Can your body mistake calories?

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  • George_Baileys_Ghost
    George_Baileys_Ghost Posts: 1,524 Member
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    No but one time it did mistake some accidental cardio for strength training. Man, did I ever get buuuuullllky!!!
  • chadya07
    chadya07 Posts: 627 Member
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    sometimes all the right things isnt really all the right things.

    i was plateauing for a while. couldnt figure out why. i was doing all the right things. except i was estimating my calories burned, not weighing my food and estimating low, and basically, eating too much.

    im crawling out of that plateau now because... early weight loss is easy. and you start to think... wow i did this much i MUST know what i am doing... but then it gets harder because your body is not like "wow, we arent running on a billion calories a day anymore" its like... hey, we lost weight and now we live on such and such calories... "

    thats when you have to be sure that what you are logging is really what you are eating and exersizing, and that the food you are eating is really as little as you think.

    2 examples. we made pizzas tonight. serving size for the dough was two ounces. i snipped off some dough and plopped it on the scale. i thought it would be 3 oz or so. nope. 5.3 oz.

    example number 2. i walk a lot. sometimes we will be walking for 5 or 6 hours at a time while running errands. so i would estimate a 3 hour walk thinking some of that time was stopped so half should be fine. recently i got a fitbit which tells me my actual steps. and then i went downtown on a 4 hour adventure yesterday. what i would have logged as a two hour walk (half the time) was actually not many steps at all and only 117 calories burned or so. according to it.

    so... yea.

    thats that.

    everything right isnt always everything right. sometimes its some things right but not everything.
  • jennifer_417
    jennifer_417 Posts: 12,344 Member
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    Weight loss is as much art as it is science. In other words, it's not perfect, and it won't always perfectly follow the formulas that we follow. GENERALLY, yeah they work, but there is room for error. What you should probably do is adjust your calories (not below 1200 NET unless you under 5' tallish) until you start losing weight.
  • jenilla1
    jenilla1 Posts: 11,118 Member
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    ...Yesterday someone said that if you walk 35 miles, you might not even lose a pound. That's an example of your body cheating you with math.

    My brain just crashed. :huh:
  • fangedneko
    fangedneko Posts: 133 Member
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    Well here was my diet today. Morning- turkey sandwich on wheat 120 calories for each of 2 slices
    Lunch- Bean Burrito- 500 calories
    Dinner- 2 beef tacos, 1 chicken sandwich

    Exercise- 25 mile bike ride (mountain bike), 2 mile walk after dinner

    Not nearly enough info for proper feedback.
  • lbee0030
    lbee0030 Posts: 61 Member
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    Yesterday someone said that if you walk 35 miles, you might not even lose a pound. That's an example of your body cheating you with math.

    tumblr_lu419rDeQl1r0w390.jpg
  • EvgeniZyntx
    EvgeniZyntx Posts: 24,208 Member
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    Not even wrong.
  • Sued0nim
    Sued0nim Posts: 17,456 Member
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    . Cheer up, if there's ever a famine, you'll outlive everyone and you can have their stuff.

    :laugh: :laugh: :drinker:
  • neandermagnon
    neandermagnon Posts: 7,436 Member
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    I think you need to go back to basics with some of the science.

    Calories are a unit of energy, just as centimetres are a unit of length. So if a serving of any particular food contains 100 calories, this is a statement about how much energy there is in that food. Your body uses this energy to keep your cells alive and to move around.

    If you give your body 3000 calories of energy through food, but your body only needs 2500 calories that day, then you have 500 calories of energy left over, which your body will store as fat.

    Calorie calculators give an estimate, because if you're a certain height and weight, you can make a guess how many of each kind of cell that person has, and estimate how many calories of energy their body needs each day to keep all those cells alive.... we're not all identical though, so this is *just an estimate* - it's a best guess made on how many cells a typical person of that height and weight can have. If, for example, you have more muscle than average for your height and weight, you might find that the calculator *underestimates* the amount of energy your body needs to burn to keep all your cells alive, because you'd have more muscle cells and fewer fat cells than average for your height and weight... and muscle cells need quite a bit more energy than fat cells do.

    Activity calories are a bit harder to estimate, but you can still use maths to do this... again, it's just an estimate. It's never going to be completely accurate, but for most people it will get you an estimate to within a couple of hundred calories, if you are completely honest about your activity factor.

    Your body will not "mistake" calories - your body will use the energy it needs to keep your cells alive and move around... but the calorie calculators are only estimates, so someone's body could actually be using quite a bit more or less energy than they predict, and so the result will be that they don't lose, or gain weight, eating the amount of calories that the calculators say they should lose weight at. Medical conditions make this more likely (because they affect how quickly/slowly the cells use up energy...)

