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MyFitnessPal Community

7000 calorie deficit required to lose a pound?

Cali_125

(I accidentally posted this to the wrong category earlier today so I am re-posting it here).

Has anyone else seen this article? What do you think of the research? I'm on Day 96 of counting calories and I am losing more slowly than predicted, so I am curious if 7000 calories is a more accurate number for my body than 3500 calories.

http://www.runnersworld.com/weight-loss/biggest-weight-loss-myth-revealed

(Either way, I'm not giving up, but I thought this article was interesting.)

Replies

DeguelloTex

My weight loss of 113 pounds over a year very, very, very closely tracked 3500 calories per pound. Very closely. Like easily within the margin of error of logging.

Glampinupdoll

Hmm not sure ab that article. May be the case but millions of people have been doing it wrong all this time? I did the tracker it said I could reach my goal in 118 days eating 1859 per day. I'm at ab 1400 a day and lose .25 a week so how will that make me lose more? Who knows! Good luck. No argument here

just wanted to let u know I read the article!

atypicalsmith

Nope, nope, nope. 3,500 calories is a pound.

intangiblemango

If you look at the actual NIH report, they are not reeeeally saying that 7000 calories is a pound. They are saying that the 3500 calorie rule is regularly misapplied and people keep eating the same number of calories, but their weight loss slows... which is why we re-adjust our calories as we lose! And since one of the main points emphasized in the reports is that weight loss often happens on a curve rather than linearly, I doubt the authors of the report would be super happy with people just changing the number and pretending that is what the report is about... I think this is bad science journalism, personally.

traceywoody

I read that article and I have found that my rate of loss had almost stopped after a year or so, so all I did was adjust my deficit down a bit to see if that would help me lose. It has! It is still slower than it was in the beginning, but I am seeing the scale go down. I think we need to be aware of our body and then adjust as we need to for us. I think we are all different and will lose differently too. I am also nearly 50, so I think I needed a little less than I was allowing myself.

Maries_wine_calories

I feel like for all of the forum posts and blah blah I've seen and read...it's just another article to cover up how lazy people are at weighing and tracking their food and how grossly over-eggateraed they are logging their acitivity. VERY rarely they are doing it ALL correctly and still have an anomoly...at which point medication for a thyroid issue etc is usually necessary.

Liftng4Lis

I'm going to go with 3500 for the win Alex!

Merkavar

atypicalsmith wrote: »

Nope, nope, nope. 3,500 calories is a pound.

Yeah this. 3500 for a pound and I also hear 31000kj for a kilo. For those not speaking ye olde English.

I can't imagine weight loss if 7000 was needed to lose one pound. Would either be so slow or you would need to starve yourself.

atypicalsmith

Merkavar wrote: »

atypicalsmith wrote: »

Nope, nope, nope. 3,500 calories is a pound.

Yeah this. 3500 for a pound and I also hear 31000kj for a kilo. For those not speaking ye olde English.

I can't imagine weight loss if 7000 was needed to lose one pound. Would either be so slow or you would need to starve yourself.

Exactly!

lstott21

I would say that it is kind of irrelevant, if you keep focusing on numbers like that you will go stir crazy, if you have more weight to lose you will lose it quicker than someone who only has a few pounds, if you exercise and don't change your diet the progress will be slower, forget the science eat less but healthy and exercise more than you are doing now and slowly increase that until it is a part of your day to day routine. It's a lifestyle change and I'm sure I don't want a life focused on calorie counting and scale watching forever ...

Cali_125

7000 would definitely be depressing if true.

hcollins1021

Now I am a newbie, about 5 or 6 weeks in. I dont have much to offer as far as stats or facts, but thought I'd share my experience as it may, and hopefully does, help someone. I too, have been following the 3500 calorie estimate. I am 31 yes old, 6'1" and started at 248. Supposedly I should be at like 150-60, or something like that.(nutz) lol. My goal weight is 198, because I can't remember being under 200 lbs since high school. I tried this just to try it, keep in mind there was no exercising, dieting (per say), and not even healthy eating...I don't like veggies. But by just being aware of my calorie intake and having one or two servings instead of 10. (I'm a big guy, and servings are small.) I do landscaping so I log that as gardening in exercises and only half of what I do....just to allow more calories . I tend to ramble soooo...........
Here's my point. First week I lost 9 lbs
Second wk,7 lbs
Third wk 1 lb.... Bad week
Fourth wk 5 lbs

At this point I'm excited, I start running and exercising as well.

