Super Frustrated At Weight Gain
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Again, thank you all for the awesome comments, I'm taking them all to heart and I feel much better about what to do now and how the week has gone. I'm definitely upping the caloric intake and relaxing the diet for this week to let my body reset a little, then a SENSIBLE caloric goal afterwards. In the meantime I'll still eat well, just more of it (nearly twice as much) but I'll ramp that up little by little each day.
I'm still in a bad mood but I feel better - thank you all!8 -
Hey,
First, deep relaxing breaths!
OK, now I ran your numbers (male, 198.5 lbs, 5'9", age 46) through the calculator at scoobysworkshop.com/accurate-calorie-calculator/, and for a sedentary person trying to cut calorie intake by 20%, I got the following results:
So, as many others have said, your daily target of 1200 calories is off - way off - and you're not accurately measuring your food.
I'm 8 years older than you, an inch taller than you, and there is no way I could survive in 1200 calories now. I dropped 100+ lbs after setting up my targets, and measuring food exactly. If you correct your intake to reflect what you are actually ingesting, you will get there.
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Wow a flood of 2nd page comments! Yes, MFP really suggested 1,200 calories for a man of my stature when I started this journey 5 months ago and I never thought to have it re-evaluate my needs. That was stupid. I've always thought 1,200 calories was insanely low but I went with the flow.
Yes, I eyeballed food and I'm probably off, I admit that - but I believe that my exercise has likely (notice I have said likely) negated my inaccuracies enough in the past week as to cause me frustrations over not losing. Even if I were way off, I've been steadily losing weight for quite some time, it's just this week was a non-stop gain. I'm going to weigh my food and work on my accuracy but, until now, it's been working for me.
I figure my system is really messed up right now. Eating improperly (be that too few calories or being inaccurate in logging them) and this week I upped my exercise and probably made the problem worse. Like I said, my mood has been really horrid this week and a hormone imbalance would certainly help explain that - especially since it all coincides with me putting a LOT more activity in this week.
I will vouch for the fact that there is a glitch in MFP where it will sometimes give a male 1200 net calories.
OP 1500 net calories is the healthy minimum for a male who is not under medical supervision.1 -
I ran your numbers (male, 198.5 lbs, 5'9", age 46) through the calculator at scoobysworkshop.com/accurate-calorie-calculator/
Thanks for that link! I've bookmarked it and am plugging it in with my activity levels now. EYE OPENING difference between MFP's suggestions and that! I'll need to cross verify the numbers with 2-3 other places but it sounds like 1,200 was insanity.1 -
Again, thank you all for the awesome comments, I'm taking them all to heart and I feel much better about what to do now and how the week has gone. I'm definitely upping the caloric intake and relaxing the diet for this week to let my body reset a little, then a SENSIBLE caloric goal afterwards. In the meantime I'll still eat well, just more of it (nearly twice as much) but I'll ramp that up little by little each day.
I'm still in a bad mood but I feel better - thank you all!
Go find the ice cream your wife has tucked away, have some, exhale and smile.
Tomorrow is a new day.
As for weight loss: There are only one absolute: You need to burn more calories than you eat.
How you do it, is entirely up to you. You dont HAVE to go low carb, you dont HAVE to weigh and measure everything or anything. You dont HAVE to drink 8 glasses of water. You dont HAVE to exercise 2 hours each day.
You just have to find YOUR way, whatever that may be.
What I do want to suggest though, is to get one of those body scale analyzers that measure total weight, lean mass and fat mass.
Many poeple will say they are inaccurate, and they would not be wrong. It will however show you a reliable trend.
Because the total number on your scale is not the most important number. Your total weight is lean mass+fat mass. Lean mass is everything but fat (bones, organs, mucles, water)
If you have been working out hard the past week, and eating very little, your body is holding on for dear life, keeping most of the liquid to repair mucles. Thats the gain you have been seeing this week. If you had a body analyzer, you would have seen that the body fat has been reduced, but lean mass increased (in this case water)
You would have known you had lost fat this past week, and you wouldnt right now eat your wife's ice cream!
Have a wonderful day
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I ran your numbers (male, 198.5 lbs, 5'9", age 46) through the calculator at scoobysworkshop.com/accurate-calorie-calculator/
Thanks for that link! I've bookmarked it and am plugging it in with my activity levels now. EYE OPENING difference between MFP's suggestions and that! I'll need to cross verify the numbers with 2-3 other places but it sounds like 1,200 was insanity.
It IS insanity. No wonder you're grumpy.
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What I do want to suggest though, is to get one of those body scale analyzers that measure total weight, lean mass and fat mass.
Many poeple will say they are inaccurate, and they would not be wrong. It will however show you a reliable trend.
Because the total number on your scale is not the most important number. Your total weight is lean mass+fat mass. Lean mass is everything but fat (bones, organs, mucles, water)
If you have been working out hard the past week, and eating very little, your body is holding on for dear life, keeping most of the liquid to repair mucles. Thats the gain you have been seeing this week. If you had a body analyzer, you would have seen that the body fat has been reduced, but lean mass increased (in this case water)
You would have known you had lost fat this past week, and you wouldnt right now eat your wife's ice cream!
