Switching from Weight Watchers to MFP?

ebyrnes66
ebyrnes66 Posts: 15 Member
in Food and Nutrition
I've been doing Weight Watchers for the past 3ish months pretty successfully, losing around 20lbs on the program. However, I picked up double tracking on MFP in the last month, and realized that while Weight Watchers was what I needed to motivate me to lose weight initially, calorie counting is easier for me to do on a day to day basis, rather than trying to figure out "point" values for foods I'm eating. Basically, I'm trying to fully switch over to MFP so that I can cancel my WW account and lose weight from my body, not my wallet :)

What I'm here to ask for your help is in figuring out how many calories I should eat. If you're not familiar with the WW program, you get a daily number of points (40 calories per point, give or take) which are often on the lower spectrum of the daily calorie intake, "0 point" foods like veggies and fruits that you can theoretically go to town on, and a number of weekly points to distribute as you like. When I was double tracking, I often was getting 1150-1200 calories a day, but I also wasn't tracking 0 point foods, and since I personally didn't use my weekly points and I had been exercising a *kitten* ton every week (I get those calories via a HRM, and you're allowed to eat half of those calories back, but discouraged from doing so), I found that I was still losing weight if I didn't track little things I didn't intend to eat, or the occasional binge fest.

I feel like I'm kinda stuck in this mentality that I should be tracking the same number of calories as when I was on WW (1200), even though that wasn't always an accurate representation of my actual intake. I guess my problem is I don't KNOW what my daily goal should be, and how my exercise levels fit into that. I was often losing more than 2lbs a week on WW, and while I know that naturally slows down when you have less weight to lose, it hasn't yet for me, and I'm guess I'm scared if I up my calories it's gonna be harder for me to be consistently losing every week. How have all of you guys picked appropriate daily calorie goals, and what are your recommendations on eating back calories from workouts? It would be helpful if anyone who made the jump from Weight Watchers to My Fitness Pal could give me any input as well :)

Replies

  • kreza98
    kreza98 Posts: 13 Member
    MyFitnessPal will attempt to calulate a calorie limit for you, but I found this to be a bit low for me. Most people will recommend figuring out your own Base Metabolic Rate and going from there. This means using a formula to determine how many calories you personally burn, not including exercise, in a day. From that you figure out how much you'll burn including exercise, and that is your Total Energy Expenditure. Then if you want to lose weight, you eat less than your TDEE, and if you want to put weight on, you eat more than your TDEE. You can then customise your goals in MFP accordingly.

    This calculator can work out your TDEE;
    http://iifym.com/tdee-calculator/

    I use the Katch-McCardle formula as it's supposed to be one of the most accurate but this requires that you know your current Body Fat Percentage. The most accurate way to measure BF% is via a DEXA or BodPod scan, or a skilled user of skin fold Calipers.. Those scales that claim to tell your body fat are rubbish. I'm terrible with Calipers, so what I do is take 3 measurements with a tape measure and use the US Navy Formula - it might not be the most accurate method, but I can get consistent results each time, so it's good enough for me.

    US Navy Body Fat Calculator;
    http://fitness.bizcalcs.com/Calculator.asp?Calc=Body-Fat-Navy#LinkToThis

    Finally I'd recommend getting on a new fitness program if you're not already. MFP is great for counting calories but it helps to have a fitness regime alongside it. I've been using Mike Matthew's Bigger Leaner Stronger book off Amazon, he's also done a girl's version called Thinner Leaner Stronger which you might find helpful.
  • MarkFraser142
    MarkFraser142 Posts: 10 Member
    You could always just do the exact same thing you did on WW. Don't track fruits or vegetables but track everything else until you stop losing, at that point start tracking everything.