Fifth week and sixth week like 1 lb. and .06

I think I lost a lot the first few wks because of how overweight I was, and then it eventually slows down. Ever seen the show the biggest loser? Start off at420 lbs and the first few wks lose like 20-30 lbs at a time. Then slows down. But another theory is when I started working out and running too my weight loss was so slight because I was also building muscle now ( which weighs 4x as much as fat) so I kept that in mind and did not get discouraged. So after all of this I guess that was what I want u to get out of this, if u are in a similar situation wondering why it doesn't seem like ur losing weight. Stay motivated and keep in mind u can burn fat and not lose weight, u could be building muscle. Good luck!

SLLRunner

Liftng4Lis wrote: »

I'm going to go with 3500 for the win Alex!

Me too, because that's how my weight loss of 44 pounds worked out.

RodaRose

Good read.
But I do what I can to avoid thinking through math problems. What happens after one year?

What’s realistic? According to Hall, in the first year of a new weight-loss program, most overweight people will lose about half the weight that the 3,500-calories rule predicts. In other words, over 12 months, the new rule is 7,000 calories = one pound. (The math changes slightly over shorter and longer periods of time, with few managing to lose weight beyond 12 months.)

hearthwood

3500 calories = 1 pound. That's fairly well documented.

SimoneBee12

I just looked, I'm on roughly a 700 calorie deficit (my TDEE changes a lot because of my lifestyle, sometimes sedentary, sometimes lightly, so I don't know the exact deficit).

In the past 10 weeks my average weight loss has been 1.3lbs per week which is almost exactly on track with a 700 calorie daily deficit.

So I'll believe my stats over some article.

Mr_Knight

It's a bad headline, but the article isn't that horrible. What it's really saying is that the typical dieter will lose half the weight they think they should be losing. If anything, based on the posts on MFP, that might even be an optimistic perspective.

The difference is all coming from logging errors and/or poor expectation because of BMR Calculator Abuse, but many people will never figure that out. So to them...yeah...it "looks like" a pound of fat has 7000 calories...

PAV8888

I do believe that 3500 is an oversimplification for a range of probably 3200 to 3800; but 7000 is further from the truth than 3500. Muscle should probably be in there too at about 1500.

Now the fact that a lb of fat is 3500 Cal does not address that after reducing our calories for a while we weigh less than before, have lost some lean mass compared to before, have muscles that have become more efficient at performing our favourite exercises, and our TDEE is down a bit due to adaptive thermogenesis, all issues that affect us as we lose weight over a long period of time (or with a steep deficit, or both)

So as time goes on it may take more "virtual" calories to lose a lb of fat; but that's not because the lb of fat requires more calories to lose. It is because we are not actually burning as many calories as our calculations are telling us we should be...
(I guess I will now go read the article ;-)

PAV8888

OK. Looks a little bit like what I was pratling about in my previous post.

I don't know where they got their numbers, I can only offer than the numbers I've seen in the past for muscle adaptation are up to 15-20%, and for adaptive thermogenesis up to 15%, adding up together to up to 25 to 30% as opposed to a 100% slow down.

My own personal numbers say that between December and March (months 7 to 10 of caloric restriction), I was tracking bang on at less than a 1% discrepancy off of TDEE (based on fat being 3500 and lean mass being 1500 Cal)

March to May (months 10 to 12) my discrepancy went up to 5% of TDEE.

May to July (months 12 to 14) it was up to 8%, and for the first time lean mass loss increased substantially (from better than 9:1 to worse than 3:1 fat vs lean).

Which has prompted me to take a mini diet break, which I just started on ;-)

Comparisons are based on a series of dxa body composition scans which I sadlly did not start doing till December.

Obviously the fact that I started at an obese 3 bmi may have contributed to my ability to maintain a deficit of over 800Cal a day on average over the 14 months without a larger slow down...

