Week 1 done and DAMN!!

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Replies

  • StealthHealth
    StealthHealth Posts: 2,417 Member
    crotondo1478 wrote: »
    StealthHealth wrote: »
    crotondo1478 wrote: »
    goldthistime wrote: »
    crotondo1478 wrote: »
    A couple buzz kills in here.

    I want you to succeed, and I'll bet everyone else here does too. But to lose 9lbs of fat you would have had to have a deficit of 31,500 calories last week. That is 4500 calories a day. Let's say that you are an active guy and maintain at 3500 calories a day. You would have had to have exercised away another 1000 calories a day and not eaten anything all week long. Or burned 1500 calories a day and eaten only a 500 calories a day. Or some other equally difficult variation.

    You should absolutely be thrilled with your success. But just keep in mind that if the scales don't budge (or worse, go backwards) at some time in the next couple of weeks it doesn't necessarily mean that something is wrong with your approach, just that your water retention levels are returning to more normal levels. Keep going!

    I exercise 5-6 days a week including an hour on weights and an additional hour on the treadmill. I am averaging about 1200-1400 calorie intake a day and don't feel hungry. When I say 1200, I am not factoring in the exercise. End of week two was today. I weighed in at another 5 lbs lost. That is 14 lbs in 2 weeks. I am only 5 lbs to the so called not overweight BMI. Hopefully I will be there in a week or two and can move to maintaining the weight. Amazingly I am not hungry and feel great!

    Sorry, but you are setting yourself up for failure. With this plan, and at your rate of loss, you're losing more lean body mass (muscle) than fat (although as others point out, much of a dieter's first week's loss will be water weight) and this will mean that despite the weight loss you will not look as lean as you hope and when you do decide to maintain weight your calorific intake will need to be lower than you hoped.

    I strongly urge you to:
    • Exercise less - reduce the cardio specifically to a couple or three short sessions and run a progressive strength program for 3 or 4 1 hour sessions per week. Ideally, plan this to give you at least 1 full day off.
    • Eat more - 1200 is highly unlikely to be sufficient for a safe rate of loss for a male working out 5-6 times a week. Also note that for dieters and the overweight, hunger or the absence of hunger is often a very unreliable method of assessing dietary needs.

    I am trying to figure out exactly what I should have for intake and exercise. Based on research I just did using height, weight, exercise amount, it says that I should be doing the following to lose 1-2 lbs a week...

    2500 to maintain
    Take 20% off to lose weight.
    Approx 2,000 calories

    3-4 times on treadmill per week for 1 hour
    3-4 times weight training per week for 1 hour

    Does that make sense? Eating more has never been a problem for me.

    You did some research that led you to the above recommendation but then you ignored that and instead eat about 1300 (700 less than recommendation) per day.

    Without knowing your stats it's difficult to comment on the validity of the 2000 cals but what did your research tell you about eating extra to account for the exercise? In other words, does the 2000 cals target take into consideration the 6 -8 hours per week of gym work?
  • StealthHealth
    StealthHealth Posts: 2,417 Member
    edited August 2017
    Sorry, That dashed off response now reads as pretty negative.

    There are 2 ways in which you can set up your calorie target.
    • In MFP, plug in your stats and set a weight loss rate. MFP spits out a number which you eat to to lose at approx the rate you specified. With this method you should also log your cardio exercise* and MFP will give you additional calories to eat back.
    • Visit a site that helps your calculate your TDEE and plug in your stats. in this instance you will have calculated your daily cals including the exercise you told it you planned to do. Back in MFP, manually set your calories and eat to them each day - in this instance you do not need to log your exercise but if you do, don;t eat back your exercise cals because they are already accounted for in your TDEE.

    My preference is the latter because I can't be bothered logging exercise and I like to frequently tweak my calories manually depending on life, the universe, and my current goals.

    * MFP doesn't allocate cals for strength work outs because it's highly variable per individual and it's a much lower value than you might assume. Many people feel that MFP overestimates cardio cals and therefore choose only to eat back a portion of those calories. Whatever works for you - it's all a rough estimation anyway.

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