    I hope that answers the question you were trying to ask - your question is a bit muddled and confused, so it's hard to tell exactly what you meant.
  • DanielleAThomas
    DanielleAThomas Posts: 8 Member
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    :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
    If you swallow a cupcake whole and dont taste it, does that mean you actually ate it?
  • ndrec
    ndrec Posts: 31 Member
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    Well here was my diet today. Morning- turkey sandwich on wheat 120 calories for each of 2 slices
    Lunch- Bean Burrito- 500 calories
    Dinner- 2 beef tacos, 1 chicken sandwich

    Exercise- 25 mile bike ride (mountain bike), 2 mile walk after dinner

    this is pretty useless info. divide every ingredient (EVERY) and measure it in grams. then you'll know.
  • LiftAllThePizzas
    LiftAllThePizzas Posts: 17,857 Member
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    The human body is a perpetual motion machine that pulls free energy from the aether. Big Energy is hiding this truth from you so that you will continue to pay for power from their "power plants" which are not powered by oil or nuclear energy, but by millions of people who "died" in fake executions as well as plane crashes and other tragedies and are being forced to pedal specially rigged exercise bikes all day long. All those "nuclear disasters" like 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl are just part of a big cover-up to keep the sheeple convinced that we need Big Energy to power our civilization.
  • meridianova
    meridianova Posts: 438 Member
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    But I guess what I'm saying is do some peoples bodies not respond to a lower calorie deficit.

    despite the flame war i'm about to start... yes. my body doesn't respond to caloric deficits the way most people's do. whether that's because of genetics, because my metabolism is low and/or incredibly efficient, or because of something else getting in the way, i don't know. what i do know is that my doctor has reviewed my bloodwork, my medical history, and my eating plan and determined that yeah, i'm doing everything that's supposed to work, but it's a much more agonizingly slow process than it should be.
  • QuietBloom
    QuietBloom Posts: 5,413 Member
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    Your body stores calories? So isn't that the same thing?

    Storing calories does not mean your body is able to make calories up out of thin air.
  • PetulantOne
    PetulantOne Posts: 2,131 Member
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    Math does no lie. If it's not working, you're doing something wrong.

    That's the beautiful thing about math. The truths are universal.
  • QuietBloom
    QuietBloom Posts: 5,413 Member
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    sometimes all the right things isnt really all the right things.

    i was plateauing for a while. couldnt figure out why. i was doing all the right things. except i was estimating my calories burned, not weighing my food and estimating low, and basically, eating too much.

    im crawling out of that plateau now because... early weight loss is easy. and you start to think... wow i did this much i MUST know what i am doing... but then it gets harder because your body is not like "wow, we arent running on a billion calories a day anymore" its like... hey, we lost weight and now we live on such and such calories... "

    thats when you have to be sure that what you are logging is really what you are eating and exersizing, and that the food you are eating is really as little as you think.

    2 examples. we made pizzas tonight. serving size for the dough was two ounces. i snipped off some dough and plopped it on the scale. i thought it would be 3 oz or so. nope. 5.3 oz.

    example number 2. i walk a lot. sometimes we will be walking for 5 or 6 hours at a time while running errands. so i would estimate a 3 hour walk thinking some of that time was stopped so half should be fine. recently i got a fitbit which tells me my actual steps. and then i went downtown on a 4 hour adventure yesterday. what i would have logged as a two hour walk (half the time) was actually not many steps at all and only 117 calories burned or so. according to it.

    so... yea.

    thats that.

    everything right isnt always everything right. sometimes its some things right but not everything.

    :laugh:
  • LazSommer
    LazSommer Posts: 1,851 Member
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    This person is better than I am...
  • Fithealthyforlife
    Fithealthyforlife Posts: 866 Member
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    OP: I've read that our bodies, when faced with perceived starvation, can conserve calories by putting out less thyroid hormone. But the effect of this would be noticeable...you'd be tired/lethargic, hardly moving, cold, etc. Of course there are various degrees of this...but science has shown us that increasing calories does increase thyroid hormone production and vice-versa. But in a normal person, these effects shouldn't sabotage weight loss, unless you're hypothyroid.

    Or, if you move so little that your deficit is no longer a deficit and is a surplus, you can gain weight.
    It's been shown in studies also that people with faster metabolism have bodies/nervous systems/habits that prefer to simply move more...and vice-versa...that's how the extra calories are accounted for.
  • fangedneko
    fangedneko Posts: 133 Member
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    The human body is a perpetual motion machine that pulls free energy from the aether. Big Energy is hiding this truth from you so that you will continue to pay for power from their "power plants" which are not powered by oil or nuclear energy, but by millions of people who "died" in fake executions as well as plane crashes and other tragedies and are being forced to pedal specially rigged exercise bikes all day long. All those "nuclear disasters" like 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl are just part of a big cover-up to keep the sheeple convinced that we need Big Energy to power our civilization.

    mkMfh24.jpg

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