    Fruits can be fairly high in calories so I don't know if I'd do that for them, but it shouldn't be much of an issue for vegetables. At least while you are still losing
  • carolemack
    carolemack Posts: 1,276 Member
    Totally forget everything you did in Weight Watchers. Use MFP the way it is intended. It works. There is no such thing as 'free' food, everything has to be counted. There is a post you should read called "on your way to sexypants" or something like that. You should read it. I will go try to find the link for you and come back and post it.
  • carolemack
    carolemack Posts: 1,276 Member
    Totally forget everything you did in Weight Watchers. Use MFP the way it is intended. It works. There is no such thing as 'free' food, everything has to be counted. There is a post you should read called "on your way to sexypants" or something like that. You should read it. I will go try to find the link for you and come back and post it.

    Go look under 'Community' and find the topic "Getting Started on MFP" there is a wealth of information there and will help you get the most out of MFP. It explains everything you need to know to be successful.
  • carolemack
    carolemack Posts: 1,276 Member
    Totally forget everything you did in Weight Watchers. Use MFP the way it is intended. It works. There is no such thing as 'free' food, everything has to be counted. There is a post you should read called "on your way to sexypants" or something like that. You should read it. I will go try to find the link for you and come back and post it.

    Go look under 'Community' and find the topic "Getting Started on MFP" there is a wealth of information there and will help you get the most out of MFP. It explains everything you need to know to be successful.

    This is a good starting point:

    http://fit101.org/the-step-by-step-guide-to-losing-weight-with-myfitnesspal
  • michikade
    michikade Posts: 313 Member
    Theoretically you can still go to town on leafy vegetables because you'd be so stuffed you'd get sick before you really made too large of a dent in your calorie goal. The starchier or denser the vegetable, the higher the calorie count so you'd have to account for that. Fruits can be pretty calorie dense so I would suggest tracking those.

    I suggest you go ahead and track everything just so you know, but if you were to skip something leafy greens would be the safest.

    When you put your information into MFP, you should get a calorie goal based on your desired rate of loss and your activity level. I see you've got around 40 lbs left to go based on your ticker, right? A goal around 1 - 1 1/2 lb / week is probably what would be recommended at that level. MFP is set up for you to eat back your exercise (most recommend 50% of it or so due to estimations) and doing so will keep your deficit level. The absolute requirement of eating back exercise is up for debate but if you have gigantic burns it's generally recommended to eat back part of it at least to assure you're properly fueled.

    The other method is TDEE-20% (simple explanation - this number is somewhere between the amount of calories you need to live and the amount of calories you need to maintain your current weight -- you end up eating more every day but don't eat back exercise).
  • ebyrnes66
    ebyrnes66 Posts: 15 Member
    Okay wow, thanks for all the responses so far!

    It seems like a lot of people are recommending a TDEE based calorie goal, but from reading your responses so far and the info some of you provided, that seems to assume a regular, reliable weekly exercise schedule. While I have been exercising a lot in the last 3 months, the problem I have is that I wouldn't say it's super regular. Like, I'm aiming for 7 days of 1hr exercise per week, mostly cardio but I do try to throw in some basic strength (I would like to get into lifting in the future, but I'm very injury prone and focusing on upping running time/distance currently, and don't want to jeopardize that). However, I usually get like 4-5 days of workouts in that range from 30min to 2hr, sometimes I go crazy and get all 7 days in, and sometimes (especially while in school, I'm a college undergrad about to return to campus in a week) I am overcome by stress/work/pure laziness and might be lucky to get off my *kitten* to do 1-2 workouts. I track these workouts with a HRM (polar FT7? I think?) so I'm assuming the numbers are accurate enough that I could eat back all the calories if I wanted, but I'm wary of trying to pick a daily number based off of projected weekly exercise, because I'm just not consistent with that. So I guess I like the MFP idea of eating back exercise calories when necessary just because I have the freedom to exercise only when I have the time to and not worry that will sabotage my progress.

    What I'm wondering now is if the MFP numbers they give you are based off of BMR (it sounds like they aren't based off of TDEE because activity is only eaten back the day it's performed), because I'm kinda confused where the numbers they give you are coming from. I looked up some of the different BMR calculations, and I got between 1500-1600 calories per day. However, for my settings on MFP, I would need something like 1490 to lose 1lb per week, 1240 to lose 1.5lb, and 1200 to lose 2lb per week. That seems super arbitrary to me, so could I figure something out based off of my BMR, and would that be different from what MFP is giving me/how the heck is MFP even getting these numbers? I'm pretty sure my logs for the last week or so are pretty accurate if you wanna check my diary, but what I've been doing is aim for 1200ish calories a day for most days and not eat exercise calories back. It sounds like people disagree on whether or not you always need to eat back exercise calories, but is that bad given the amount of exercise I've been doing?

