Weight loss

jeffgibson64
jeffgibson64 Posts: 5 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I've been following this app to a T. My recommended caloric intake and macros are being followed pretty good. I have a hard time meeting the dietary goal of each day because it's hard to eat that much. Each time I close our my daily diary it tells me I'm doing great and estimates how much weight I'll lose in 5 weeks.
So far I have actually gained weight.
Just wondering what's up with that?

Answers

  • sollyn23l2
    sollyn23l2 Posts: 1,854 Member
    jeffgibson64 wrote: »
    I've been following this app to a T. My recommended caloric intake and macros are being followed pretty good. I have a hard time meeting the dietary goal of each day because it's hard to eat that much. Each time I close our my daily diary it tells me I'm doing great and estimates how much weight I'll lose in 5 weeks.
    So far I have actually gained weight.
    Just wondering what's up with that?

    The calorie allotment they give you is just an estimate. If you are actually gaining weight, you most likely need to decrease your calories by, say, 500.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 35,204 Member
    If you've been consistent in your logging and sticking close to that calorie goal for 4-6 weeks, Sollyn is likely right. If it's hard to eat that much, and you haven't switched from highly processed food products to mostly whole foods, that may also be a hint that calories are too high. If you've switched from non-filling foods (like highly processed) to filling foods (as most people find whole foods to be), then it may not be a hint.

    If you haven't been consistent/accurate that 4-6 weeks, it's too soon to tell, maybe . . . especially if you've increased exercise in addition to cutting calories, a thing many people do. Water retention and waste in the digestive tract can mask fat loss on the scale in the shorter run. It takes those multiple weeks - occasionally more - to sort that out.

    Since you haven't told us that timeline, your age/height/weight, activity level, calorie goal, or how much you've gained, we can't evaluate or comment on how likely it is that you truly are in a deficit, but not yet seeing the fat loss on the scale.
  • jeffgibson64
    jeffgibson64 Posts: 5 Member
    Alright I'll give y'all the rundown. I'm 60yo male, 6'2" tall with a large skeletel frame. I weighed 303 when I started using this app a little over one month ago. I started back to working out in June of 24. I do weight training and medium cardio for 3 days then take one or two days to recover. My workouts last a minimum of 2 hours. I don't mess around. I entered my activity level at lightly active, which I think should be active.
    When I started using this app I entered all my information plus my goal to reach 250 at a weight loss of 1lb per week.
    The app came up with a plan of 2640 calories per day at, carbs 198g/fat88g/protein 264g. In order to achieve this goal.
    I don't think I've hit that 2640 mark since I started. I do well to hit 2000. I keep the macros pretty close.
    I started off at 303# and this morning I weighed 310. So I've gained 7# since I started using the app.
    Any other questions please ask.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 35,204 Member
    edited February 10
    jeffgibson64 wrote: »
    Alright I'll give y'all the rundown. I'm 60yo male, 6'2" tall with a large skeletel frame. I weighed 303 when I started using this app a little over one month ago. I started back to working out in June of 24. I do weight training and medium cardio for 3 days then take one or two days to recover. My workouts last a minimum of 2 hours. I don't mess around. I entered my activity level at lightly active, which I think should be active.
    When I started using this app I entered all my information plus my goal to reach 250 at a weight loss of 1lb per week.
    The app came up with a plan of 2640 calories per day at, carbs 198g/fat88g/protein 264g. In order to achieve this goal.
    I don't think I've hit that 2640 mark since I started. I do well to hit 2000. I keep the macros pretty close.
    I started off at 303# and this morning I weighed 310. So I've gained 7# since I started using the app.
    Any other questions please ask.

    In that scenario, I'd expect an accurate 2640 calories to result in weight loss, once there are enough weeks in the mix. For example, this TDEE calculator estimates your maintenance calorie needs based on that description as 3000-3600 range, so around a pound a week loss might be expected, possibly more, if you're personally close to calorie needs averages for similar people: https://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/

    Eating less would be expected to result in faster loss, though a large calorie deficit can sometimes increase water retention because of the physical stress. If your current exercise routine dates back to June 2024, I wouldn't anticipate a big scale jump from water retention for that reason.

    I'm a little confused by your comment that you keep the macros close even when at 2000. The grams you mentioned add up to the 2640 calories. Presumably you mean you're maintaining the same percents at 2000? That would be more like carbs 150g, fat 67g, protein 200g. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. At your weight I'd prefer to be getting a bit more protein than that, probably 240g+ with a regular lifting program, but this research-based calculator I trust suggests 165g as optimal, up to 331g more speculatively for possible additional benefits: https://examine.com/guides/protein-intake/

    However, that's not about weight loss anyway, it's about optimizing the value of nutrition. Weight loss is directly about calories, with nutrition generally only an indirect factor.

