Losing Weight is NOT that simple..imo..
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After losing 40 pounds the body is completely different. What worked 40 pounds ago might not work now. Also when you start exercising, a 1 mile run might burn a lot of calories, but as you get fitter you will need to run more and faster to burn the same amount of calories.970Mikaela1 wrote: »After losing 40 pounds you have enough data that it really shouldn't be guesswork anymore. Accurately tracking your data points should all but eliminate the guesswork.
After 40 lbs the body weighs less. A smaller body burns less calories, however a fitter body can do more. But hey, if you want this to be hard and complicated, it absolutely can be
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I agree with the gist of what the original poster is saying. People here are often insufferably smug with their comments and suggestions. It seems like it's politics or religion with them, and good luck arguing about that with true believers.0
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LiftAllThePizzas wrote: »
I never get why everyone ignores the fact that they can be off in both directions. People assume every inaccuracy is an underestimate. So unless there is some compelling reason to believe that a significant majority of food labels are all too low, you can expect the variations to even out in the long term.DeguelloTex wrote: »Second, even if the labels can be that far off, they almost never are. And stuff like steaks will even out over time.
Crazy statistics voodoo, right?
OP, I've consistently lost 0.5 lbs per week. As explained, there are ways to be more accurate. Food scale, and either find a way to be more accurate with their exercise burns, or take them out of the equation altogether (TDEE estimate approach)
I've also read some posts that indicate that the BMR estimates can be extremely accurate, since there's only so much variation in the daily calorie utilization of a 37 year old 5'4" 200 lb woman, for example. And from there you apply the activity multiplier and account for intentional exercise in the method of your choosing
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This part - no. If you use a digital food scale, and weigh all solid foods, you can be very accurate with calorie counting.
Better get yourself an accurate bomb calorimeter to go with it, the OP was making the point that nutritional labels themselves are not required to be very accurate.0 -
This part - no. If you use a digital food scale, and weigh all solid foods, you can be very accurate with calorie counting.
Better get yourself an accurate bomb calorimeter to go with it, the OP was making the point that nutritional labels themselves are not required to be very accurate.
Nutritional labels are allowed to be 40% inaccurate for the specified serving size? Could you post some reading material on this?
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I've also read some posts that indicate that the BMR estimates can be extremely accurate, since there's only so much variation in the daily calorie utilization of a 37 year old 5'4" 200 lb woman, for example.
Depends how many 200 lb women were measured in building the correlations. Not many I suspect. Male Italian conscripts may be better represented.
But you are right that any population estimate is going to be spot on for some members of the population.
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danieltsmoke wrote: »Secondly, its really difficult to just know how many calories you're eating..Have you googled "food label accuracy"? That stuff can often be 20%-40% wrong..not even to mention that some things just cant be calculated accurately..ie. one steak from a package could be hugely more caloric-ly dense simply due to a higher fat content.
First, congratulations on your weight loss. I'd be interested to know what your doctor has said about your low intake. I like you, and hope you're being well looked after.
Second, if you go buy the label weight, you will encounter inaccuracies. It's annoying, but weighing food is the best way to be accurate with calorie counts. Having said that, I often don't weigh food I've logged by the serving. I figure it's swings and roundabouts - sometimes it'll be underestimated, sometimes overestimated.
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I've also read some posts that indicate that the BMR estimates can be extremely accurate, since there's only so much variation in the daily calorie utilization of a 37 year old 5'4" 200 lb woman, for example.
Depends how many 200 lb women were measured in building the correlations. Not many I suspect. Male Italian conscripts may be better represented.
But you are right that any population estimate is going to be spot on for some members of the population.
Thanks. To clarify, that was not my stated position
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From the FDA's Guidance for Industry: Nutrition Labeling Manual - A Guide for Developing and Using Data Bases:
Nutritional labels are allowed to be 40% inaccurate for the specified serving size? Could you post some reading material on this?
Better get yourself an accurate bomb calorimeter to go with it, the OP was making the point that nutritional labels themselves are not required to be very accurate.This part - no. If you use a digital food scale, and weigh all solid foods, you can be very accurate with calorie counting.Class I nutrients must be present at 100% or more of the value declared on the labelClass II nutrients must be present at 80% or more of the value declared on the label.
Some things need to have a minimum of exactly what's shown (more is fine), some things need to have at least 80% of what's shown (more is fine), and some things have to have less than 120% of what's shown on the nutritional label (less is fine).For foods with label declarations of Third Group nutrients, the ratio between the amount obtained by laboratory analysis and the amount declared on the product label in the Nutrition Facts panel must be 120% or less
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Liftng4Lis wrote: »Actually, weight loss all comes down to a caloric deficit. It's quite simple really.