Mr_Knight

PAV8888 wrote: »

I don't know where they got their numbers, I can only offer than the numbers I've seen in the past for muscle adaptation are up to 15-20%, and for adaptive thermogenesis up to 15%, adding up together to up to 25 to 30% as opposed to a 100% slow down.

Basic math. On a starting TDEE of 2500, a deficit of 500 gets cut in half by a relatively modest 10% drop in TDEE.

ramepithecus

Regarding the "1 pound of fat = 3500 calories"... this is just where my mind is going, but does that mean that if you ATE a pound of fat it would have 3500 calories in it? Because it seems like a pound of fat would actually contain more calories than that.

I promise I'm not thinking about eating a pound of fat. Okay - well now I am, but I'm not *really* considering it.

Orphia

traceywoody wrote: »

I read that article and I have found that my rate of loss had almost stopped after a year or so, so all I did was adjust my deficit down a bit to see if that would help me lose. It has! It is still slower than it was in the beginning, but I am seeing the scale go down. I think we need to be aware of our body and then adjust as we need to for us. I think we are all different and will lose differently too. I am also nearly 50, so I think I needed a little less than I was allowing myself.

Yep, that's exactly what I was thinking.

I played around with the BWP and set it up with my stats exactly as I inputted them into MFP.

It gave me exactly the same calorie limit I'm currently on.

See for yourselves.

https://www.supertracker.usda.gov/bwp/index.html

PAV8888

Mr_Knight wrote: »

PAV8888 wrote: »

I don't know where they got their numbers, I can only offer than the numbers I've seen in the past for muscle adaptation are up to 15-20%, and for adaptive thermogenesis up to 15%, adding up together to up to 25 to 30% as opposed to a 100% slow down.

Basic math. On a starting TDEE of 2500, a deficit of 500 gets cut in half by a relatively modest 10% drop in TDEE.

I guess their numbers sound right then as I would think a 10% drop to TDEE as likely. Seems an *kitten* backwards way to change the calories for a lb of fat to account for TDEE changes....

PAV8888

ramepithecus wrote: »

Regarding the "1 pound of fat = 3500 calories"... this is just where my mind is going, but does that mean that if you ATE a pound of fat it would have 3500 calories in it? Because it seems like a pound of fat would actually contain more calories than that.

I promise I'm not thinking about eating a pound of fat. Okay - well now I am, but I'm not *really* considering it.

453.6g x 9Cal per g....

ramepithecus

PAV8888 wrote: »

ramepithecus wrote: »

Regarding the "1 pound of fat = 3500 calories"... this is just where my mind is going, but does that mean that if you ATE a pound of fat it would have 3500 calories in it? Because it seems like a pound of fat would actually contain more calories than that.

I promise I'm not thinking about eating a pound of fat. Okay - well now I am, but I'm not *really* considering it.

453.6g x 9Cal per g....

That works out to a little over 4000 calories, which is also what I get for olive oil. Is the 3500 the calories for *human* fat? I really really hope that's not in the database.

PAV8888

A lb of human fat is conventionally estimated to be about 87% lipids. Your olive oil is 100%

stevencloser

Mr_Knight wrote: »

It's a bad headline, but the article isn't that horrible. What it's really saying is that the typical dieter will lose half the weight they think they should be losing. If anything, based on the posts on MFP, that might even be an optimistic perspective.

The difference is all coming from logging errors and/or poor expectation because of BMR Calculator Abuse, but many people will never figure that out. So to them...yeah...it "looks like" a pound of fat has 7000 calories...

So they blame the rule for people not understanding proper calorie counting and never adjusting their intake as they lose weight. Great.

stevencloser

BTW. that same calculator they linked tells me I can lose a pound in a week with a 185 calorie deficit.

Jruzer

The article talks about metabolic adaptation, which is certainly an effect, but I find it extremely hard to believe it is a first order effect of this magnitude.

Echoing others that my losses and maintenances closely mirror what my calorie budget says.

TimothyFish

Given that the calories in fat measures out to be 3500 if you stick it in a fire and burn it, you can be certain that you won't get more energy than that when your body uses it. It is more likely that people are overestimating their activity level.

And for what it's worth, the tool they linked to in the article grossly overestimates the calories burned at my activity level.