Have a wonderful day
I have the top of the line Withings scale and, while I know it's not perfect science, I use it religiously each day and have for months. I have a fantastic chart of my trends. I have not, however, been really paying THAT much attention to the lean mass. It tells me a water % but I've never really known what that meant - I kept meaning to go out and research it but just haven't gotten to it.Susieq_1994 wrote: »It IS insanity. No wonder you're grumpy.
RIGHT!?!?!?!1 -
What I do want to suggest though, is to get one of those body scale analyzers that measure total weight, lean mass and fat mass.
Many poeple will say they are inaccurate, and they would not be wrong. It will however show you a reliable trend.
Because the total number on your scale is not the most important number. Your total weight is lean mass+fat mass. Lean mass is everything but fat (bones, organs, mucles, water)
If you have been working out hard the past week, and eating very little, your body is holding on for dear life, keeping most of the liquid to repair mucles. Thats the gain you have been seeing this week. If you had a body analyzer, you would have seen that the body fat has been reduced, but lean mass increased (in this case water)
You would have known you had lost fat this past week, and you wouldnt right now eat your wife's ice cream!
Have a wonderful day
I have the top of the line Withings scale and, while I know it's not perfect science, I use it religiously each day and have for months. I have a fantastic chart of my trends. I have not, however, been really paying THAT much attention to the lean mass. It tells me a water % but I've never really known what that meant - I kept meaning to go out and research it but just haven't gotten to it.
Look at your fat mass chart for the last week.
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You seem to have an all or nothing mentality- don't log at all or "weigh every peanut". Take a deep breath. When you get close to goal, accuracy is important because you don't have much room for error. But you're really making weighing & logging out to be an excessive burden, and it's not (if it was, I certainly wouldn't be doing it). If you snack on peanuts during the day, weigh out a bag in the morning and eat from that. When you make a sandwich, make it on the scale & grab the numbers as you go along. The thing is, we're really creatures of habit. We tend to eat the same things & the same general amounts from day to day. Once you've logged for a couple of weeks, all of your basic choices in the amounts you tend to use will be right there in your recent entries and logging will take a few minutes a day.
I saw some mention made of eating back your exercise calories. Burns are inflated. Only eat back about half. You need a month of weigh ins to see a real trend, not a week. But hang in there, you'll get this. 1 -
MileHigh4Wheeler wrote: »
Those scales do tend to have some margin of error. Good for watching the trends though, from my understanding.0 -
MileHigh4Wheeler wrote: »
Today: 23.8% Fat. That your all time low since you started losing weight?
It seems like you have lost quite a bit of fat, and thats your goal so last week has been good.
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Today: 23.8% Fat. That your all time low since you started losing weight?
It seems like you have lost quite a bit of fat, and thats your goal so last week has been good.
It is my low, about tied with where i was on December 15th. Yea, my body fat trend is very much up and down, when I look at the chart it's like a heartbeat. There is a steady decline but lots of peaks and valleys.0 -
MileHigh4Wheeler wrote: »I ran your numbers (male, 198.5 lbs, 5'9", age 46) through the calculator at scoobysworkshop.com/accurate-calorie-calculator/
Thanks for that link! I've bookmarked it and am plugging it in with my activity levels now. EYE OPENING difference between MFP's suggestions and that! I'll need to cross verify the numbers with 2-3 other places but it sounds like 1,200 was insanity.
Hang on, one thing to note: MFP estimates are NEAT calorie goals, they do not include exercise. A site like scooby's workshop which calculated TDEE is including all your calories burned including exercise. That's one reason for the big difference.
That said, all of these are just estimates based on numbers you input. The most accurate numbers are the ones that come from your actual results, but since there's a change your logging hasn't been accurate it's difficult to assess what your actual TDEE is.
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MileHigh4Wheeler wrote: »I ran your numbers (male, 198.5 lbs, 5'9", age 46) through the calculator at scoobysworkshop.com/accurate-calorie-calculator/
Thanks for that link! I've bookmarked it and am plugging it in with my activity levels now. EYE OPENING difference between MFP's suggestions and that! I'll need to cross verify the numbers with 2-3 other places but it sounds like 1,200 was insanity.
It's worth pointing out that MFP's calculations for daily calorie goals don't include exercise. A TDEE calculator like the one linked above does. So while "lightly active" on MFP means you're lightly active at work, "lightly active" on a TDEE calculator means you incorporate a modest amount of exercise into your daily routine. Hence the difference in numbers between the two sources.3 -
WinoGelato wrote: »MileHigh4Wheeler wrote: »I ran your numbers (male, 198.5 lbs, 5'9", age 46) through the calculator at scoobysworkshop.com/accurate-calorie-calculator/
Thanks for that link! I've bookmarked it and am plugging it in with my activity levels now. EYE OPENING difference between MFP's suggestions and that! I'll need to cross verify the numbers with 2-3 other places but it sounds like 1,200 was insanity.