    Using round numbers, 7 pounds of fat gain in a month - if fat gain is what it is - would suggest a person has eaten roughly 24,500 calories above maintenance cumulatively, or if we use 30 days as the basis, on average 817 calories daily more than maintenance. I know you said "a little over one month ago", not 30 days, but this is very approximate. If you want a closer estimate, you can do the estimate with the actual number of days.

    We'd normally tell a person to estimate the calories their weight change represents, as in the paragraph above, then use that plus the average calories eaten over the same time period, to get a personalized maintenance estimate. That personalized maintenance estimate can be used to estimate a personal calorie goal, knocking off 500 calories for each pound per week of loss.

    If you've averaged 2000 calories daily - which I also don't know for sure - that would imply maintenance calories around 2000 minus 817, or a bit under 1200 calories daily . . . which honestly I think is just not plausible. Again, since presumably you can add up your calories eaten over the time period, you could get a better estimate.

    MFP or other calorie calculators can under- or over-estimate calorie needs, but that big a gap is pretty much impossible IMO. I'm pretty much on board with your "what's up with that".

    One question is logging accuracy. That's not a diss at all. Logging can be a surprisingly subtle skill. Most of us who've been doing it for a long time (around 9.5 years in my case) have had some serious face-palm moments when we stumbled over some systematic problem in our logging habits.

    For sure, this would be a good moment to give thought to whether you're logging every bite, lick, taste, beverage, condiment, dressing, oil used in cooking, cheat/treat day, oopsie over-goal moments if you've had any, etc. Another thing is avoiding using other people's food-dish type entries (things like "ham sandwich" or "meat lasagna") because there's no way of knowing how much mayo or cheese or whatever they used, vs. what you used). Weighing foods is also more accurate than cups/spoons, let alone eyeballing . . . plus quicker and easier than cups/spoons, believe it or not, once a person knows the tricks. (That's a whole other topic, the tricks.)

    In that context, this next is an offer, not a demand: If you're willing to make your food diary MFP public, and say so here, some of the old hands may be willing to take a look and see whether anything jumps out at them, that they've noticed in learning their own logging. People are generally nice, not mean or critical in the kind of comments they make, though you might get some suggestions of food choices people have tried themselves to get the same satiation/happiness on reduced calories.

    There may be still some room in this scenario for variation from water retention or waste in transit in the digestive tract playing peek-a-boo on the scale with fat loss, but with a month in the books that's less likely. There's a more nuanced discussion of that sort of thing in this thread:

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

    I'd like to be able to help you - reaching a healthy weight has been such a powerful quality of life improvement for me that I want that for everyone, strangers or not. But the above is pretty much what I've got at this point. I admit, I always tend to write stupid-long essays, but in this case, since there were some approximations involved, I tried to "show my work" behind the thought process. I appreciate that you've been so open already, and answered my questions.

    Best wishes!

    P.S. If you reply again, that should show up in my Community notifications, so you shouldn't need to tell me that you've replied. :)
  • DiscusTank5
    DiscusTank5 Posts: 546 Member
    Any chance you've gained muscle this past month? A measuring tape may provide a better metric than the scale alone.

    I second what Ann has said. I was at a plateau for awhile this fall. What changed was weighing all my meals on a food scale -- by the gram.

    Best of luck. Don't give up! A few tweaks may be all you need to get the scale moving in the right direction.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 35,204 Member
    DiscusTank5 wrote: »
    Any chance you've gained muscle this past month? A measuring tape may provide a better metric than the scale alone.

    I second what Ann has said. I was at a plateau for awhile this fall. What changed was weighing all my meals on a food scale -- by the gram.

    Best of luck. Don't give up! A few tweaks may be all you need to get the scale moving in the right direction.

    Since a good rate of muscle mass gain for a man is estimated at maybe 2 pounds a month - and would realistically probably be slower at age 60 - OP would still have 5 pounds or so of mystery gain to account for, even with excellent muscle mass gain, sadly.
  • jeffgibson64
    jeffgibson64 Posts: 5 Member
    Thanks for all the replies. I think I'll start weighing my food and reduce my daily intake more.
    Even though I get the" you're not eating enough message ' some days.
    I'll see if I can make my stuff public
    Thanks
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 10,079 Member
    If you’re not weighing your food then there’s a chance that you’re eating a lot more than you think. Also check the database entries for accuracy. If you cook enter your own recipes ingredient by ingredient and don’t forget oil and condiments. You don’t know what a random mac n cheese 1 serving in the database entails.

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