loss I felt great. I plan on doing it for a couple of months, but the weight loss benefit it could bring me is not really why I do it.

I do it from 21:00 to 13:00 more or less to sync with my family on the table for lunch and dinner.

At the gym I do Eliptical machine for 30 minutes and then another 30 minutes of strenght training with various machines. The 500-600 cal is what my watch reports to the app after the training session.

I can say I feel good, I know it is early but I am determined to lose weight. I need the energy to follow my kids and having my *kitten* all day in this chair is not helping.

About the food, I am under medication for cholesterol, so I am avoiding trash food at all.

Thanks!

sollyn23l2

jhotunh3ll wrote: »

Thanks for your replies. Here is some more info. Im 46yo, 175cm heigh and 86.7kg. My goal is to reach 70kg at some point. Whe I started I was 86, I guess the 0.7 could be muscle gain, not sure though, I really do not know much about all of this.

I am doing fasting because it helps inmensely. I work at home and the only way I have found that can keep me out of snacks and trashy food is IF. It also makes me enjoy food much more. I did it in the past for some months and while I did not do it for weight loss I felt great. I plan on doing it for a couple of months, but the weight loss benefit it could bring me is not really why I do it.

I do it from 21:00 to 13:00 more or less to sync with my family on the table for lunch and dinner.

At the gym I do Eliptical machine for 30 minutes and then another 30 minutes of strenght training with various machines. The 500-600 cal is what my watch reports to the app after the training session.

I can say I feel good, I know it is early but I am determined to lose weight. I need the energy to follow my kids and having my *kitten* all day in this chair is not helping.

About the food, I am under medication for cholesterol, so I am avoiding trash food at all.

Thanks!

The .7 could be water weight from increased exercise. I would say, though, that if you're trying to lose weight, then given that information, eating more is not likely to be the answer. If you're feeling good, then personally I wouldn't increase calories. Unless you're looking to gain weight (which isn't what you said).

Retroguy2000

jhotunh3ll wrote: »

Thanks for your replies. Here is some more info. Im 46yo, 175cm heigh and 86.7kg. My goal is to reach 70kg at some point. Whe I started I was 86, I guess the 0.7 could be muscle gain, not sure though, I really do not know much about all of this.

I am doing fasting because it helps inmensely. I work at home and the only way I have found that can keep me out of snacks and trashy food is IF. It also makes me enjoy food much more. I did it in the past for some months and while I did not do it for weight loss I felt great. I plan on doing it for a couple of months, but the weight loss benefit it could bring me is not really why I do it.

I do it from 21:00 to 13:00 more or less to sync with my family on the table for lunch and dinner.

At the gym I do Eliptical machine for 30 minutes and then another 30 minutes of strenght training with various machines. The 500-600 cal is what my watch reports to the app after the training session.

I can say I feel good, I know it is early but I am determined to lose weight. I need the energy to follow my kids and having my *kitten* all day in this chair is not helping.

About the food, I am under medication for cholesterol, so I am avoiding trash food at all.

Thanks!

That calorie estimate still sounds high to me. As I said, it's also probably the gross amount of calories. For example, say MFP has your target calorie goal at 2400. Call that 100 per hour to simplify it. If you work out for an hour and your watch says you burned 500, huzzah, but wait, you would have burned 100 doing your regular daily life instead, so it's actually 400 more burned. And then we could get into the whole thing about energy compensation meaning you burn less later in the day to compensate, but let's not get into the weeds on that for now.

Male or female?

Perhaps you have added muscle. Is your protein high? Are you a new lifter? Are you doing progressive overload and lifting close to failure, with sufficient volume per week? If you're ticking most of those boxes, then yeah you may have added muscle. You probably didn't add 0.7kg of muscle in three weeks though. It's a slow process for a new lifter, and even slower for experienced lifters.

Either way, that 0.7kg can be noise from water weight etc. But it does suggest you are not in a calorie deficit, especially if male, which you will need to lose weight. If you're female, your monthly cycle can have a big influence.

jhotunh3ll

Thanks for your kind replies. I am male btw, and yes, my goal is to lose weight to gain energy. I quit smoking 6 years ago for my kids and now I am doing this also for them, well, also for me, but I really want to be more active with them. I even cut with alcohol 100%.