The more I watch what I eat the more I totally agree with this!0 -
I agree OP, it's not easy with CiCO and very estimated which i why IN the past I've shunned it knowing I've lost 30lb without counting anything but trying to be in tune with my bodies natural 'calorie counter' as you can called it. I have however now joined MFP to continue my journey with CICO to see how this has a bearing on weightloss but seeing the OP points I have to agree.
Some people swear by CICO by counting but it isn't good for everyone, people with OCD etc and sure isn't the only way to loose weight!
Also, it's no ones business what the OP eats, that wasn't the topic of the thread and I feel like you've jumped on him with your high horses, sticking to the thread topic and not knit picking would be a lot kinder and considerate!0 -
So who actuallt agrees with the points that the OP made?
Put to one side whether people are smug or whether hes eating a healthy amount. Does he make good points in his OP or say anything new?0 -
Weight loss is simple in that you need to eat fewer calories than your body uses. "Simple" doesn't mean effortless. Running is simple but still a lot of work. Weight loss is the same way.So who actuallt agrees with the points that the OP made?
Put to one side whether people are smug or whether hes eating a healthy amount. Does he make good points in his OP or say anything new?
The two things you need to know, as the OP said, are how much your body burns and how much you are consuming. Both have a margin for error. However, you can keep track of how much you think your body is burning and how much you think you are consuming. You can then use that data to make adjustments.
All you need is time and accurate records (as accurate as you can make them) to figure out what works for you. It does take time and it does take keeping track about how your body is reacting. Adjustments need to be made all along the way.0 -
From the FDA's Guidance for Industry: Nutrition Labeling Manual - A Guide for Developing and Using Data Bases:
Nutritional labels are allowed to be 40% inaccurate for the specified serving size? Could you post some reading material on this?
Better get yourself an accurate bomb calorimeter to go with it, the OP was making the point that nutritional labels themselves are not required to be very accurate.This part - no. If you use a digital food scale, and weigh all solid foods, you can be very accurate with calorie counting.Class I nutrients must be present at 100% or more of the value declared on the labelClass II nutrients must be present at 80% or more of the value declared on the label.
Some things need to have a minimum of exactly what's shown (more is fine), some things need to have at least 80% of what's shown (more is fine), and some things have to have less than 120% of what's shown on the nutritional label (less is fine).For foods with label declarations of Third Group nutrients, the ratio between the amount obtained by laboratory analysis and the amount declared on the product label in the Nutrition Facts panel must be 120% or less
Thanks! The third group is what actually includes calories.
I like this tidbit: "Reasonable excesses of class I and II nutrients above labeled amounts and reasonable deficiencies of the Third Group nutrients are usually considered acceptable by the agency within good manufacturing practices."
One thing I wonder, is that due to the separation of the nutrient classes, it might still be easier for a manufacturer to hit all the targets if they're closer to nominal, than if they lean towards the extremes for any of the nutrient categories
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danieltsmoke wrote: »@ogmomma2012 I agree. Awesome job on the 75lbs down. I think that weightloss is simple in theory, but very much more complicated in practice. Would you agree?
I agree.0 -
After losing 40 pounds the body is completely different. What worked 40 pounds ago might not work now. Also when you start exercising, a 1 mile run might burn a lot of calories, but as you get fitter you will need to run more and faster to burn the same amount of calories.970Mikaela1 wrote: »After losing 40 pounds you have enough data that it really shouldn't be guesswork anymore. Accurately tracking your data points should all but eliminate the guesswork.
But your precise numbers don't matter. Only results matter. If you're not getting the results you expect, adjust intake up or down to make up the difference.0 -
The point has been made that they don't have to be "very" accurate for someone in his position to lose weight.
This part - no. If you use a digital food scale, and weigh all solid foods, you can be very accurate with calorie counting.
Better get yourself an accurate bomb calorimeter to go with it, the OP was making the point that nutritional labels themselves are not required to be very accurate.
Is there any evidence that the labels are substantially and systematically inaccurate in any direction, let alone a direction that makes it harder to lose weight?
Even if the labels aren't very accurate, and even if they are systematically inaccurate in a particular direction, unless you eat a constantly changing rotation of food, you can compensate for this systematic error by adjusting your intake.
And, after all of that, we don't even know if whatever issues the OP has with weight loss are related to inaccurate nutritional labeling in the first place.
