Do you trust Calories Remaining?

I eat my calorie goal 1290 and I also eat back about 1/2 - 3/4 of my activity calories I earn so yes I trust it and yes I consistently lose weight doing so.

ETA I currently have 34 lbs to go.

I it also depends on you settings and how you are tracking your exercise. For example I have a Fitbit I use to track my exercise so I set my activity level to sedentary on mfp and I eat back about half of my exercise calories and have been steadily losing weight about on track. The reason I only eat half back is that Fit it hr models tend to overestimate calories burned while exercising. Some devices are better I've heard Apple Watch and Garmin tend to be fairly accurate and the mfp app estimates are fairly safe to go by.

I don't see anything wrong with not eating back excersise calories. I'm sure some days it will be more some days less. I personally wouldn't force myself to eat if I'm full and satisfied. I eat, not because it tells me I have calories remaining, I eat because I'm hungry. I really don't pay attention to remaining calories.

The question is - what is your goal? How many lbs a week? You've lost 2.5 lbs a week. So unless your goal is that, you're eating too little. But even if your goal is 2 lbs a week and you only lost 2.5 lbs a week with an extra 700 calorie deficit, you're way underestimating your food intake anyway (or you would have lost 17 lbs).

That being said, with 40 lbs to lose, personally I'd eat a little bit more.

notquitecrazey wrote: »

Even though I have a fitness tracker, I don't trust it. I shoot for my calories, and I view any that my fitness tracker counts as burned as a bonus gift to myself. It's very frustrating, but there really isn't a reliable way to see how much you've burned exactly.

You'd be better to eat half back.

But as to how to know the accuracy, it just takes a bit of time to be able to compare your expected loss based on your calorie limits vs. your actual loss. Losing fast than you plan, eat more. Average of 4-6 weeks is a good place to start.

Use weight trend not daily weight (especially when measuring only once a week or once a month) to judge progress--weight loss is variable and water weight changes faster than fat levels.

Fitness trackers are not accurate, your food logging is not accurate, the food values you use are not accurate.... but if you consistently and faithfully log to the best of your ability and use a device that is able to consistently capture your activities, then you can adjust based on your results over a period of time (3 to 5 weeks, including TOM if applicable). And that WOULD be accurate when it comes to you!

Based on your results (faster than 2lbs a week), you are relatively under-eating. Doing so is not necessarily good for you. You will retain more lean mass by limiting your losses to 0.5 to 0.75% of your bodyweight per week. Lots of people will say that losses up to 1% a week are fine too.

Note that there are no bonus points for getting to maintenance fast. The bonus points will accumulate when and if you manage to maintain your loss for three, five, or even more years.

Various trackers work better or worse for particular individuals based on how close to the average these individuals are and on the type of activity the trackers are trying to account for.

n=1. According to Google Fit I over-eat by approximately 25% and should be gaining weight like crazy. According to Fitbit I should be able to achieve the results I am achieving AND eat about 5% more Calories a day. On average I eat ~2950 Cal....

I trusted it because I knew I was pretty accurate in both my logging and my exercise calorie burns...I did not rely on the database to provide me with calorie burns from exercise...I also vetted my database entries when logging food to ensure reliability...I used a food scale to weigh most things, etc.

It wasn't a matter of trusting the app...what the app spits out is only as good as what you put in...it was a matter of doing what I needed to do and trusting myself.

Steelheader102 wrote: »

I don't think it's a matter of trusting the app (MFP) it's a matter of trusting the apps that feeds the app... Really? Because I walked 7500 steps today I should eat an extra 600 calories? I'm sorry, but I call that a bunk.

I'm putting in exactly what I eat and we weigh everything. Mfp is helping to record and know what I put in my body and I've found many discrepancies in their database.

So I guess the tool itself helps to track, but it's not science and it can't take into account everyone's individually situation and needs.

Well, yeah, fitness trackers can provide faulty estimates. As I said initially, if someone gets poor results from eating back activity calories it is possible that they are over-estimating what they are burning. That doesn't mean that *no* calories should ever be eaten back (because even if you don't burn 600 calories doing an activity, you're surely burning something), it means that we sometimes have to make adjustments based on our individual results.