Default Calorie Settings

bates

Alright to make a long story short, here it goes. I know that whens tarting weight loss programs you dont see a loss right away, but after 2 weeks of health eating and working out I gained weight. Now I dont know if its because i went from a pre-sedentary life style, back to my football style lifting but I'm confused.

MFP had be eating around 2300 calories with the default settings of 55%, 20%, and 30% of cals, protein, and fat, respectively. Well MFP I'm changing it. The default settings it chose I don't like so now they read, 1800 calories, 50%, 25%, and 25% for each category. Any opinions? I'm thinking of lowering the fat even more and upping the protein. Or just leaving it there and ignoring the abundance of protein I already get in my diet

SHBoss1673

Alright to make a long story short, here it goes. I know that whens tarting weight loss programs you dont see a loss right away, but after 2 weeks of health eating and working out I gained weight. Now I dont know if its because i went from a pre-sedentary life style, back to my football style lifting but I'm confused.

MFP had be eating around 2300 calories with the default settings of 55%, 20%, and 30% of cals, protein, and fat, respectively. Well MFP I'm changing it. The default settings it chose I don't like so now they read, 1800 calories, 50%, 25%, and 25% for each category. Any opinions? I'm thinking of lowering the fat even more and upping the protein. Or just leaving it there and ignoring the abundance of protein I already get in my diet

we really need your numbers in order to even make an (educated) guess on something like this. Height Weight, exercise routine and any other information you can give. Without that, the numbers don't mean that much.

bates

Alright to make a long story short, here it goes. I know that whens tarting weight loss programs you dont see a loss right away, but after 2 weeks of health eating and working out I gained weight. Now I dont know if its because i went from a pre-sedentary life style, back to my football style lifting but I'm confused.

MFP had be eating around 2300 calories with the default settings of 55%, 20%, and 30% of cals, protein, and fat, respectively. Well MFP I'm changing it. The default settings it chose I don't like so now they read, 1800 calories, 50%, 25%, and 25% for each category. Any opinions? I'm thinking of lowering the fat even more and upping the protein. Or just leaving it there and ignoring the abundance of protein I already get in my diet

we really need your numbers in order to even make an (educated) guess on something like this. Height Weight, exercise routine and any other information you can give. Without that, the numbers don't mean that much.

well I'm 6'5, 260, like I said above I use to play collegiate football (recent graduate). After football was over I stopped working out, lost a good deal of my muscle and went from about 275 to my current weight of 260. I try to workout about 3-4 hopefully 5 times a week, but waking up at 4am and getting home at 5:30 puts a strain on that. My workout consists 30 minute walking, recently upgraded to about a 45 minute walk/job around a neighboring lake (Lake Mission Viejo in California), which i think is about 4 miles.

As far as lifting goes, i often switch of between toning type exercises (low weight high reps) and muscle building (high weight, low reps), and as well as a lot of body wieght/balance type stuff. I'll start out with the walk and go straight into my workout (keeping my HR up). For the toning I'll often do circuit type lifts such as DB chest exercises, kettle bells, push ups, barbell alternating steps ups, cross over step ups over a bench (stand on the left with my left foot on the bench, step up touch down on the right, back up touch down back on the left.). For some of the higher weights, I'll do more of the big 3 lifts (squat, bench, cleans) followed with some auxilary type lifts, and then followed with arms and a light stretch.

Hope that helps

SHBoss1673

2 things that I can see.

first, for your weight, height, and age (assuming a lightly active lifestyle), 1800 calories is far too few. 2250 is your BMR, which is as low as you should be going. This means, without doing one stitch of exercise, you should be at 2250 calories consumed per day. This assumes you have no metabolic or organ conditions that would slow your metabolic rate.

Second, Believe it or not, for your height, and age, 260 isn't too bad, it's a little high, but maybe not if your Body fat % is anywhere near 20 (you should definitely get your body Fat % checked before you do anything else) so weight loss is going to be neither fast, nor easy for you.

My recommendation, work a cardio intense program (I.E. 4 days cardio only, 2 days full body moderate weights just to retain your muscle mass for now) with 2 of those cardio days being High Intensity Intervals, 1 day of Straight max intensity short duration (to increase VO2 Max) and 1 day of medium intensity endurance (lower heart rate, but at least 15 minutes longer than the HIIT days).

Why this plan? Because it's a good balance of muscle maintenance, and fat burning, plus it will improve your overall oxygen efficiency and cardiovascular health, and believe it or not, even at 22, someone your height, and weight, there is a higher chance for heart disease later in life, building up your heart and lungs now will decrease that risk by 10's of percents when you hit your 30s.
You add a balanced diet (I feel you can go up to a 45-30-25 carb-protein-fat diet) with plenty of antioxidants and electrolytes in it (bigger bodies need to watch for dehydration far more than smaller bodies due to the amount of fluid muscles need to stay healthy).

Now, later on when you are at a good place, and your calories are in maintenace, you can think about muscle definition or even increasing muscle mass if you like, but until you know where your body fat % is, and until it's down below 20% (for your age, that's a really important milestone to reach) I wouldn't think too much about increasing muscle strength or size.

I can give you tips in a PM if you like on 20 something year old persons and ways to increase your aerobic capacity, it's different from us old folks who need somewhat less intensity and more time.

Hope this helps

-Banks

P.S. I hear where you're coming from, I played college football too, and ended up at 6'2" 235 lbs, and while that's not horrible, like you, it's not great either, it takes about 2 years to get back to great (well, maybe less for someone in their 20s).