The app gae me a daily goal of 1600 cal, 50% carbs, 30% fat, 20% protein. Protein is easy to reach for me. I also take protein powder 30g only when I see I need that extra push of calories and protein. It is the rest of the things that are more complicated.

I am a new lifter yes, I did in the past a bit but nothing I can count now. I do several machines just to train strenght and to balance with cardio as I read is important to do both things. I like to load the machine with as much weight as I can lift and do few reps to the max of my strenght, which is not much for now I have to say. For example, for biceps I can only put 10kg and I do 12, 10, 8 lifts.

The thing is that when I look at the app, today for example, I see I still would need to eat 900cal in an hour, and that is almost impossible to me. I am afraid I am not doing this right as I heard if I do not reach the proper intake of calories it would backfire on me, so I may need to stop the IF which I really would not want to,but I would totally do if I have to. The exercise negative calories is what I do not know what to do with.


Thanks again for your responses.

Retroguy2000

jhotunh3ll wrote: »

The app gave me a daily goal of 1600 cal, 50% carbs, 30% fat, 20% protein. Protein is easy to reach for me. I also take protein powder 30g only when I see I need that extra push of calories and protein. It is the rest of the things that are more complicated.

I am a new lifter yes, I did in the past a bit but nothing I can count now. I do several machines just to train strenght and to balance with cardio as I read is important to do both things. I like to load the machine with as much weight as I can lift and do few reps to the max of my strenght, which is not much for now I have to say. For example, for biceps I can only put 10kg and I do 12, 10, 8 lifts.

To clarify, you gave the app those settings. You can customize your preferred weight loss rate, you can provide a different estimate for your daily activity, and you can set your macro %'s however you want.

The lifting sounds promising for muscle growth, assuming sufficient volume (at least 10 working sets per muscle group per week) and progressive overload, however your protein is too low. That's just over 80g. You should be on at least 0.7g per pound, so at least 135g. Don't worry about the %, get the grams total, doesn't really matter when. It's also generally recommended btw to do cardio either separately from lifting, or after (aside from a 5-min warm-up). That way you have max energy for the lifting, and you can still do cardio as long as you want after. So in your case, 5-min warm-up, do the lifting, then get on the elliptical if you want.

Since you're at best flat wrt weight and you probably think you're in a deficit, I'd advise checking your food diary here. Check that you're using the correct entries for everything, that the data for them is correct, with the correct portion size, and that you're tracking every food and drink that has calories. According to an online calculator your TDEE is probably around 2,400.

I don't know about the exercise negative calories thing. I don't sync a tracker.

jhotunh3ll

I have used some online calculator and adjusted the values of the macros. That is something the app calculated for me so I was following it.
Now I have set Carb 215g, Proteins 138g and Fat 52g. The daily calories is 1880.
I am going now to do a proper gym plan (thanks for the tip on the cardio after lifts, I am definitively going to do that), and I think I am going to pause the IF for now as I think I need first to get more organized with the foods during the day rather than in a short time. Btw, I am measuring everything as exhaustively as I can with a grams scale.

In regards to the negative calories, I do not think I have explained myself well. If you look at the screenshot there is on top Base Objective 1600, food 1728 and exercise 1028. So in total it says I am missing 900cal to reach the Base Objective-food+exercise. What I do not understand, and pardon my stupidness on this, do I need to eat the extra calories I burned from the exercise? Could I stop at the 1600 and be fine? What If the exercise is not tracked?

Thanks for your comments!

Lietchi

The estimate from your watch sounds like it might be exaggerating the calorie burn a bit. Especially strength training doesn't burn very many calories (and many watches overestimate because they base the calories on HR which is a poor way to estimate calorie burns for strength training).
You do need to account for the exercise but I would start with eating 50% of those calories for the next 4 to 6 weeks and then evacuating what your weight trend has done compared to the weight you intended to lose and then adjust if needed.

jhotunh3ll

Thanks a lot for the detailed answers. I am already reading a lot of other posts in the forum with super good information.