Viewing eating as a weekly thing?

if you come in an hour late to work today, your boss might be nice and let you to make it up. you either stay late an hour, or come in an hour early tomorrow. he will not let you come in five minutes early every day for the next twelve days.

my point is, make up that loss as quickly as possible.


but, if you come in really late to work (or go crazy over your calories) don't try and make it up at all.

I don't think there's a 'right' answer to your question OP, but I would think attempting to tie your calories back farther than a week would get overly complicated. Keeping it as simple as possible will help to facilitate success.

E.g. - I tend to focus on each day's deficit knowing that I'm not going to win that battle every day. Once it's logged, each day is forgotten whether I went over or whether I came in well under the wire. It all works out in the end and as long as I'm making progress towards my goals, I'm happy.

TLDR; The less I have to think about things, the more I like it

The problem with the "cut 20 calories for the next 3 weeks" thing is that the margin of likely error is greater than the value you're changing. The longer you 'bank' your calories for, the more likely you will have already inadvertently eaten those calories back. Better to play it safe and eat them back/work them off within the same few days.

Ultimately, you could theoretically average your calories over the course of an entire year and, if you hit a deficit on average, you will lose weight. It's much harder to track that way and more prone to error.

I don't really count anymore so not sure I'm the right person to even offer an opinion here - but the way I see it is - if I went over today, I'd either have to reel it in tomorrow, or workout more today or tomorrow. I don't believe breaking it down into making up 30 a day or whatever for the next few days would
- a) help or
- b) be worth the math....I'd either recover the mistake within a day or cut my losses.

I wouldn't go more than a week. A week is a manageable amount of time to track and make sure that you won't either run out of calories and have to survive on 200 calories one day, or not eat enough and need to eat 10,000 calories one day. Obviously an exaggeration, but I think if you tried to do longer periods of time, you would end up with some really messed up counts.

I try to eat my day's calories just in that day. When I have a day that I overate, I usually look back at my 7 day report and if my net is under for the seven days, including the over day, I just forget it. If I am over for the week (which has only happened once) I commit myself to eating each day's target without going over for a week. I don't bank calories and I don't try to make up for an over day. I feel it has the potential to lead me into a bad cycle.

ETA: I think keeping a rolling seven days target is not a bad idea if you want to cycle low and high calorie days, rather than having a calendar seven days.

You could try to stretch if for longer, but a week works pretty well. Someone shared a spreadsheet where you could track your calories for the month. (I can look for it to see if I still have the link if you'd like.) For me, when I was restricting I would only log what I weighed once a week and consider the week over, there was a minor discrepancy between the calories I logged, burned and the weight I lost but it was pretty close.

*edit* This may be it, it's been a while since I used it. http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/heybales/view/weight-loss-spreadsheet-for-bmr-tdee-deficit-calculations-426221

Going by the week worked the best for me because I tend to eat less on weekdays when I am always pressed for time and rarely feel like eating much after going to the gym during the evenings. On the weekends I have a larger calorie bank for going out and socializing without worrying how I am going to fit it into my goals.

NO, I don't think it should be stretched. I am always being with my daily calorie intake, but if I skip then I recover it another day, one week is fine, but I don't think it would be better to skip this for more days.

Something to also think about is that your calorie goals change as you lose weight, so it could even get more confusing if you're trying to make up any overages too far into the future.

I definitely eat more than once a week. Usually more than once a day!

herrspoons wrote: »

BernadetteChurch wrote: »

herrspoons wrote: »

Sometimes I eat a bit more. Sometimes I eat a bit less. If it balances out over the week it's all good.

Doing it over a month is dumb though because, let's be honest, you'll just find yourself on day 29 with 5,000 Kcal to make up.

Please don't call people and their methods dumb because you've decided that their method can only end badly.

Which it generally will, because most people who try and balance things out over a month will end up with thousands of net calories and very few days in which to discount them.

So, yeah. Dumb as a sack of rocks.

I'm dumb as a sack of rocks then. Thanks for your invaluable input. Do stop generalising, though. I've never found myself with a 5,000 calorie deficit on day 29 of the month, and actually find tracking calories in this way to be very beneficial.

OP asked for people's opinions/experiences and I gave mine. I didn't recommend it for everyone or anyone. And I certainly didn't ask for anyone else's opinion.

I count daily. But on weigh in day, I add up what my weekly calorie intake and subtract weekly BMR and calories burned. I then divide by 3500 to see if it's close to what I weighed in. It's usually pretty accurate.

I understand doing it as a weekly thing, but I cannot personally see myself reducing my kcals by 20 over the next month to make up for a 600kcal surplus.

Most of the time, I look at it from a weekly perspective whenever I eat below 1200 net for the week and need to go over my kcal goal in order to be at 1200 net (I might have to do it this week due to finals -I am never hungry when I am stressed) or if I know I want to eat so many kcals above my goal for one day (such as Thanksgiving dinner) and need to eat 100-200kcals below my goal for five days in order to eat an additional 500-1000kcals that day.