Every Body is different - Un-confuse MFP - my thoughts

Hello everyone,

MFP is a great website, we all agree, but let me share my thoughts with you regarding losing weight and fitness: First let me introduce myself; I am 52, living in the UK, reasonably fit and weigh 198 lbs. I am 6 foot tall and of athletic build. (My BMI is Overweight) I was born into farming, working hard on the land during my formative years, was a champion gymnast at school, captain of the 1st school rugby team and went on to do a degree in Agriculture. After that I spent 3 winters as a ski instructor in the Alps. Got married and have 2 lovely kids. Still married 25 years later. I have done well in various businesses, got out of farming, and now enjoy a relatively stress free life. I play golf 2 or 3 times a week playing off a handicap of 12. (for those that are into golf).

So, why am I here on MFP? Well, very straightforward. My son is out in the Alps for his 2nd ski season and my wife and I are going to join him for a weeks skiing next month. I thought that I ought to get fit and lose some weight. (My BMI says I am overweight). I finally arrived, after trying many different websites and bits of software, at MFP. It is a great website, lets get that straight first... But, it reminds me of my 15 years in the computer business... We had an old adage, that still works today, “Rubbish in, Rubbish out”. I am not being critical of MFP but want to try and explain my thoughts on getting fit and loosing weight and how MFP can work when the confusion is taken out of the equation.

There is a heap of information about losing weight on the Internet. You can find dozens of papers explaining just how to do it. So why is it still difficult in practice even with a resource like MFP. Confusion I would suggest is probably the answer. What do I mean?

Having reviewed a huge amount of the information on the net you come to a startling answer. If I eat less calories and change my diet to a more natural one, (even if I don't), I will lose weight. Simple, straightforward, anyone can do it. Then the confusion starts. How many calories less do I need to eat? Do I need to do any extra exercise? What foods should I be eating? How do I know if I am winning? (Bathroom scales don’t tell all the truth). And so on and so on. Confusion reigns!

Well, how about making it simple and then letting MFP do the rest for you. Here goes:

1. Define your goals. I have split this into two important aspects; first, to lose weight, second to get fitter. These are actually two completely separate things. As just by eating less than your base calorie requirement you will lose weight. (Change nothing in your daily routine and eat 500 calories per day less than you BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) and you will lose 1lb per week. Getting fitter is another matter. This requires you to start exercising more. You must burn up more calories and start eating more! The effect is that your muscle mass will increase and you will start to get fitter. (This is without doing any weight training!) Once you start to get fitter you will burn more calories in a day as your BMR goes up. This takes time but is a proven effect of being fitter. Also, your resting heart rate will come down along with your blood pressure. All well documented effects of being fitter as well as lighter.

So, we define our Goals... Again these have to be reasonable ones. They should be time limited and should not be impossible. (I am going to lose 28 lbs in a month is not, I might offer, a reasonable goal. Something like; I am going to lose 8 lbs in 30 days is a goal that can be kept by most people.) Be realistic about it. Don’t have wishy washy goals either. “I am going to get fitter” is a bad goal. “I am going to cycle 8 miles a day, 3 days a week” is a much better goal for getting fitter.

2. Decide what your Basal Metabolic Rate is... Oh, again confusion reigns. MFP has a tab for determining BMR. But unfortunately it is flawed I might profer. Check and review all the scientific material you can find on the net and yes there are many ways of calculating the BMR of a “Normal” individual. But, as my subject line implies, “Every Bodies Different”. Hence the BMR that is calculated by these methods often does not give a good base level of calorie intake. As a case in point take me. 198 lbs, age 52, 6 feet high. the following are the results:


Your estimated BMR is: 1,786 calories/day*
*BMR based on the Mifflin - St. Jeor equations. Please remember that even the best BMR calculators provide only a best guess and should be used as a guide only.