    Also somebody mentioned that I should be aiming to lose 1.5-1lb per week based on my goal weight. Truthfully, my goal weight is arbitrary (I've never been below like 160 since reaching this height, so I don't know what weight I would be happy at) so is that a problem for figuring all this out? I know I definitely wanna lose at least 20 more pounds, so does it matter that I'm unsure of how much more weight I'll try to lose after that?

    I know this is a lot, I really do appreciate everyone who's helping me out with this, it's really hard to try and figure out all these exact numbers when I've been dealing with a system like Weight Watchers where the premise is more to be as flexible as possible without sabotaging weight loss. I was getting unhappy with how prone to irregularity in terms of weight loss and general off the wagon that type of system is, but I'm just really lost in how to decide on my goals here when it seems like a lot of the people using this site don't necessarily utilize the calorie goals that MFP provides for them. So thanks for bearing with me here!
  • amusedmonkey
    amusedmonkey Posts: 10,330 Member
    If your exercise and activity levels are not consistent, I suggest using MFP "sedentary" setting. Any exercise or activity out of the ordinary can be logged in the exercise tab, which will dynamically increase your daily intake budget to match your activity level. Most people would log 50%-75% of their activity time (example, if you did 60 minutes of cardio, you only log 30-45 minutes). The reason for this is that the calorie burns listed here include what your body burned just by staying alive during that period. Say you clocked 300 calories of burn, it's fairly possible that if you hadn't exercised and just sat and watched TV you would have burned 100 calories just by living during that period. This means the number of calories your exercise actually added was closer to 200 than 300. Same goes for burns recorded by heart rate monitors.

    If you don't know which weight you should be, just set up mini goals and see where you go from there. As a general rule of thumb if you're average height and under 200 lb, 1-1.5 lb is the way to go. Under 140, 0.5-1 lb. A more specific rule: try to keep a deficit ranging from 10%-30% depending on your needs, so if your daily expenditure is around 2000, try not to go under 1400 (30% of 2000 is 600. 2000 minus 600 is 1400) because it may lead to huger, binge eating, muscle mass loss.. etc.
  • RSEC75
    RSEC75 Posts: 45 Member
    As amusedmonkey suggests you can use the TDEE method if you don't regularly exercise by using the "sedentary" setting. I like to do that, then any exercise is a bonus and logged in the exercise tab rather than being required to make my goal work.

    MFP asks how often you intend to exercise (how many times a week for how long) but doesn't use that in the calculations of your goal, that's only used to give you a target on the exercise tab.

    I quite like MFP's descriptions of the different activity settings. Other apps I've looked at describe them as how often you exercise per week, but MFP describes them in terms of the job you do.

    Sedentary: Spend most of the day sitting (e.g. bank teller, desk job)
    Lightly Active: Spend a good part of the day on your feet (e.g. teacher, salesman)
    Active: Spend a good part of the day doing some physical activity (e.g. waitress, mailman)
    Very Active: Spend most of the day doing heavy physical activity (e.g. bike messenger, carpenter)

    This makes sense to me because it means specific exercise you do as exercise, for fitness purposes, is recorded separately rather than already accounted for in your goal and your activity level is based on your daily life without specific exercise. For me in a desk job I start from the sedentary point.

    This works well for me, weeks like the one just gone, when I've VERY sedentary because I've had a cold and not felt up to exercise and been stuck at my PC working all day, I've still lost weight sticking to my goal, because my goal was based on a sedentary lifestyle. The week before when I managed several days that included exercise I was able to eat a little more to fuel the exercise and also lost a similar amount of weight. The MFP system seems to help me even out my sedentary and more active weeks.

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