BURNING 3000 CALORIES A DAY??

Sounds a wee bit disordered unless it's her job...


My son has a TDEE around 3000, but he is a teenage boy going through puberty who is also a highly competitive athlete. We have a problem with keeping weight on him.

Ok. I don't know much about either BMR or TDEE but I do know that generally speaking, many people burn about 2000 calories a day just living. So adding another 1000 calories with exercise doesn't seem too challenging. I do orange theory and burn between 450 and 550 calories per visit (some may say it's an inflated number but someone always says that. I'm happy and losing weight so something must be right). So if I had an average metabolism instead of slow metabolism(maintenance for me is 1600 cals), I would only need to burn 500 more calories to reach 3000. Seems doable. Kind of tiring but doable.

Aaron_K123 wrote: »

Well burning 3000 calories per day from excercise alone is extreme but assuming she isn't just wrong about that or bullsh*tting it would still be okay provided her 3 meals a day add up to around 4000 calories. If, however, she is eating like 1500 calories a day then no that isn't healthy or sustainable. Without knowing how much she is eating hard to say.

Athletes have burn numbers like that daily, they just also eat enough to sustain it. Like athletes though her job must be working out if she is actually pulling those numbers.

Keep in mind we're talking about Fitbit calories, not actual calories.

Hard to imagine that is anywhere near a true measure of average calorie expenditure from exercise.

While I track my training to understand my fitness and fatigue levels, as opposed to calories burned, that information is captured by my garmin HRM. Just for kicks, I looked back at a few different high volume days for reference. On Aug 26th, a 3h:45m endurance bike ride (1385 cal) followed immediately by a 1hr run (734) yielded a 2119 calorie expenditure. On Sept 10th, a 3h:10m half iron distance race effort on the bike burned 3821 calories. Finally, on Oct 14th, a 1h:55m race pace half marathon run burned 1612 calories.

Again, I picked these days as examples of high volume days, my average days are far lower. So even allowing for variations based on age, gender, weight, etc, its hard to imagine many people could sustain a 3k/day expenditure from exercise over any period of time.

If she was heavy, it's quite possible she was burning 3000 calories a day, as in TDEE, which is what Fitbit shows (I did on some days when I was heavier - at this point that would be pretty extreme for me). Is it a good idea? If you work up to it gradually and it's sustainable, sure. What is absolutely unhealthy and shouldn't be done is eating 1200 calories a day on that kind of activity level.

Keep in mind Fitbit can often over-estimate. This is especially the case if it's a heart rate model. I had to trade in my heart rate model for one without because the burn was so high and unpredictable it was near impossible to fine-tune.

So in short: while it's quite possible she could be burning that much, there is a very likely possibility that she isn't. What's important is that regardless of how much she actually is burning, no one who works out twice a day likely doing high calorie burn exercises should be eating 1200 calories.

zoekravitz wrote: »

So this girl I follow on instagram lost a significant amount of weight in 3 months and she did thiis by eating 3 decent healthy meals a
day (she also meal preps) but works out to burn at least 3000 (yes, 3k) calories a day? Is that a bad idea?? She burns about 1K + per sessions (she works out twice a day) plus she walks home from the gym which is about an hour's journey. Also she doesn't verbally claim to lose 3k calories, but it is what she shows her fitbit says after her workouts and no her meals aren't worth 4k calories, they're about 1.2k at the most.

A 3K TDEE isn't anything that crazy...but that person should be eating way more than 1200 calories if she has a TDEE of 3K calories...she's severely under eating and she obviously doesn't care about actually being healthy if this is truly the case. What she is doing is called exercise bulimia...she has an eating disorder and should be in counseling.

I'd stop following...

not_a_runner wrote: »

Why don't you link her IG here so we can check it out ourselves?

Unless she's working out for HOURS and hours a day, her claims are wildly exaggerated.

@zoekravitz please do post the IG link.

Oh okay I just saw that OP changed her original post again. Now again it sounds like the person is talking about TDEE. Fitbit doesn't display calories burned by exercise alone, it displays TDEE. So if at the end of her day her fitbit said 3000 that just means her TDEE was 3000 which honestly is not unreasonable, just means she is fairly active. Lots of people who lead normal lives have TDEEs of 3000 plus. I've had fitbit TDEE's of more than 5000 like the one I just posted above. That doesn't mean I burned 5000 calories in exercise.