OK, so it is a guide. Lets look at this information... There is one major piece of information missing here. How fit am I. Confused, well yes, because that it the next question that would normally be asked to adjust this figure. Am I sedentary, slightly active, very active, an athlete etc. Let’s go back a step. I want to suggest that the bit that is missing is actually my Fat %. How much fat you have on your body is a very good indication of how fit you are. Fat does not take much energy to maintain, but your Lean Body Mass is really the part of you that the BMR feeds.

So, in my case I only have 14% body fat. That is 28 lbs of fat and hence a Lean Body Mass of 170lbs. That is the bit that my BMR has to support. Doing the research on the web I have found the Katch-McArdle formula which takes into account the Lean Body Mass to determine the BMR:

BMR (men and women) = 370 + (21.6 X lean mass in kg)

So, plug my figures in. 170 lbs = 77 kg. This gives my BMR = 2033.

So, by having a larger Lean Body Mass, i.e. more muscle to feed my BMR has gone up by 250 calories from just calculating it by weight alone.

So, how do I determine my Fat %? Very easy, using a skinfold caliper and lookup tables supplied with the calipers. My first confusion removed. I now have a figure for my bodies BMR.

3. Make adjustments to my BMR to allow for my activity levels. Again, confusion creeps in here. As the next question that gets asked in the MFP calculation is your activity level. I would suggest that this is misleading. From the moment you get up in the morning to going to bed at night you are expending more energy than your BMR. How do you estimate the level that this should be. Let’s look at this: I could record every movement I do and estimate a calorie expenditure for that movement. This is just not going to work. How many calories do I burn buttering my toast in the morning or making a cup of tea. No idea. So what is the next best way of doing this? MFP have come up with 4 levels of activity with some suggestions as to who they apply too:

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. nurse, 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)

These levels, in my case, allow for an extra 450, 630, 810 and 990 calories above your basal level on a daily basis. So which do you pick? There are I believe a couple of ways of determining this figure. Firstly, purchase a pedometer. Set it up correctly and then over the course of a day you will get a figure for calories burnt due to your walking around. This being the area you will burn most calories extra during a day. You could purchase a Heart Rate Monitor, (more on this later) but I would argue that they don’t really work correctly when your heart rate is in the rest zone.

So finally we come up with a figure for the additional calories you are going to burn above your basal metabolic rate. In my case I have decided that the Lightly Active figure of 630 extra calories gives a good estimation of my activity. This does not include any added exercise that I might do in a day... Please clear this confusion up now for once and for all. Any activity that you do outside your normal activity should be accounted for within the exercise area of MFP.

So, the BMR that I am working with is 2663

4. Decide how my goals will affect the figure above: I want to lose 2 lbs of Fat a week to bring my Fat % down from its current 14% to 10%. To do this I will have to lose 10 lb of fat without putting on any extra Lean Body Mass. So it is going to take me 5 weeks to do. 2 lbs of Fat is equivalent of about 8000 calories. So I have to reduce my calorie intake by 1166 calories per day. This is all mathematical and quite confusing. Also, it is not recommended to exceed 1000 calories per day less than you BMR. (So I read.) For simplicity then; 1 lb per week requires 500 less calories, 2 lb per week requires 1000 calories... Therefore why aim from more than this. All the evidence presented on the net shows that you will put your body into starvation mode and start eating muscle, i.e. Lean Body Mass, instead of Fat. Even at 1000 calories per day deficit you need to be careful as your body may well decide that it is starving. (Shock it every now and again by having more calories than you need every four days)

Again, I hope I have taken some of the confusion out of determining your level of calorie intake. My level now comes out at 2663 - 1000 = 1663

