Data Nerd Insights - Figuring Out Your Personal NEAT

Cortelli

Warning – Data Nerd Stuff Follows

So I have about 5 months’ worth of regular energy tracking in MFP (lost a bunch before I joined MFP and no data  unfortunately). After getting to roughly a desired BF% and recently completing a period of maintenance, I started a bulking effort this week. Not having ever bulked before, I revisited all of my data in an effort to get a better handle on what my true NEAT expenditures are, and therefore get a better sense of a comfortable bulking calorie target. It had been several months since I poured over the data, and with a larger data set, I found something interesting that I hadn’t seen before.

First – the below is a graph showing my actual weight on a 7-day average (i.e., looking at the average weight over the preceding 7 days) versus the “predicted” weight (i.e., looking at the actual 7-day average weight from 7 days ago versus today compared to the predicted weight given recorded energy intake and expenditures). As you can see – pretty reasonably close, never really outside a few pounds and both under- and over-estimating actual weights.




But then I also looked at the actual weight (again on a 7 day averaged basis), versus the predicted weight given the cumulative energy balance since the recording began back in early November. As you can see, although my rolling actual vs. predicted never varied too greatly, the cumulative gap shows a significant unpredicted weight loss.




Could be an error in NEAT (or activity level in MFP), overly conservative logging of food or exercise (I am not religious about weighing and eat out enough that I have to estimate a fair bit), or a slightly higher than normal metabolism even though expected NEAT is accurate for a person my size. FWIW, throughout my time on MFP I have used “sedentary” as my activity level, and my NEAT as calculated by MFP is +/- 2000 cals (depending on weight). I played around and changed my activity to “lightly active” – basically added 240 cals daily – and plotted the datat of actual vs. predicted. This adjustment makes the actual and predicted look much more aligned.




All of which is interesting to me in and of itself. More importantly, it gives me a much clearer view on what my true NEAT expenditures appear to be, which in turn helps me greatly in setting calorie targets for my bulking experiment.
This disparity wasn’t so clear a few months back with less data.

If you’ve got a significant chunk of data in MFP, and are still a bit in the dark about your energy requirements, spend a little time in Excel or a preferred spreadsheet program with your data – it can be eye opening!