What % cut of TDEE?

Lili_Bunny

I am 28 yrs old and 5'2" and currently weigh 193 lbs. I have at least 60 pounds to lose, probably more. I try to work out for an hour at least 4x per week - usually a Jillian Michaels tape. My HRM has me burning from 300-500 per workout.

What percentage cut should I use off of my TDEE, assuming I put 3-5hrs per week activity level?

Also, what calculation system is best? Harris, Mifflin, Katch?

Thanks for any help!

NCchar130

I'm fairly new to this but I think 15% is the recommended cut.

Have you input your stats here? http://scoobysworkshop.com/calorie-calculator/

This is where I came up with my goal.

NCchar130

When I put your numbers in, it shows a BMR of 1648, TDEE of 2555, and a calorie goal of 2172 as a 15% cut.

Lili_Bunny

Thanks for looking that up! I have heard that if you have a lot to lose (like me) you might want to go lower, though? Like 30%? But I don't know if that's really a good idea or not.

NCchar130

good question! i will hope someone more knowledgeable than myself will see this and answer, because I'm honestly not sure.

I went with MFP settings for the first 40 pounds or so, lost weight at a good rate. When I started strength training on what (since MFP kept setting me lower) turned out to be a lower net than my BMR, I felt so awful so quickly that I began looking into EM2WL more seriously and raising my calories made all the difference in the world in how I felt. But I couldn't say for certain, based on my experience, if that was eating too low alone or because of adding real strength training and the low eating made real recovery impossible.

I'm actually eating more now than I did at the very beginning when i weighed 217

heybales

When I put your numbers in, it shows a BMR of 1648, TDEE of 2555, and a calorie goal of 2172 as a 15% cut.

First, if you have decent estimate of BF% within 5%, use the Most Accurate Scooby and Katch method.

And You can use 20% down to about 40 lbs, then go to 15%.

You'll already be getting bigger deficit because your TDEE is higher. 20% of 2555 is bigger than 20% of 2000.

And if your 40 hr job time is sedentary desk job, I'd suggest 4 hrs of high cardio like that is a BMR multiplier of 1.52.

But if your job or equivalent time is more than sedentary desk job, it goes up a bit depending on time.

Using this spreadsheet, you can get best estimate of Bf%, TDEE activity calc, log your progress, get macro goals based on LBM.

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/813720-spreadsheet-bmr-tdee-deficit-macro-calcs-hrm-zones

Lili_Bunny

Thanks! I will start out with 20%. I am a grad student so I do walk around campus a bit on a daily basis but otherwise it's mostly sedentary. I will try to get in 4hrs/week of cardio, though.

The spreadsheet is also great. Although I get 45% bodyfat by one method and 27% from the other, which seems pretty crazy. Hopefully the average is close?

heybales

Thanks! I will start out with 20%. I am a grad student so I do walk around campus a bit on a daily basis but otherwise it's mostly sedentary. I will try to get in 4hrs/week of cardio, though.

The spreadsheet is also great. Although I get 45% bodyfat by one method and 27% from the other, which seems pretty crazy. Hopefully the average is close?

Likely not, so sadly you don't get a real idea of what it is right now, though it will change.
Both calcs use mainly different body parts, that's what's nice with using those two highly recommended ones.

What has been usually seen is one calc will move more than the other as inches drop. The fast moving is usually the least accurate, so the avg keeps going in a more correct direction.
Sometimes the avg BF actually goes up. Obviously it didn't really go up, but it just means it was already higher and got more accurate.
That also means you may have lost inches but not much weight.
In that latter case, your BMR now goes down, TDEE down, TDEG down. Now you have even more deficit, and weight does drop more along with inches.

Another scenario that does come up, is you may have one of the measured body parts that is either now out of proportion to the others, or always has been. Like perhaps always skinny wrists, no matter what the forearm is doing. Or bigger hips despite a smaller thigh or waist.
In that case you may always have a bad spread to the calc %'s. In which case the avg is decent estimate and probably within 5% as you drop, and both calcs will drop about equally.
In those cases, people usually know which body part, and you can pretend in the BF calc and confirm which one makes them come closer.

But hold steady, the self-correction that comes later either means you benefit a lot from exercise with smaller deficit, or what was almost too big a deficit was only for brief period of time anyway, so not that bad.

Only a few cases where it really didn't work in general. Where tested RMR was much higher than estimated because of PCOS, so the TDEG actually was too steep a deficit, and in mine and other cases, RMR is much lower than even tested bodyfat levels would indicate because of endurance cardio done for years.