5. Complicate the matter by adding in exercise to your daily routine. Confused, yes I am. The problem arises due to the way that exercise calculators work. Do it yourself. I play golf, two to three times a week. A round of golf takes 4 hours and generally I cover about 6 to 7 miles during a round. (GPS is great!, my pedometer gives a very similar figure.) Using the exercise calculators this gives a figure of about 1500 calories for the round... Wow! “Eat your exercise”, every one says. I’m sorry but this is quite out of the question. Firstly I was very sceptical at the figure given, secondly I can’t eat a full blown 3 course meal just to fill up the calorie deficit created by a game of golf. My wife thinks I am eating to much anyway, on this “DIET”, but I am losing weight. So what has gone wrong. Well lets start with the figure of 1500 itself. What is this composed of: Walking, pushing my clubs, and swinging the clubs. So, Walking for 4 hours at 3 miles an hour, allowing for stopping and waiting for my partners to play their balls would give me about 1100 calories. (This figure comes from extensive research about walking calories burned by laboratories around the world.) Pushing my clubs and swinging them could easily add another 400 calories. So the figure might be right... But, I was still not happy. It is a huge figure. My Pedometer showed 7 miles but only 800 calories burnt. Of course the pedometer does not include calories for swinging and pushing the clubs... Then it hit me, of course these figures include a portion of my daily BMR! 443 calories to be exact. The Pedometer doesn’t know about BMR so it was recording the calories burnt just from the walking. It still brings the figure down to a hefty 1000 calories. That I am prepared to accept as a figure. Great, 1000 calories extra per day I play golf to eat!

6. Add cardio exercise into the equation. Well yes, as I have a goal to get fit enough to go skiing with my son next month, I have had to add some cardio fitness training into the equation. Skiing if you are not fit is not fun. As a Ski Instructor I have an advantage over most people but believe me it is still hard work getting fit enough every year to go skiing. This year particularly as I have not been for 4 years and my son is horribly fit, having trained with the army, and still only 23!

Skiing requires great leg strength and aerobic fitness. Cycling and a full set of lower leg exercises are required. But of course, I had this dilemma as to how to measure the calories used. No choice but a Heart Rate Monitor and associated app on my Android phone. I have always been of the opinion that cardio exercise should not be carried out for more than 3 or 4 sessions per week for 30 to 40 minutes at a time during training. Rest days are a must to allow muscle to regenerate and get stronger. This is fully detailed on the many fitness and weight training sites on the web. It is only when you are getting to the fully fit level that longer sessions are recommended to enable endurance training to take place. (Skiing requires this only if you don’t stop for Hot Chocolate or mulled wine several times a day as well as a long lunch to pack in the calories!) So, I can now, using my HRM, work out how many calories I am using in Cardio exercise. Always remembering to take off my BMR figure. 8 miles on the bike at an average 13 miles an hour burns 400 calories very quickly. I have found an app that uses the Karvonen method of measuring calorie use from Heart Rate. Very accurate and highly recommended.

7. What to eat and when? Well this is something I have never really had a problem with. We live miles from fast food restaurants, even shops. A vegetable patch out the back of the house takes care of most of our fresh vegetable requirements. All I can say is make it natural and wholesome. Eat a lot of meat. (Please veggies don’t flame me for this.) If you are going to undertake a fitness regime, along with loosing weight, you have to increase your protein intake to maintain, or build, muscle. Muscle is the fat burner in your body. The more muscle you have the better you will burn fat. Eat more often if you can. Every 3 hours if possible. You might have heard a lot about this and it is difficult to do but works. Your digestion system is designed to digest a meal in 3 hours. Once you go onto a lower calorie intake you need to keep that system working in order not to feel hungry. Keep filling up the stomach with smaller portions and you will remain satisfied and be able to eat all the calories. Bulk keeps you from being hungry. Lots of vegetables, unmodified starch, fat-less meat, milk, peanuts etc.

Well, there you are, I hope that my diatribe has helped to Un-Confuse you with regard to the way I use MFP. Keep at it and the weight will come off and with hard work you will get fitter.


Yours truly,

Chris White. I have lost 10 lbs since the new year. My Lean Body Mass has risen by 5 lb and my fat % has gone down by 5% 15 lbs of Fat lost!