I am SO CONFUSED...Help

Personally, I don't eat back my calories burned unless I feel that I need to eat a bit. I think you'll find a calorie intake that you feel good about. If you lose appropriately then stay about there. If you are overly hungry, might add 200 calories a day here or there.

If your net calories are 1000 and you feel OK then stay there. Its all just a best guesstimate anyhow.

Its all just a lose starting place, not rocket science. Keep at it and see where you are in a few weeks. Then make adjustment if needed.

Good luck!

If you entered your stats, set 2 pounds a week as your goal, and MFP told you to eat 1710, here's what it did:

1. Calculated your maintenance calories (without exercise), based on age, gender, height, weight, and activity level at 2710 calories/day.
2. Looked at the fact that you want to lose 2 lb./week = deficit of 7000 calories/week = deficit of 1000 calories/day.
3. Subtracted 1000 from 2710 to get 1710.

In other words, your goal of 1710 already has the ambitious deficit of 1000 calories a day built in. Now say you exercise and burn 500 calories. Your daily deficit is now 1500 calories - that's huge, and would lead to 3 lb./week loss if you did that exercise every day. That's an unhealthy rate for all but the morbidly obese.

That's why the MFP method is to log exercise calories and "eat them back." Think of it as "refueling" yourself after exercise (though you can eat some of them before exercise; it's not quite like a car).

The trick is not overestimating calorie burn from exercise. Most entries in MFP's database exaggerate the burn, though walking and running aren't bad. Most machines exaggerate somewhat, too, though less than the database. So many people log only 50-75% of what the machine or database estimate.

Edited to add: note that all these numbers are estimates. You need to tweak them to fit your situation and your logging accuracy. In my first month on MFP, I had it set to 1.5 lb./week and really lost only 1.1 lb./week. I was happy with that, but it meant that somewhere in my estimates, I was missing 200 calories a day, probably a combination of underestimating calories eaten, overestimating calories burned, and my activity level falling between "sedentary" and "lightly active." I have since gotten more accurate, with 2 years' worth of data to analyze!

Hey vmccauley1990

In order to answer this accurately there is a little bit more information that is needed if honest.

The most important question that needs answering is;

Are you using a Heart Rate Monitor to "ACCURATELY" tell you what your body is really doing? This includes calories consumed, average heart rate, peak heart rate and "genuine" time of activity. I don't mean to sound disparaging but the figures quoted for calorie burn, etc on MFP are way off at best - and normally less than actuals!

If the answer to the above is You are NOT using a HRM - can I strongly recommend that it is purchase that would serve you well, especially as you are taking your training seriously (Insanity 6 days a week is not to be scoffed at!).

If you are using a HRM then things may initially seem slightly more confusing as your calorific 'balance' will always seem to be huge. By that I mean you will probably never get to the point of being able to consume your daily allowance plus whatever you have 'earned' by doing your workouts minus what you have really consumed.

Here is the important part,

If you are still hungry after eating all of your meals and snacks and you have calories in the bank then you have a choice as to whether or not you consume them. I personally will never be able to eat my daily allowance plus whatever I earn a day (average of 1200 - 1300) minus what I actually eat. However that said, if I am hungry then I will eat more (wisely!). If I am feeling full then I will eat less, but I will eat less wisely too.

Ultimately - listen to your body. It will tell you if it needs fuel, equally it will tell you if you are not eating correctly when you next attempt an Insanity workout and realise you have 'nothing in the tank!'.

I personally use a Polar FT80 and find it invaluable in my training (bought off of fleabay for a hugely reduced price!). If you haven't got a HRM then eBay may be a friend!

I hope this helps.

WB

vmccauley1990 wrote: »

- BOTTOM LINE: If I Burn 500 Calories a Day, and eat all 500 back PLUS my allotted 1710, If all my numbers were correct, then the idea is i should still loose 2 lbs a week, right?

Yes, that is correct, as long as you set up MFP correctly, you're measuring (estimating) accurately and you're typical in your activity. You might have to adjust things after a month, since some people just burn off more energy in their daily lives than others (people who are always fidgeting, for example).

But if I eat 1500 of the 1710 and still burn the 500, I am not harming my body by eating too little?

That depends. Your total energy expenditure is:

BMR (Basal metabolic rate): what you would burn in a coma
TEF (Thermic effect of food): energy required to digest and metabolize food; not much but it does exist!
NEAT (Non-exercise activity thermogenesis): energy burned in daily life, from brushing teeth to shopping to emptying the dishwasher
EAT (Exercise activity thermogenesis): energy burned in deliberate exercise.

MFP uses your data to estimate BMR, TEF, and NEAT, and then subtracts the calories that correspond to what your weight loss goal is. For you, it estimated 1710 calories to lose 2 pounds a week.

2 pounds a week is aggressive. You definitely want to eat those 1710 calories, plus a reasonable value for your exercise (try 75% of what the exercise database estimates) until you find how you're responding to that diet. If you're used to eating more like 2710 or more (which is what MFP thinks is the calories you would need to maintain), 1710 is going to be very hard, especially at first. I was on a daily deficit of only about 550 calories and I was ravenous much of the time for the first three weeks.

You might lose more weight in your first week as your body sheds extra water, so your results from weeks 2-5 are better than week 1 for seeing how you're doing.

Once you have a baseline of four weeks, you can adjust things as needed. If you lose about 8 pounds, then your estimates are pretty accurate! If not, you can try to figure out whether you're overestimating exercise calories, underestimating food calories (very common!), or less active (outside of exercise) than you initially estimated.