GUYS! I AM SO CONFUSED! 80% TDEE or eat my exercise cals?

yourmomdude

Numbers:

BMR: Around 1600

TDEE: Lightly active=2250
Moderately active=2540

Harris-Benedict is about 100 cal less than my TDEE estimates.

I've been doing cardio 4-5x/wk (I bike outside 10mi/day 3-4 days/wk and do zumba 2x/wk), I lift weights 2-3x/wk. About 5-6 hrs a week total.

I set MFP to lose 1lb/wk and it spit out the number 1450, which is 200 cal below my BMR, but is still way higher than all the people on my news feed eating 1200 cal and then not eating back their exercise calories.

Everyone on here is constantly fighting about eating exercise calories and starvation mode and TDEE and blahblahblah. It has me super confused about what I should be eating. I weighed myself after 10 days (at night at the gym because I don't have a scale) and gained a pound. I posted my frustration on here and posters responded by patronizing me about whether I logged a doughnut I talked about eating over the weekend. I know I am not going to lose a ton of water weight immediately because I already ate well and exercised before using MFP--I just ate too much and exercised too little.

I am really confused and concerned about what I should eat. I don't want to work out this hard to not see some results.

Any suggestions? CAN SOMEONE ON THE INTERNET HELP ME?!?!?

withchaco

80% of TDEE is the same thing as eating your exercise calories... because exercising increases your TDEE.

However, if you chose "lightly active" or "moderately active" because you work out, then DO NOT eat your exercise calories because your exercise cals are already estimated into average TDEE that way.

ubermensch13

Eat 20% below your TDEE and continue your work out routine. Give it time......not everyone loses what MFP says, per week, sometimes it takes a longer sample size to average out. Are your clothes fitting better? Are they looser? Don't use the scale as the measuring stick......and stop obsessing, it is a marathon, not a sprint.

xcarbonix

Do you know what personally worked for me?

I was often times frustrated by seeing the crazy mixed messages all my MFP had, as well as their results and found it demotivating in the biggest way. I deleted all of my MFP friends and focused on what worked for MY body and MY results while paired with my actual trainer at the Y. I went from not losing anything at all and hating looking at my feed.... to losing 4 inches and gaining muscle.

My advice is find a professional who can help you in your area and focus on your own body without comparing yourself to anyone else. Comparison will kill ya if you let it!

Rehouven

Hi there!
I think it all depends on what your goal is, how you train (much more than how much!) and what are your macro ratios day-by-day.

First of all, with all this sport, I think you can consider yourself at least moderately active.

If your objective is body recomposition (lose fat, make muscle), I think you should train less (try to cut on Cardio) and focus on consistently increasing strength. Then from a calorie perspective, I'd try to have a greater calorie deficit on rest days and stay somewhere between your BMR and your TDEE on your workout days. You should experiment and see what works best with you. I'd also do what ubermensch says - measure some key areas (hips, thighs, etc...) and focus on size much more than the pure weight loss which can really go up and down depending on water retension, etc...

Hope this helps.

Pebble321

Don't overthink it.
Just pick one method and stick with it.

Using MFP numbers and eating exercise cals is probably going to give you about the same daily cals as eating TDEE-20%.
It's just two different ways of getting to the end point.

Choose whichever one makes more sense to you, and don't worry about what anyone else says!

norcal_yogi

bump...

rotill

Going by weigh-ins only helps when you keep it up over time. At any random day when you weigh yourself, you may be bloated due to the time of the month, the composition of your meals yesterday, a particularly hard work-out that binds water in your body to heal up those growing muscles - it is impossible to go by one weigh-in, particularly if you aim at losing weight slowly.

I had gained a pound yesterday, then lost two today. That's how it goes. Of course I didn't lose two points today, I lost those pounds over the last two weeks, but yesterday my body decided to let go of water weight etc, and I didn't eat anything wrong, nor work out too much, and so it suddenly clicked and the weight-loss showed.

Now, the principle above works the other way too - you can't disregard that weigh-in either. What you need to do is plot it, keep logging your food and exercise, and keep track over time. If may be the quality of what you eat. Some people react strongly to carbs and processed sugars, others need to keep away from fat and low on proteins. It may be that you need some variety in your work-outs - I have set my activity level to low even if I ride my bike to work every day. The bike rides do very little for me compared to the amount of calories I should burn, as I am so used to it and do it so efficiently it hardly registers.

Basically, my advice is: Keep tracking what you eat and how you work out, weigh again in a few days, and if you are still gaining, have a look at your routines. There are a lot of factors beyond calories that can influence you, and you need an overview over what you currently do to know what to start changing.