Calorie Counter

Take the time to weigh and measure your food. It is an education that will stay with you. It gets easier. Most people have no clue about portion sizes and true calorie counts and like me, thought they could eat quantity if it was low-cal. The easiest person to fool in oneself! Buy a digital scale, turn it on, put a plate or bowl on it, and hit 'tare' which will reset to 0 even with your plate or bowl on it. I have a two sets of measuring cups and spoons out on my counter, but I have learned that measuring by grams is the best way to get a real measure. Do I always? No, but then I pay the price, which is slower weight loss.

MLHC1 wrote: »

Question:
My Fitness Pal states that my goal is 1200 calories a day to lose weight. What I do not understand is the counter. Is the 1200 net calories (Exercise - Food = 1200) OR Eat 1200 calories and exercise for a net under 1200?

Your goal is net calories, or food - exercise. (So 1200 is 1500 - 300 exercise calories.)

However, the exercise numbers can be inflated and many people find it easy to underreport calories when logging, either because they don't accurately measure the intake (that's why people are saying to weigh your food) or choose the wrong entries (as many are erroneous, so you have to be careful) or simply forget to log bites or finishing a child's leftovers or cooking oil or cream in coffee or the like.

Not saying this is you, but one reason sometimes results aren't as good as you would expect.

My typical exercise day burns around 600 to 900 calories (depending if I am able to run that day.)

This is a very high burn. What are you doing for this burn? Lots of people recommend logging only about half of the exercise calories to account for the difficulty of estimating.

I'm trying to analyze this bc the silly scale said I gained 3lbs, which can take the wind from your sails.

Over what period of time? If you've just started, you will get used to the fact that the scale fluctuates for reasons that have nothing to do with fat. Water weight after starting a new workout is common or after eating a higher sodium or carby day sometimes or -- really common -- at certain times of the month, and the specific time differs from woman to woman.

When I flew home after my last vacation (which was a very active vacation) I was up 8 lbs. After 3 days it was gone, since it's some reaction I get to the pressure in airplanes or something.

MLHC1 wrote: »

I use My Fitness Pal to help me stay accountable. I would like to believe that it isn't a waste of time using it.

MFP is a tool. Use it to your benefit to track and make adjustments. Adjustments are only accurate if you have a starting point to adjust from or to. Measuring food accurately is easier if you weigh in grams. Activity is more difficult to measure IMHO. Measure your food as accurately as possible to get to your minimum and then adjust how many activity calories you can eat back and still lose weight. If you are not losing eating all 600-900 then try only eating back 300-450 or 1500-1750 total calories. If you lose more than 1% of your body weight (over the coarse of 4 weeks) eat more.

Weight loss is not linear. The scale will go up and down from day to day, but if you're logging accurately and keeping at a calorie deficit, the general scale weight will follow a downward trend.