From your current edit on the OP it sounds like she is referencing her TDEE which isn't wild at all. My TDEE runs 3500+ a day because of the training load I run, so I could cut on 3000. Obviously no one is burning 3000 calories outside of their BMR through regular intentional exercise and a walk.

Just a general thought.

Establishing a caloric deficit is for weight loss. This requires establishing a modest caloric deficit and monitoring.
Exercising is for improving your fitness. This requires appropriately fueling your body.
They are two entirely separate goals

You can pursue both goals at the same time and can exercise while you lose weight but you still need to fuel your body so you should keep your calorie deficit modest. That way you can lose weight slowly while also developing your overall fitness.

What you should not do in my opinion is use exercise as a way of inflating your deficit. If you exercise in order to lose weight instead of in order to improve your fitness then I feel you are sort of doing it wrong. Now don't get me wrong you can exercise while losing weight to increase your TDEE so you can still eat sizable portions and not worry about restaurants while still losing at a modest deficit, that is reasonable. What I mean is eating 1300 calories a day and on top of that doing a ton of cardio because that will make you lose weight even faster! Yeah, that approach (and attitude) is not sustainable or healthy.

By all means do a ton of cardio, to improve your cardiovascular fitness....but eat more food equivalent to the amount you are burning to keep that activity fueled. Keep it separate from your weight loss lest you develop some rather unhealthy attitudes towards your weightloss and body.

zoekravitz wrote: »

So this girl I follow on instagram lost a significant amount of weight in 3 months and she did thiis by eating 3 decent healthy meals a
day (she also meal preps) but works out to burn at least 3000 (yes, 3k) calories a day? Is that a bad idea?? She burns about 1K + per sessions (she works out twice a day) plus she walks home from the gym which is about an hour's journey. Also she doesn't verbally claim to lose 3k calories, but it is what she shows her fitbit says after her workouts and no her meals aren't worth 4k calories, they're about 1.2k at the most.

So she's burning 3000 calories a day and eating 1200?? Yes, this is a bad idea! How many pounds did she lose in 3 months (how much is "a significant amount of weight"?) Unless she's quite heavy, dropping more than 2 lbs a week is not healthy.

edit: Never mind, I type slow, this is just a repeat of previous posters.

TDEE of 3000 is not unreasonable for a very active woman. It's a pretty normal number for an averagely active male.

3000 pure exercise calories is a little extreme. An hour walk will burn about 150-200 calories on average. Assuming she's doing some form of relatively intense steady state or interval cardio, she'd have to be in the gym for another 4.5 hours or so to burn the remaining 2800 calories (and active the entire time). Alternatively, she could run a marathon.

So, 3000 calories per day in pure exercise isn't impossible, but it's not something anybody can do with any kind of frequency.

People who just finished a long thru-hike look gaunt and emaciated. I bet setting a fastest known time record would burn around 3k a day from the walking.

NorthCascades wrote: »

People who just finished a long thru-hike look gaunt and emaciated. I bet setting a fastest known time record would burn around 3k a day from the walking.

Yeah no I agree, long through hikes kind of f you up. I'm up here with you in the Pacific North West and when I section hiked parts of the Washington PCT I'd run into PCT through hikers who were almost done and yeah some of them were quite gaunt and at least one was missing some teeth. I don't think having huge daily deficits day in day out for months while pushing your body to its limit regularly is great for you by any means. I'm not promoting that as some sort of weight loss plan.

That said I think you can do it short term without ill effect, I think people overreact a bit to the idea of large TDEEs as somehow being instantly damaging. I feel anyways that having a few weeks of high TDEE with a large caloric deficit can be okay as long as you have the fat stores to make up for it.

The trouble with backpacking is since you have to carry your food it is basically impossible to eat enough to make up for your daily burns. If you are an athlete who is training hard and eating to compensate for that hard training I think you can manage insanely high TDEEs while being perfectly healthy. That said I bet athletes do end up suffering wear and tear like joint injuries quite often from the intense training.

I think a 3000 calorie burn from backpacking wouldn't require any record breaking. You are walking all day long, you have significant elevation changes, you are carrying extra weight. I wasn't breaking any records with the pace I was setting on my trip and like I said I ended up losing about 10 pounds over 14 days which would be pretty close to a 3k deficit. Considering I was eating 2500 cal a day I'm pretty sure my daily exercise burn was in excess of 3k.