How accurate is the weight loss you’ll loose that you’re given to at the end of every day.

pattaylor64
pattaylor64 Posts: 1 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
How accurate is the predicted weight loss given every time you complete your daily intake?

Answers

  • westrich20940
    westrich20940 Posts: 921 Member
    In my experience...it's basically irrelevant. My weight loss didn't really ever match that trajectory when I did complete my diary to see it so I stopped bc I felt it made me frustrated when seeing it and you don't have to. It's not super accurate...and can easily lead to emotional/mental frustration. If it's not a useful metric, there's no need to put much stock in it.

    I used a Bluetooth scale to weigh myself every other week --keeping in mind my cycle....and then that tracks to an app where you can see trend lines actually on a graph and I found that immensely helpful to see my trends/progress.

  • Retroguy2000
    Retroguy2000 Posts: 1,867 Member
    You don't need to complete your diary. It doesn't do anything other than give you a bogus estimate of future loss.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,598 Member
    It says "if every day were like today". It can't be. Yeah, sure, you could go out of your way to log exactly the same number of calories (or close) every day. You could exercise the same amount every day. But guess what? The day you spent extra time at the store wandering the aisles looking for some obscure thing . . . you burned more calories. The day the weather was vile so you stayed home, mostly on the couch curled up in a blanket . . . you burned fewer calories.

    Every day is never like today.

    On top of that, the message assumes you're statistically exactly average in your calorie needs. High odds you're not. Most people are close to the estimates, a few a bit higher or lower, a rare few surprisingly much higher or lower. You won't know where you fall in "averageness" until you've been at this for 4-6 week (or a whole menstrual cycle, if you have those).

    Advice: Average pretty close to your daily calorie goal on a weekly basis, like +/- 50 calories. Don't shoot for silly-extreme weight loss: Keep it achievable. After that 4-6 weeks or one cycle, see how much weight you've lost on average per week over the whole time. If that's not what you were aiming for, and you were aiming for something sensibly moderate, then adjust your calorie goal to get a better aim on that. Use the assumption that 500 calories per day is a pound a week (or 1100 calories per day is a kilo a week), and apply arithmetic for partial pounds/kilos. That'll work.

    Instead of trying to match the message, make it a fun game of trying to hit your planned very-sensible loss rate using your personal results data to adjust your plan. It's like a fun, productive science-fair project for grown-ups.

    MFP thinks I will gain weight in 5 weeks, even if I record a calorie level that I KNOW will result in weight loss for me (based on around 9 years so far of logging, loss then maintenance). It thinks I will gain weight even if I set my MFP "activity level" a step or so higher than reality. For reasons I don't clearly know, I'm one of those "surprisingly different from average" people.

    Are you? Keep plugging away patiently and persistently, and you'll find out.

    Best wishes - it's worth the effort!

  • jokingme
    jokingme Posts: 1 Member
    I find the projected weight loss very motivating but then when it doesn't actually happen very depressing. Thanks everyone for their honest input. I've been using the daily calorie counter for about 4 weeks and I weigh myself once a week. I've typically been holding steady for two weeks then on week three had a 1 pound loss then week 4 I was up 3 pounds. Is this crazy? I cannot figure out my body!!
  • sollyn23l2
    sollyn23l2 Posts: 1,784 Member
    Not very accurate at all. Our bodies just don't really work like that. My own projections using my own information have been much more helpful, but even that's just a guess.
  • csplatt
    csplatt Posts: 1,205 Member
    It’s a random estimate. For each of us it doesn’t just depend on accuracy of logging but also body composition and other things inside our body that make the number on the scale fluctuate. These things it cannot know. I ignore those estimates.
  • spiriteagle99
    spiriteagle99 Posts: 3,748 Member
    jokingme wrote: »
    I find the projected weight loss very motivating but then when it doesn't actually happen very depressing. Thanks everyone for their honest input. I've been using the daily calorie counter for about 4 weeks and I weigh myself once a week. I've typically been holding steady for two weeks then on week three had a 1 pound loss then week 4 I was up 3 pounds. Is this crazy? I cannot figure out my body!!

    That is the way weight loss works: it isn't linear. Your body retains water for a lot of different reasons: too much salt, too much fiber (takes a while to digest), new exercise that causes muscles to retain water to aid healing, ovulation, etc. Just within a week, your weight will go up and down a couple of pounds whether you are dieting or not. If you are only weighing once a week, then it becomes harder to know what is actually happening with your weight. If you weigh after a big meal, a restaurant meal (lots of salt), a hard workout, etc. your weight may go up. If you weigh the day after you've cleared out your system, it may be down a few pounds. Many people on this forum weigh every day and then use an app to smooth out the data points to see whether the overall trend is going up or going down. When I was losing weight, I just weighed myself every 3 or 4 weeks, since that was usually enough time for any weight loss to be fairly obvious.

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