TDEE and SL 5x5

I would suggest setting your goal at sedentary when calculating your TDEE - then eating some if not all calories back on the days you exercise. This way you are still hitting your nutritional/eating goals even on your rest days. Just a suggestion!!!

I suggest buying a heart rate monitor. I use a Polar one. It's really the best way to accurately calculate calories burned from all exercise, including strength training. I find MFP's estimates for my cardio calorie burn to be off frequently so my heart rate monitor keeps me on track. Good luck!

Kkelso1119 wrote: »

I suggest buying a heart rate monitor. I use a Polar one. It's really the best way to accurately calculate calories burned from all exercise, including strength training. I find MFP's estimates for my cardio calorie burn to be off frequently so my heart rate monitor keeps me on track. Good luck!

A HR monitor will be wildly wrong for weight lifting. HR monitors are best suited for steady state cardio (walking, running, biking, rowing, eliptical, etc... all at a relatively constant pace)

OP: With no information about height, age, weight, I can't give you my estimate so I can't answer your question. I'm 5'11" 31yo, male, and 176lb and I exercise 3-5 times/week and my TDEE is ~2700. I know this based on measuring calories in and weight changes. However, some TDEE calculators will give me ~2700, while others will give me over 3000 with the same parameters. This is because they may use different equations to do initial estimates, and then differences extrapolate from there.

You could plug your stats into MFP and set the goal to maintain weight. Then add the average number of exercise calories to that and you get TDEE. You could also use other TDEE calculators for comparison as well. Since there are various BMR estimation equations you will probably get different results. You can then pick something in the middle and see how it goes.

If you want to be more accurate, then monitor weight changes over 6-8 weeks and log as accurately as possible. Then take your average daily weight loss, divide by 500, and add that to your average calories eaten per day and it'll give you a more accurate TDEE.

That looks better, although I'm not sure just how accurate it is. Remember, this is simply a rough estimator (although they call it a calculator) based on averages - and, as mentioned, uses one of a number of different formulas.

In your situation, you could (but don't have to) probably go with TDEE - 20%, which gives you 2363 Cals to consume daily. Recalculate after you lose 10 lbs. Try that for a month or so and compare the amount of weight you expect to lose (based on your calculations) to what you've really lost. If it's close, keep on keeping on. If not, then adjust up (if you're losing considerably more weight than expected) or down (if losing a bit less than expected).