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danieltsmoke wrote: »I've lost 40lbs about, so what I'm doing is working for me, I'm not complaining. But I get frustrated when I see a forums response like "Just eat less calories than you're burning...are you sure you're weighing accurately?" This seems patronizing, and also is flawed in a couple ways.
First, it's really difficult to just know how many calories you're burning..I don't have a butt stamp indicating that number, or even an owners manual, so the best I've got is taking blood tests and running fitness experiments (which simply isn't practical for an average person), OR using an online calculator/guestimator, which let's be honest, has a HUGE margin of error. Some sites I have a 2500 TDE, some say 3500..
Secondly, its really difficult to just know how many calories you're eating..Have you googled "food label accuracy"? That stuff can often be 20%-40% wrong..not even to mention that some things just cant be calculated accurately..ie. one steak from a package could be hugely more caloric-ly dense simply due to a higher fat content.
My point is, even if you follow all the right steps, you could easily have an over estimated TDE (by no fault of your own), and eat far underestimated calories (by no fault of your own), and simply not lose weight. Thus "just eat less than you burn" is fairly useless.
If I had any advice to offer to people struggling, I'd say it's all about trial and error, which can be frustratingly slow. You gotta try something, whether its working out more, or trying to stay under a certain amount-ish of calories, and see how that goes for a few weeks. If that doesn't work, change it up, and try again. Patience has been my biggest struggle but probably my greatest ally during the last few months, and I know that once you find your groove you're gonna kick your fitness goals right in the somewhat large *kitten*. Rant over..
The best indicator? Whether or not you are losing weight, once you are weighing all food, sticking to the calorie deficit and logging honestly. If you are losing weight, you are at the right numbers for you. If not, adjustments need to be made. That's how it works.
No one said it was easy.
that. and it IS easy. its just hard sticking to it. but if you want it bad enough, you do it.
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PaulaWallaDingDong wrote: »
But your precise numbers don't matter. Only results matter..
Which was part of the OP'S point - telling people to weigh food to 4 significant figures doesn't ensure weight loss.
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PaulaWallaDingDong wrote: »
But your precise numbers don't matter. Only results matter..
Which was part of the OP'S point - telling people to weigh food to 4 significant figures doesn't ensure weight loss.
Telling them to weigh food when they arent weighing and are complaining they arent losing does make sense though. If people are at a consistent calorific deficit then they will lose weight over time. So his calim about it being impossible to know how much you are eating is pretty much baloney. Accurate deficit control is the most effective method of estimating.
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Accurate deficit control is the most effective method of estimating.
Don't understand. Controlling something is the best way of estimating ? Or accurate intake control to eliminate or minimise variation ?
Ultimately if you aren't losing weight eating less is a good idea however you achieve that - fewer spoons, packets, grams or whatever.
I agree with the OP that one's actual deficit is almost unknowable other than by assessing it from the achieved weight loss.
So it's an iterative process rather than a case of " setting a deficit ".0 -
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I suppose it could be the case that for the last year and three months I've just been lucky enough to buy food that has nutritional values that are unusually close to the values on the labels. That seems like a pretty unlikely explanation, though.0
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After losing 40 pounds the body is completely different. What worked 40 pounds ago might not work now. Also when you start exercising, a 1 mile run might burn a lot of calories, but as you get fitter you will need to run more and faster to burn the same amount of calories.970Mikaela1 wrote: »After losing 40 pounds you have enough data that it really shouldn't be guesswork anymore. Accurately tracking your data points should all but eliminate the guesswork.
But you have the data to help you understand your TDEE and calorie burns, even at the lower weight. I've lost 30 and I can look back and see what my TDEE is and what I'd need to lose, just by reading my data. Same goes for calorie burns (though I don't do cardio so I don't know quite as much about it).0 -
So who actuallt agrees with the points that the OP made?
Put to one side whether people are smug or whether hes eating a healthy amount. Does he make good points in his OP or say anything new?
I do disagree, but was hesitant to post (editing out a couple of comments because @999tigger's question requests that we put a couple of things aside. My apologies!).
It's easy to ignore the basics of weight loss by stressing out over the inaccuracies of calorie content and calories burned.
But those inaccuracies are inevitable - this is life, not a laboratory, and those of us who have enjoyed weight loss success are very aware of that. Those inaccuracies fall within a reasonably defined range if you apply the MFP tools correctly (which also isn't hard to do), and as @PAV8888 points out, "A collection of small errors unless systematically inaccurate in the same direction tends to minimize not maximize the overall error". That's important information to take in.
