2 lb per week weight loss

nikkons017 wrote: »

buy a food scale and use it to measure out your food in grams to get accurate calories. Never count exercise calories towards what you can eat. You burn very little calories from exercising, just consider the calories you burn as a bonus.

if you are near the 1200 calorie mark, do not go below. 1200 calories is the calorie intake of like a 10 yr old and you are bordering on malnutrition. You need to be lifting weights to build muscle so it increases the calories that you burn.

build more muscle = higher metabolism = easier to burn fat = able to eat more food and still lose weight

Most fitness girls I know eat around 1800 calories if not more for their "cutting"/fat loss

nikkons017 wrote: »

WinoGelato wrote: »

nikkons017 wrote: »

buy a food scale and use it to measure out your food in grams to get accurate calories. Never count exercise calories towards what you can eat. You burn very little calories from exercising, just consider the calories you burn as a bonus.

if you are near the 1200 calorie mark, do not go below. 1200 calories is the calorie intake of like a 10 yr old and you are bordering on malnutrition. You need to be lifting weights to build muscle so it increases the calories that you burn.

build more muscle = higher metabolism = easier to burn fat = able to eat more food and still lose weight

Most fitness girls I know eat around 1800 calories if not more for their "cutting"/fat loss

To the bolded, as was explained upthread, the calculation of a calorie goal from MFP excludes exercise, it is a NEAT goal, so the system is actually designed that if you exercise you should eat back at least a portion of those calories.

I'm not sure how on one hand you are stressing the need to eat at an adequate minimum level yet on the other dismissing the idea of eating back exercise calories... isn't that kind of the same thing? If OP exercises and burns 400 calories, and eats those back increasing her total calorie intake to 1680, how is that different than your recommendation to just increase her calorie goal?

if you can find any reliable way to accurately measure energy consumed by exercise as all the machines and trainers give you bogus numbers. The amount you burn depends on lots of factors like height, weight, age, gender, muscle mass, muscle adaptation etc... I know people like to look on their cardio machine and it gives them a nice 400 number but it is complete bs. Those formulas also include a portion of bmr which is what you would burn if you did absolutely nothing and just existed, which is near half of that number. This is why they can magically calc your calories burned from just entering your weight knowing nothing else about you (lol). You are not buring 1k+ calories in your body pump/combat/yoga/whatever class, its marketing. If you really wanted to burn over 1k calories you would have to almost full out sprint continuously for 2.5hrs straight with no breaks, then you might get close. Again this doesn't factor in age, weight, etc... We are physically adapted to be efficient when doing exercises/work/hunt and we eat calorie dense foods. This is why humans survived.

So you can't estimate accurately how much calories you are burning so you can't accurately determine how much "extra" you could theoretically eat. However it is fact that if you are not in a caloric deficit, you will not lose weight according to thermodynamics. So you get 3 options, eat a caloric deficit, eat at maintenance, eat above maintenance. 2/3 of those, you will not be losing weight. I'd rather not guess when the odds are already against me.

Muscle take up more energy to maintain then fat does on your body. As when you crash diet, you are mostly losing muscle/water as its the first thing to go in terms of keeping you alive, thus how you get skinny fat people who are thin but still look frail. If you put on more muscle, you require more energy for your body to maintain that muscle. Thus you are increasing how much you can eat. The amount is determined by your goals and how much previous muscle mass you have. You adjust accordingly by your progress pictures and long-term scale moving averages.

This works the same for exercise. But the key point for exercise/activity level is that is has to be consistent week over week, which is really hard for most people as stuff just happens. If you can do it, great; watch the scale and photos and increase your cals, working towards you goal.

But this is the catch. A pound of fat is about 3500 calories. So for you to lose even 1 pound per week you need to be in a deficit of 500 calories each day for 7 DAYS (minimum). If you cut that to 250 cal deficit then it takes you around 2 weeks to lose 1 lb. So if you mess up your calories adding them back in, you could be losing weight but extremely slow. So if you decide to cheat; 1 medium pizza is ~2k calories, bar of chocolate is around ~900 cal, a normal combo meal from a fast food place is like ~2k cals, its extremely easy to erase what little deficit you had and erase 2 or more WEEKS of progress.

The minimum level is for safety. 1200 is extremely low and it is hard to eat a wide variety of foods to get adequate macro and micro nutrients at that level. If you want to go below that, this is your choice but be warned that you will probably develop nutrition deficiences, you body will go into panic mode cause your starving yourself and will make fat loss near impossible. It will also lower your metabolism to further conserve energy making weight loss harder/slower. You will also be eating mostly muscle and not the fat you wanted to lose.

kshama2001 wrote: »

EricaH7 wrote: »

Thanks for all the advice and help. I definitely learned a lot. As far as my stats go I started at 184.4, currently I am at 175.2. My goal is to be somewhere between 130-150. Right now I have been averaging losing 2 lbs. per week eating as I do which obviously I have not been eating back the exercise calories, however I do not find this amount of calories I am eating hard to maintain which is confusing to me when everyone is saying it should be? I have been eating like this for over a month now and I really have not been hungry. I have been maintaining this amount just fine. If you guys believe this is unhealthy then I will listen to suggestions and up the amount I am eating, but to be honest I have not changed the quantity of foods I am eating at all. I have only changed the quality.

With only 25-45 pounds to lose, 2 pounds per week is an overly aggressive goal. Do dial back to a pound a week.

You start using a food scale, at which point you will learn that you've been eating more than you think, and start eating back a percentage of your exercise calories, or continue as is as the extra consumption is currently balancing out the calories burned via exercise.