Calories In vs. Out + Exercise Debate!! HELP!!!

What you're advocating is a VLCD, you're not going to find much support for that around here. In fact, it's against the community guidelines.

I'm new here. What is a VLCD??

Very low calorie diet ie sub 1200 calories net a day

"Is my girlfriend right. "

Answer is always yes.

Kidding, but this time she definitely is. :-P Good luck to both of you!!

Girlfriend is correct.

I would suggest you ditch the MFP standards and switch it up to TDEE set to lose .5 lbs a week. As you don't have a lot to lose whats the rush? Rather than your body eating up muscle from a VLCD you would do better trying to replace what little bodyfat you have with muscle.

Or just keep doing what your doing, which it sounds like you will anyway.

Well I do believe that men are more apt to lose weight quicker than women.....but I could be wrong.

I tend to believe men and women lose weight the same if you look at weight loss as a percentage of total weight. It is just that men on average tend to weight more than women so they tend to lose pounds faster. Just convert pounds to "percent of total mass" though and weight loss tends to be the same between men and women.

You are most likely right....

But since we usually go by scales, and pounds.....not percentages.....
Then my point stands.
His pounds lost, will be more then her pounds lost. No??

Yup. Perhaps I am just feeling extra nit-picky today <grin> Apologies if I am bugging you with that, I think your info is good which is why I am feeding off your posts and clarifying or discussing what I think on those topics.

You've opened a can of worms!

Without judging why your calorie goal is what it is, it is important to fuel your body. I never eat my exercise calories back. If you do, make sure what you are eating is really what you burned. MFP calories burns seem to be sky high vs. reality. Most of my friends use an HRM and count the calories that way.

Realize that in general men seem to lose weight faster than women. We are built differently and since women generally have a higher body fat percentage we just lose it slower.

Weight loss is calories in vs. calories out...so it's your decision on how to get there.

Very well then.

Also...on a creeper side-note....wtf is your percent bodyfat man...like 6%? Starting to be able to see the striations.

If I had to guess.....yeah, prolly around 6 - 7%
I have another pic in my library where I flexed more, and you can see the striations better.....looks a little freaky to me.
So I swapped it out. :laugh: :laugh:

Sorry, dude, your GF is right on target. As for your "diet", you're not getting any support for me for your approach. In all likelihood, you will crash and burn soon. This site is primarily about finding long-term, sustainable and healthy diet and fitness habits. Your approach is none of those IMHO. Go on the forums here and educate yourself. There are some brilliant folks willing and ready to give advice on doing it the right way (I am not putting myself in their category since I take more of their advice than I give). Best of luck to both you and your GF!

I've been saying that if my calorie intake goal is hit, that's it. Whether I've exercised and earned more calories is immaterial. I shouldn't eat more or use exercise as an excuse to eat more.

It depends on how you set your goals and what your exercise is. Bottom line - if you under-fuel, your exercise performance will hit a wall and then decline precipitously. You can't make something out of nothing.

So, please let me ask all of you. My calories that I can eat each day, is 1900. I am very active all day and I cycle, and I can exercise and burn up to 2500 calories a day in addition. Are you saying that I should be eating the 1900 calories and whatever I exercise, in order to retain my muscle and burn fat? That would be over 4000 calories some days. Please explain

Yup, for you and the OP, I burn that much some days, occasionally up to 3,000 cals when I hike for hours up/down mountains and hills, up about 3-4,000 feet elevation gain, and I do eat most of that back those days. It can be hard for some to eat that much (not really for me, PIZZA!) but thats why some people average their workout cals over the week with other methods like TDEE, so they dont have very large calorie spikes. I don't always eat ALL those calories back anymore on 2-3kcal burn days, but most of them.

However, you want to be very very certain you actually burnt that much, and its very very unlikely you did burn that much in 75 mins. Here is what you should do: eat back a percent of your workout cals, say 50-80% of them to start out if you are really worried its too much, and see over a week if you are still losing. You should not lose fast if you are losing "vanity pounds" OP, it should take you 2 wks for a pound if they really are as you call them. If you can eat back at a percentage and stall your weight loss, that means thats probably closer to your true burn...

www.bicycling.com says 75 minutes at 16 - 20 mph at my weight is 1735 calories.

That is insane. There are limits to how much a body can burn calorically. At your maximum heartrate you might push 700 calories an hour....but 1500 calories an hour? No way in hell.

I do 70 minutes of plyometric cardio that has my heart pounding out of my chest for about 50 minutes straight and I estimate that burn at about 550 calories.

Per VO2max test data.

At a HR of 150, which is mid-aerobic zone and I can do that for 4-5 hrs easy (the average is that anyway, with faster and slower HR), I'll burn 970 calories an hour.

That is recreationally fit level, not even race fit.

I'm also surprised how low many people think calorie burns have to be for some reason.

You add weight and just a little bit of cardio fitness improvement - you can start getting some big burns.

Now, sustained 1500 for over an hr, 25 cal/min, unless somehow a pro that kept in shape while gaining weight? That might be iffy.

Then again, can a 250 lb person run for an hr at 6 mph? That's not that fast - I've caught up to those kind of folks in a marathon, and until I caught them, they were obviously doing better than me at 8:30/mile.

Might do a Google search on VO2max test results - many people post them, you might be surprised the measured calorie burn going on.

OP - so you are of the opinion that a bigger deficit is better?

Meaning you burn as much as you can with all activity through the day, but you only eat 1200. The amount of activity doesn't matter.

Why don't you just stop eating then and get it over with quicker?

Whatever your reason why you think that extreme is a bad idea, and probably many more you aren't even aware of, can still happen - just can take longer.

So get used to eating so little - you may need to stay down at that level if you don't want to gain the weight back.

But wouldn't it be incredible to find out you could lose the same amount and eat more, maybe not the first couple weeks of big losses, but eventually the average overall?

http://www.t-nation.com/diet-fat-loss/truth-about-metabolic-damage