If you focus too much on inaccuracies and "we just can't know for sure", it becomes a deflection and a way to rationalize yourself right into failure.
In my experience, losing weight HAS been simple. I wouldn't call it easy - it definitely has its challenges. But simple? Yes. The tools I've learned here have set me free from so much anxiety over whether what I'm doing will work or not. I resisted logging and weighing food for so long, and now I sort of laugh at myself over that, because it's the single most powerful change I made that led to success.
Unfortunately, it's always easy to cave in to generalizations that are so broad that they are pretty much meaningless when we're trying to help each other sort out the actual practical steps that support weight loss. "Everyone is different" sounds like a nice thing to say, but it doesn't really say anything at all that's helpful. It turns out to be just another deflection. So I guess that makes me mean or something, I dunno. I just know that counting calories + logging + weighing has resulted in great success for me, and that it has been beautifully simple.
I agree so much with all you've said
But the bit I bolded...yes, hell yes...that happens here so often0 -
Yeah. It's like saying your speedometer isn't 100 accurate therefore it can give you absolutely no valuable information about your speed, so you might as well just floor it.So who actuallt agrees with the points that the OP made?
Put to one side whether people are smug or whether hes eating a healthy amount. Does he make good points in his OP or say anything new?
I do disagree, but was hesitant to post (editing out a couple of comments because @999tigger's question requests that we put a couple of things aside. My apologies!).
It's easy to ignore the basics of weight loss by stressing out over the inaccuracies of calorie content and calories burned.
But those inaccuracies are inevitable - this is life, not a laboratory, and those of us who have enjoyed weight loss success are very aware of that. Those inaccuracies fall within a reasonably defined range if you apply the MFP tools correctly (which also isn't hard to do), and as @PAV8888 points out, "A collection of small errors unless systematically inaccurate in the same direction tends to minimize not maximize the overall error". That's important information to take in.
If you focus too much on inaccuracies and "we just can't know for sure", it becomes a deflection and a way to rationalize yourself right into failure.
In my experience, losing weight HAS been simple. I wouldn't call it easy - it definitely has its challenges. But simple? Yes. The tools I've learned here have set me free from so much anxiety over whether what I'm doing will work or not. I resisted logging and weighing food for so long, and now I sort of laugh at myself over that, because it's the single most powerful change I made that led to success.
Unfortunately, it's always easy to cave in to generalizations that are so broad that they are pretty much meaningless when we're trying to help each other sort out the actual practical steps that support weight loss. "Everyone is different" sounds like a nice thing to say, but it doesn't really say anything at all that's helpful. It turns out to be just another deflection. So I guess that makes me mean or something, I dunno. I just know that counting calories + logging + weighing has resulted in great success for me, and that it has been beautifully simple.
I agree so much with all you've said
But the bit I bolded...yes, hell yes...that happens here so often
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Its all estimation. The greater the degree of accuracy the more likely you will be at your wanted deficit.
Weighing is a better method than spoons and cups or eyeballing. Whats so hard to understand about that?
These forums are chock full of people who try other methods but it doesnt work for them hence they are told to weigh. Nobody ever said weighing was the only method.
Ps caitwyn agree with what you said. I put the provisos in because people get distracted and go off on a tangent instead of answering the points made. Weighing isnt the only way and I dont think the people who respond ever say that, they normally answer posts to people who are not losing and whose existing method of estimating is not working for them. its bizarre to start criticisng a method that is more likely to get you results. If people just did the basics correctly then a lot more succeed. Its that simple.
I prefer the word straightforward, which is what I normally use. That doesnt mean its easy.
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If one peruses the forums with regularity, one will find that one of the biggest obstacles is not from the lack of 100% accuracy from food labels, food weighing, or workout time, it is mental.
Granted, some people have a difficult time losing weight due to a medical condition. I am not making light of that in any way. I think that that segment of the weigh less / fitness community here is small, at least from the overall responses I have read thus far.
In my opinion, losing weight / getting fit (barring a medical condition) (for the first time or part 2, 3, or whatever pertains to you) is as hard as one makes it. Often times, we create our own mountains. Work on getting rid of the stinkin' thinkin' and you will see that the mountain you need to climb to your goal is not that tall at all, it just looks that way because you have so many excuses blocking your path.
Do your best to get into a routine. That will help losing weight / getting fit to become a more natural part of your life, and you won't come to look at your new journey as a place where you are in some kind of unpleasant jail biding your time.0
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