Maybe s tupid question

milesy1971 wrote: »

thanks......i think my biggest problem with tracking calories is the nightly family meal - the wife cooks normally so to work out calories per serve always seems problematic

im sure others have the same issue.any advise on how you handle this?

My boyfriend cooks all of the family meals from scratch as well. Use the barcode scanner and leave out the ingredients (bottles, bags, etc) and scan them after dinner and figure out how much your serving was based on how many were used total to cook for the family. It's not easy, but scanning harder things liked marinades, sauces, dressing, etc makes the figuring easier.

WendyLeigh1119 wrote: »

milesy1971 wrote: »

thanks......i think my biggest problem with tracking calories is the nightly family meal - the wife cooks normally so to work out calories per serve always seems problematic

im sure others have the same issue.any advise on how you handle this?

My boyfriend cooks all of the family meals from scratch as well. Use the barcode scanner and leave out the ingredients (bottles, bags, etc) and scan them after dinner and figure out how much your serving was based on how many were used total to cook for the family. It's not easy, but scanning harder things liked marinades, sauces, dressing, etc makes the figuring easier.

even the barcode scanner entries can be way off

Definitely check that barcodes match bottle or bag. But I got my boyfriend a food scale to make it easier on him. He likes to have the kitchen to himself, so I don't dare get in the way. We just go over the "stats" after dinner together. If it's veggies and fruits and such, calories are minimal so I don't worry about exact measurements too much. It's the pastas, sauces, and grains I'm really vigilant about. "Give me literally 1/4 of a bagel with the eggs" is practically a mantra around here, lol.

milesy1971 wrote: »

thanks......i think my biggest problem with tracking calories is the nightly family meal - the wife cooks normally so to work out calories per serve always seems problematic

im sure others have the same issue.any advise on how you handle this?

Treat it like a restaurant. You have control over simple green salad ingredients/salad dressing. Log it. You have control over portion size with the main entree (no seconds) and use the closest guess when you enter it in your log. Round up.

You can offer to help cook a meal one night a week and weigh and measure the ingredients yourself.

One question you're asking is whether eating 1310 Calories (if that's truly and accurately calculated and all you actually ate and drunk) is acceptable for a male... and the answer is probably no.

One other question you're asking is whether the 2K exercise calorie adjustment and 4K that you showed on a previous link are likely.

The answer there is a bit more complicated. On the face of it 2K and 4K exercise burns are pretty high and unlikely.

However they are eminently feasible if people meet certain criteria.

Namely total exercise calorie adjustments are a function of the settings you've selected on MFP, and of the total time of exercise or activity, intensity of exercise or activity, your weight, and to an extent your age and height.

So, if you're setup as sedentary on MFP and you walk for 8 hours at work... well you're not really sedentary and you will get a huge adjustment from that. The same applies if you're setup as sedentary and go for a 4 hour hike up the mountain.

So absent all the information in question (age, height, weight, level you've told MFP you're setup as, amount and type of activity and exercise)... only your weight change and logging will tell you in the longer term whether any of this made sense.

It looks like MFP is giving you 1900 calories to eat. I am going to assume you've set yourself up to lose 1lbs a week, which may or may not be the correct assumption and/or setting for you!

This means that MFP thinks you would burn 2400 Cal a day if you were a sedentary individual (and given a factor of 1.25 that MFP thinks your BMR is about 1920 Cal a day).

An individual with a 1920 Cal BMR COULD spend about 4417 calories during a very active day.

But he ought to be fairly tired at the end of it

So: if you think you had a very busy day and you're a big guy, yeah! You spent a lot of calories. Maybe a few too many given what you ate. Eat more or spend less or both so as to have a reasonably paced weight loss.

If you think you sat on your **kitten** all day barely moving a finger... and your toes are in no danger of getting blisters... well then you may want to look into the accuracy of your garmin.

Silentpadna wrote: »

milesy1971 wrote: »

does this make any sense???
\earning calories from daily excercise??

A great answer for @PAV8888 above. He gave a lot of what-if scenarios. If you would provide more context, help would be easier to give.

What kind of activity did you do the day you gave your screenshot? And of course: age, height, current weight, what your normal day's activities look like.

On a personal opinion and very much a side note to this thread, I would ignore the advice that some people give to "always set your activity to sedentary, just to be safe". That can actually be unsafe for active people, who then don't eat back enough exercise calories (also "just to be safe"). You can wind up with too big of a deficit and not getting adequate nutrition. The theory goes that if you eat back a percentage of exercise calories to account for potential overestimation of burns by your tracker, then you'll be "more accurate". This makes sense if you have set MFP settings to match your activity level. Eating back, say 50% of your exercise calories might mean eating 100 out of 200 exercise calories. Not a big deal right? If you set it at sedentary and you really are highly active, then eating 50% of 1500 exercise gives you 750 more in a deficit. This could lead to problems in not adequately fueling your activity.

I agree and it annoys me when I see this, then you double it up with only eating back half of exercise cals (or none at all) AND setting it to "lose 2 lbs per week" and it's a disaster waiting to happen. Irresponsible advice that's a recipe for under-eating, and then people wonder why 90% of dieters fail. Lots of people seem to be under the impression that they're sedentary by default, sedentary literally means an office worker who does literally zero activity throughout the day. very few people here are actually "sedentary".

What are your stats? Height current weight goal weight activity level
3900 calories a day seems very high unless you are very heavy or very very active

11k steps if this is average for you set mfp to active.
118 kg is 260 lbs
Assuming 5 ft 10
Your burn is about 3500 as you lose 1 lb a week every decrease of 500 a day you should eat 3000 a day.

10k steps is at least lightly active.