Hang on, one thing to note: MFP estimates are NEAT calorie goals, they do not include exercise. A site like scooby's workshop which calculated TDEE is including all your calories burned including exercise. That's one reason for the big difference.
That said, all of these are just estimates based on numbers you input. The most accurate numbers are the ones that come from your actual results, but since there's a change your logging hasn't been accurate it's difficult to assess what your actual TDEE is.
Since I first mentioned the Scooby site and TDEE numbers, note that I said the calculation was for a "sedentary" person, which I believe should give a close approximation to the MFP/NEAT baseline number (happy to be corrected). My purpose for doing so was to show that there was no way MFP should be telling him to eat 1200 calories ... unless, for example, he put in a massive weekly weight loss target.
For those not knowing what TDEE or NEAT are, a brief summary:
- MFP uses NEAT (Non exercise Activity Thermogenisis) which basically is the calories you need before purposeful exercise to lose weight...that is why choosing your activity level is important when setting up your account if you aren't going to use TDEE.
- TDEE is Total Daily Energy Expenditure so that is your NEAT + EXERCISE
- Source: Second reply in https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10004328/mfp-vs-tdee0 -
MileHigh4Wheeler wrote: ».......................
I was so upset about this that I told my wife "screw this, what is the point" and told her that I'm done,............
HELP!
Don't give up. Keep going. You could be "this close".5 -
MileHigh4Wheeler wrote: »callsitlikeiseeit wrote: »THAT RIGHT THERE IS THE PROBLEM. RIGHT THERE. IN BLACK AND WHITE.
So you are saying that I need to weigh every single peanut I eat (in case the peanut is 1/100th of a gram off from a normal peanut) and somehow try to match every single macro and micro nutrient because nobody can lose weight reliably without doing that?
I know it sounds really snarky but the all caps yelling at me says that "hard work, eating "right" and exercise will never be successful unless you weigh each grain of rice you eat".
It just seems excessive. I appreciate that you lost 80 pounds, that's quite an achievement indeed, but I've been doing well up until recently I'm just not sure if my increase in exercise or maybe a lack of a major important nutrient is something I should be zooming in on here. I haven't weight each apple seed but you are implying that was just sheer luck because measuring out each oatmeal grain individually is the only way to get to my goal. Again, I glean this from the all caps yelling that my problem was staring me in the face.
I'm kind of skipping ahead and have not read every comment, but this right here is the issue. You are not weighing and logging correctly. The only way I lost the 60 lbs I have is by weighing every single thing I eat. This is the only way to know that the calorie amount you are taking in is correct. If I make homemade spaghetti sauce, I will weigh by grams and log every ingredient. I add them all up and divide by the amount of servings and that is the weight in grams I can have for that serving. Does it take a bit more time? Of course... but I am now sitting here 60 lbs lighter and can definitely say those extra few minutes I spend weighing and logging my food is way worth it.1 -
WinoGelato wrote: »MileHigh4Wheeler wrote: »I ran your numbers (male, 198.5 lbs, 5'9", age 46) through the calculator at scoobysworkshop.com/accurate-calorie-calculator/
Thanks for that link! I've bookmarked it and am plugging it in with my activity levels now. EYE OPENING difference between MFP's suggestions and that! I'll need to cross verify the numbers with 2-3 other places but it sounds like 1,200 was insanity.
Hang on, one thing to note: MFP estimates are NEAT calorie goals, they do not include exercise. A site like scooby's workshop which calculated TDEE is including all your calories burned including exercise. That's one reason for the big difference.
That said, all of these are just estimates based on numbers you input. The most accurate numbers are the ones that come from your actual results, but since there's a change your logging hasn't been accurate it's difficult to assess what your actual TDEE is.
Since I first mentioned the Scooby site and TDEE numbers, note that I said the calculation was for a "sedentary" person, which I believe should give a close approximation to the MFP/NEAT baseline number (happy to be corrected). My purpose for doing so was to show that there was no way MFP should be telling him to eat 1200 calories ... unless, for example, he put in a massive weekly weight loss target.
For those not knowing what TDEE or NEAT are, a brief summary:
- MFP uses NEAT (Non exercise Activity Thermogenisis) which basically is the calories you need before purposeful exercise to lose weight...that is why choosing your activity level is important when setting up your account if you aren't going to use TDEE.
- TDEE is Total Daily Energy Expenditure so that is your NEAT + EXERCISE
- Source: Second reply in https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10004328/mfp-vs-tdee
Yeah I didn't actually see that you provided him any numbers, I just wanted to clarify for him why you might see such a big difference between two different systems. I still haven't figured out how he ended up with a 1200 recommendation from MFP other than a glitch...
I've actually never compared a sedentary NEAT calculation from MFP with a sedentary TDEE from Scooby or another site. I know some TDEE calculators rely on a body fat estimate in order to more accurately predict calories. I use the MFP NEAT with a synced FitBit for exercise adjustments. That's been very accurate for me.2 -
In addition to a lot of good advice you've gotten from others, I'll just leave this here - it's worth a read: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/why-big-caloric-deficits-and-lots-of-activity-can-hurt-fat-loss.html/0
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