SHBoss1673

I just realized you said you can normally only do 5 days a week.

to modefy for that, I would do 3 days of cardio (2 HIIT and one endurance, skip the VO2 one as it's not strictly speaking, necessary), and 2 days of moderate full body weight training (I.E. 5 set of each exercise with maybe 70% to 75% max weight and 10 to 14 reps per set, 3 combination exercises per major muscle group, I.E. instead of squats, do jump squats to work opposing muscle groups, weighted (or maybe not with your weight) pull ups to work both biceps, triceps, shoulders, and chest (pull ups don't have to be 14 reps, that would be a bit insane to ask for 70 pull ups, probably looking to test for max count, then do 70 percent of that like if you can do 10 pull ups to failure, do 7 as your rep count) and then some kind of weighted russian twists with kettle balls or something. I'm just trying to give you a full workout range for a short period of time, a routine that does multiple muscle groups at once, because we aren't looking to give you bulk or more definition, there's no need to isolate muscles.

bates

2 things that I can see.

first, for your weight, height, and age (assuming a lightly active lifestyle), 1800 calories is far too few. 2250 is your BMR, which is as low as you should be going. This means, without doing one stitch of exercise, you should be at 2250 calories consumed per day. This assumes you have no metabolic or organ conditions that would slow your metabolic rate.

Second, Believe it or not, for your height, and age, 260 isn't too bad, it's a little high, but maybe not if your Body fat % is anywhere near 20 (you should definitely get your body Fat % checked before you do anything else) so weight loss is going to be neither fast, nor easy for you.

My recommendation, work a cardio intense program (I.E. 4 days cardio only, 2 days full body moderate weights just to retain your muscle mass for now) with 2 of those cardio days being High Intensity Intervals, 1 day of Straight max intensity short duration (to increase VO2 Max) and 1 day of medium intensity endurance (lower heart rate, but at least 15 minutes longer than the HIIT days).

Why this plan? Because it's a good balance of muscle maintenance, and fat burning, plus it will improve your overall oxygen efficiency and cardiovascular health, and believe it or not, even at 22, someone your height, and weight, there is a higher chance for heart disease later in life, building up your heart and lungs now will decrease that risk by 10's of percents when you hit your 30s.
You add a balanced diet (I feel you can go up to a 45-30-25 carb-protein-fat diet) with plenty of antioxidants and electrolytes in it (bigger bodies need to watch for dehydration far more than smaller bodies due to the amount of fluid muscles need to stay healthy).

Now, later on when you are at a good place, and your calories are in maintenace, you can think about muscle definition or even increasing muscle mass if you like, but until you know where your body fat % is, and until it's down below 20% (for your age, that's a really important milestone to reach) I wouldn't think too much about increasing muscle strength or size.

I can give you tips in a PM if you like on 20 something year old persons and ways to increase your aerobic capacity, it's different from us old folks who need somewhat less intensity and more time.

Hope this helps

-Banks

P.S. I hear where you're coming from, I played college football too, and ended up at 6'2" 235 lbs, and while that's not horrible, like you, it's not great either, it takes about 2 years to get back to great (well, maybe less for someone in their 20s).

Sweet man, thats exactly the kind of help that I was looking for. I know how to put muscle mass on no problem, but as far as body fat % reduction goes I only know the basics. The only reason I was focusing on getting the lifting in was because I have been reading that the continual muscle breaking/building will help increase your metabolism, ultimately helping you burn more calories.

Yeah I played offensive line so i wasnt, shall we say, the leanest player out there, nor the healthiest eating.

SHBoss1673

Sweet man, thats exactly the kind of help that I was looking for. I know how to put muscle mass on no problem, but as far as body fat % reduction goes I only know the basics. The only reason I was focusing on getting the lifting in was because I have been reading that the continual muscle breaking/building will help increase your metabolism, ultimately helping you burn more calories.

Yeah I played offensive line so i wasnt, shall we say, the leanest player out there, nor the healthiest eating.

no worries bro. I hear ya. Our trainers had no clue about nutrition (course this was back in the early 90s) so I hear ya on that front. I have plenty of info on that too if you need, just send me a message if you have any questions, as I doubt many others on here will relate to your situation (there might be 2 or 3 guys that could but...). I was a free saftey so I never really had that kind of weight management issue, plus I went and played rugby instead my junior and senior years so weight was not a problem (believe it or not, 3-a-days in football are easy compared to 3-a-days in rugby, even without the pads). But I can give you all kinds of cardio things to really lean you down and cut you up. At 22, you should be able to kill it in less than 6 months if you work moderately hard and keep a decent diet going. You could probably get down to like 245 or so and really look nasty, your age is the perfect time to do it too.

0mega60

hey guys....im still 2 months new with the program and iphone app.....like to join this group .....since im getting extreme with my workouts 7 days and data daily updates and reviews...:))))))

seems that i cannot grasp the DAILY SUMMARY REPORT.....seems i can add my cardio and register calories for it but no setup for excercise/calories...?????

confused !!!!!!

please help

SHBoss1673

hey guys....im still 2 months new with the program and iphone app.....like to join this group .....since im getting extreme with my workouts 7 days and data daily updates and reviews...:))))))

seems that i cannot grasp the DAILY SUMMARY REPORT.....seems i can add my cardio and register calories for it but no setup for excercise/calories...?????

confused !!!!!!

please help

send an email to me Omega, this thread is a little old, it's not really a group, but I'm more than happy to help you out with any advice you may need.