7000 calorie deficit required to lose a pound?

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!

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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!

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.)

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.

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 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.

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

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....

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

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.