Not sure what I am doing wrong....

gramacanada

if you are going to the gym you will be building muscle which is heavier than the fat you are loosing, so go on looks as well as the scales.

GAH!! Muscle is NOT heavier than fat. A pound of muscle weights exactly the same as a pound of fat. Muscle just takes up less space on your body.

Don't be silly. How could 1 lb of muscle take up less space than 1 lb of fat, unless as a general statement (without knowing weight or volume) muscle was heavier?

A pound of feathers weighs exactly the same as a pound of iron... A pound of iron takes up much less room.
But it is NOT heavier. Same with fat and muscle. One pound of fat weighs the same as one pound of muscle.
The pound of fat is bigger. The pound of muscle is smaller.

kennethmgreen

MFP lies. Not on purpose, of course. But all the figure it gives you are averages and you can't use them as gospel because everyone is different. Just because the screen says "if you ate like this every day in 5 weeks you'd weight X", doesn't mean it's true. The same thing when it claims you burned 150 calories when you only walked a mile. (The net calorie burn of walking is about 50 calories a mile, btw.)

There are so many ways MFP can be off.

First of all, it can be off because it doesn't get your BMR right. The BMR it calculates for you is just an average based on other women your age and weight. But that doesn't mean it's your BMR. Yours could be higher or lower. If it's lower, then the amount of calories MFP things you need to maintain will be too high. So it will not give you enough of a deficit or it will think that the deficit you do have will lead to more weight loss than it does.

Another way it can be off is with the exercise database. I see exercise burns posted in my news feed from MFP that are ridiculously high. I know the database isn't subtracting off your BMR calories which are already accounted for. If you don't subtract them off, then you are counting them twice. This is why a lot of people only eat back half their exercise calories. Or they subtract off 60-100 calories an hour from what their HRM or MFP tells them. (HRMs also don't subtract off your BMR calories.)

It can also be off because of human error. If you don't record every lick, bite or sniff, you could easily be missing 50-200 calories a day. If you don't measure your food, your portion sizes could be bigger than you think. Also, if the package says there is 1 oz of food and that's 200 calories, there could be as much as 18% more than that by law so it could be that you are eating 236 calories. Do that a couple of times a day and it adds up!

You may also have put in too high an activity level when you first set MFP up. This is why a lot of people just put in sedentary and then record anything they do that's out of the ordinary and only if their loses show they need to do that.

What it's not likely to be is gaining muscle -- it's very hard to gain muscle when you eat at a calorie deficit. Some experts say it's impossible. Not sure I agree that it's impossible, but it's definitely hard.

The other thing is, losing 1.2 pounds a week is actually a pretty fast clip. If it was me, I wouldn't want to be losing faster than that because the faster you lose it, the harder your body fights to put it back on once you are in maintenance from what I can see. As an example, in some study of Biggest Lose participants -- people who are losing weight 2-3x faster than that -- they found their metabolisms were much more wrecked by their dieting than typical dieters who lose it slower.

I think your post is supportive and well-informed, and I especially like your advice around weight loss rate. However, the idea of subtracting BMR from calorie burns (except in cases of burns lasting more than 2 hours or so), isn't as accurate as you are presenting. If you want to subtract BMR from each calorie burn, you should also be recording every walk to your car, every time you go up a flight of stairs, every time your open a jar of pickles. Because those activities are - however minimally - burning calories above your BMR.

I'm not trying to convince you not to subtract out your BMR, or even saying that you are incorrect. But the "BMR calories burned get counted twice" argument is a bit one-sided when presented the way you have. And I've seen too many people get frustrated obsessising on the details. Many people (like myself) know that the calorie burns we enter are counting the BMR cals twice. But it all evens out when considering the other things we do throughout the day above our BMR. It's just one more way to use MFP tool and the information it provides.

MFP, and weight loss/fitness in general, is about estimations. Yes, accurate estimations are better than wild guesses. But they are still estimations.

MacMadame

If you want to subtract BMR from each calorie burn, you should also be recording every walk to your car, every time you go up a flight of stairs, every time your open a jar of pickles. Because those activities are - however minimally - burning calories above your BMR.

Except those are already accounted for in your activity level that you select when you set your numbers up.

However, you are right that you shouldn't subtract your BMR from your exercise burn. Technically you should subtract your RMR from your exercise burn rate but I didn't want to get too technical about BMR vs. RMR especially with numbers that are all just estimates anyway. :laugh:

megsmom2

the program is telling you to eat more, and MFP works by having you eat back your exercise calories. You are doing neither of those. It does seem counter intuitive, but it works, and will help you keep healthy while you are losing. Eating so little just creates the very problem you are talking about...slow to no loss.