Help with caloric deficit

nmjpk576sj

hi, my current goals are to lose 2 pounds per week. For some reason, when my calories are burned and tracked, my calories are increased. This is clearly not correct.

PAV8888

Do you have a tracking device such as a fitness band or watch or 'health app' connected to your MFP account? Or are you tracking and adding exercise on MFP?

In both cases this may change your eating target. But why rush to conclude that this is not correct? :)

You take in Calories and you spend Calories. The difference has to either go into something or come out of something.

Setting aside some revving up and revving down in the margins, the "something" tends to be body weight. And for that matter, for most people and in most situations, this body weight tends to mostly, but not exclusively, consist of body fat

To lose 1lb a week…. you have to take in about 3500 Cal less than you spend.

If you want to lose 1lb a week, taking in 7000 Cal less than you spend would have you lose 2lbs instead of one.

Ah, you say: but that's good! I would lose faster than I wanted!
Well…. hold on there sparky.
Other people will say: faster is not always better! And faster in the short term is often not better in the long term.

There do exist advantages to losing at an individually reasonable pace without exceeding it.

Of course, ahead of time, it is true that you don't know whether your activity tracking or your food tracking is accurate. And even if it is, you don't even know how close to the population averages you, an individual, are positioned. You could be unusually low, unusually high, or right in the middle!

So you eat at a reasonable deficit for a reasonable length of time. Minimum 3 weeks or so. If you happen to have a hormonal cycle at least one if not two cycles while comparing your weight at similar points of your cycle.

And then you look at how much you would have expected to lose based on what you've logged, and how much you have actually lost. And then you course correct and keep going!

AnnPT77

If you have a fitness tracker synced to MFP, and the tracker thinks it saw you burn more calories than MFP expected you to burn based on your activity level setting plus other stuff in your MFP profile . . . MFP will add calories to your goal. And - assuming all those estimates are reasonably close to accurate . . . that IS correct.

Think about it.

Here's a simple example: Say I burn 2000 calories per day just being alive and doing my job and work around the house. I want to lose a pound a week. That will give me a calorie goal of 1500 calories daily to lose the pound a week, because as PAV said, 3500 calories per week is a pound per week of weight change, and 500 is one day's worth of that 3500.

OK so far?

Now, let's say I exercise for 250 calories, plus did all my usual job and home stuff. I will burn not 2000 but instead 2250 that day. If I still want to lose a pound a week, I'd subtract 500 from that . . . and get to eat 1750 instead of 1500. Or, to put the same arithmetic another way, I get my 1500 calorie basic daily allowance, plus an extra 250 from the exercise, which adds up to 1750. That last version is what I'd be looking at in MFP pages, 1500 basic goal + 250 exercise = 1750 I can eat.

Move more, I get to eat more and still expect to lose weight at the same rate. Pretty cool, eh?

True, I could skip eating that 250, and lose weight faster than a pound a week . . . but if I repeat that kind of thing to an extreme, I'm increasing health risks, maybe getting over-fatigued so dragging through the day, losing muscle mass not just body fat, getting thinning hair a few weeks down the road, and maybe more stuff that's worse. Is bad stuff guaranteed to happen from fast loss? No, but the risk goes up.

Personally, I eat my sensibly-estimated exercise calories, because I like food better than I like increased health risk. YMMV.

Also, all of the other stuff PAV said, too. 😉