Help with this cal in/out process??????

Nana_Booboo

Can you all help me out as to if I got this straight in my head and the reason that I've failed so many times at losing and keeping my weight off???

If I eat 1200 and exercise off 400 my body only gets 800 cal. This "could" eventually cause me to not lose or lose extremely slowly. Years of dieting and depriving and have caused me to fail several times. HOWEVER, it low calorie obviously works, people that has had gastric surgeries have lost weight this way for a long time,


A basic diet of 2000 cal plus exercise 2-5 times a week is the "normal" maintainable diet for most humans, correct? That's why most lables say "for a 2000 cal diet"

However, I still want to lose weight.

So for example, I take in 1800, exercise 600 bring my total calories in back down to 1200 thus having a deficit from a maintainable diet of 2000 cal of 800 cal a day that with in a weeks time is 5600 cal. That should give you a 1.5 lb loss.


If this is correct thinking, I think at age 42 I've finally figured out my life long struggle!!!


Any suggestions will be welcome, even if I'm totally wrong.

Sidesteal

If this is correct thinking, I think at age 42 I've finally figured out my life long struggle!!!

No, because you are basing your deficit off of a suggested 2000 calorie diet instead of basing it off of your TDEE/maintenance.

TDEE: The amount that YOU burn throughout the day through a combination of exercise and BMR expenditure.

You can read more about this here, as well as check out some calculations:
http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=121703981

AdAstra47

"Calories in / calories out" does work for SOME people. But it's vastly oversimplified. Our bodies are more complex than that. This is why 95% of diets fail.

First thing is the difficulty in trying to figure out your "calories out." Take BMR, for example. Online calculators use your gender, height & weight to give you a rough average of the number of calories you'll burn just to keep yourself alive every day. BUT the online calculators can't take into account the hundreds of other variables that are affecting your metabolism and its speed: How much of your body is muscle mass? Do you have a large or small frame? What is your genetic ancestry? Your metabolism can be affected by the altitude where you live, childhood diseases you've had, your natural hormonal cycles, how much stress you're under, how much sleep you've been getting... If you have dieted in the past, and gained the weight back, you may have unintentionally slowed down your metabolism so your BMR may be lower than normal. Or not.
Long story short: unless you've had it tested by a doctor, any BMR reading you get is only a very rough estimate so you may have to adjust it up or down based on your own personal experience.

You can think of your body as a furnace where calories are burned to keep the fire going. Your body can burn carbohydrates for energy, or it can burn fat & protein. But even if the fuel & the oxygen are there, you won't have a fire until you get a spark to start it. That's your hormonal triggers. Hormones (insulin, for example) tell your body when to burn energy and when to store it. So if something is throwing them off, then that also throws off the "calories in / calories out" equation.

There are different chemical reactions to process different types of calories. For example, I've learned that my body doesn't process carbs well. So as long as I was eating the US RDA's carb-heavy diet, even though I was eating a calorie deficit, I was gaining weight. In order to start losing, I had to adjust my ratios so that I'm eating very few carbs and getting most of my energy from fat & protein. Again, everyone's body is different, you have to adjust your ratios of carbs/fat/protein to whatever will work best for your particular body.

There is no easy answer. If there were, we wouldn't have an obesity epidemic. One of the great things about MFP, though, is the tracking ability. You can log exactly what you eat each day, you can write notes, and then you can look at your last week or your last month or your last three months & try to identify trends. Everyone's body is different, you just have to figure out what will work for you. And tracking everything carefully will help you do that.

Good luck!

jayb0ne

I echo what some other folk have said about it all being personal to you. Even using a formula to work out my maintenance level or using MFP's recommended maintenance cals wasn't quite right for me.

I also noticed that as I changed my body composition (more muscle, less fat), my maintenance level of calories changed. This is because muscle costs more calories to maintain, so more muscle equals more calories onto that maintenance number. I read somewhere once that a pound of muscle burns 50 calories a day without any effort - I dunno how true that is though, I didn't look into it fully.

It's a long haul process of checking, weighing and measuring your body and adjusting diet to find your own balance.

I always tell people who are just starting out (only when asked of course) to track calories first and foremost and make a deficit based on their estimated TDEE. Once you've got the hang of creating a consistent deficit, then you can play with switching foods around to change your macro split and see what works well for you.

As I say, it's a long haul process... It'll take time to fully understand your body's reaction to different types of food intake.

Hope that helps a bit.

Jay

andrejjorje

All from above are great great answers.

cshrank

Also dont forget that when you work out, your body needs more energy. The suggested calorie intake is what you are supposed to be burning... so if your suggested comsumption is 1600 and you burn 400, at the end of the day you'll probably be more hungry and you'll need that extra 400... thats why your calories jump to 2000 on MFP. The trick is not to starve yourself! Thats why MFP gives you more calories to eat when you work out... to compensate. I don't really know how it all works because when I work out alot, there's no way I can eat all the calories it says to eat, but on the other hand its hard for me to stay with in my calories when I don't work out, even if I do eat healthy. I just know when I do work out, I'm much more hungry throughout the day and I do not feel bad for eating more... sometimes I feel I cannot get enough to eat! But I've seen a lot of succes this month just by counting my calories in/ calories out.