Going nuts over how to diet

EdwardMH2 wrote: »

The MFP community is so patient and helpful. Thank you all for putting up with my OCD on this subject. Sadly EVERYTHING in my life is overthought and paralysis by analysis ridden. I always think I have to do things perfect but at the same time no confidence so I loop in and out of doing, not doing everything.

Doing something sort of right most of the time is going to be better than doing it perfectly none of the time.

I know it's overwhelming. Aim for the calories given plus a reasonable portion of the exercise calories and just trust the process for a while. Adjust as needed.

@PAV8888 has given you some more detailed information to keep your detail minded heart happy.

Your activity level is over the top. Have you anyways been eating as little as you are now, or is this a new thing? Are you now trying to be more active than before at the same time as cutting your food intake?

Basically you are not morbidly obese and need a small adjustment to your energy balance to get to your goal weights.

What you seem to be doing instead is applying big adjustments.

How do you measure your steps? Do you have a fitness band? If you do, stop trying to second guess it and just accept the burn it gives you.

You have concentrated an inordinate relative amount of time worrying about how much your daily burn is.

I hear nothing in there about how you're accurately recording your food intake.

Your goal is not to under eat your goal.

If you set your goals correctly and you measure semi accurately then your goal is to hit your goals.

Between the appreciable length of exercise and probably terrible accuracy of recording food intake I too would join the chorus of only eating back half the exercise calories that you've manually recorded.

I note that this does not apply to daily activity recorded by an exercise band.

So instead of talking about pickleball why don't you tell us number one: **what has your weight been doing this past week?** How many calories have you eaten, based on your loging? Have you logged every single meal and day?

Because my main question is not the pickleball.

You are saying that two Irish corn beef meals (by that I assume more than just the plain corn beef meat without bread or fixings), plus a hot chocolate that is not sugarfree, plus a non diet cola float add up to under 1000 Cal. While remotely possible it would take some pretty tiny portions.

Now you say you have a Gear 2. While I personally was not impressed by the accuracy of the Samsung Health Products when I looked at them a few years ago, what matters is consistency of measurement not accuracy. As long as you have a consistent measurement you can adjust for it.

So stop trying to measure your exercise yourself and let the automated Samsung Gear measure your exercise for you..

Just take your DAILY TOTAL caloric expenditure to be whatever your gear tells you it is ***without** you entering anything.

Concentrate on eating (especially if you're exerting as much as you are) two and a half thousand accurately measured calories.

Plug your daily weight into trendweight or Libra or happy scale.

Examine your rate of loss or gain after three to four weeks if you're a guy, after 4 to 6 weeks if you're a girl, and figure out whether your weight change matches your expected weight change on the basis of 3500 calories equal 1 lb.

Then adjust your intake based on your real life results.

Do you really think that you can be a 200-plus pound person who is on their feet moving by your description more than 6 hours a day and who will feel able to perform on the basis of eating less than a thousand calories?

Sure, on a non active day eat less than 2k cal. Somewhere around 1800 accurately measured sounds like a good deficit based on remembered stats and less than 5k daily steps for ALL reasons including exercise and incidental

But on a totally active day like the one you described you probably should be closer to 3k Cal, if not over.

You're currently worried about the accuracy of calculations when your eating is not even remotely in the general ballpark.

You want a deficit. One that is neither too small nor too large.

Large deficits come with health and performance implications. Small ones mean no weight loss today.

Edward: I am concerned that you may be misinterpretting something pretty basic to the whole MFP concept.

You are supposed to have X amount of calories (in your case you claim 1510) in order to generate a Y amount of deficit (I suspect you have chosen 2lbs a week weight loss which requires a deficit of 1000 Calories a day) BASED ON THE ACTIVITY LEVELS YOU'VE DECLARED (in your case you've said lightly active) ASSUMING you do not perform any additional activity or exercise ABOVE your declared level.

BUT THIS IS NOT THE CASE.

You both exercise and move more than your declared level based on your description. In fact you exercise and move even more than a very active person would.

So you need to eat MORE calories than the (declared) lightly active person would in order to not, by accident, create a larger than 1000 Cal deficit.

Counter-intuitive as it may sound, you DON'T want to create a larger deficit. in fact even a 1000 Cal deficit may be excessive for you.

On top of all that you already have a fitness watch, your Samsung Gear 2.

if you leave things alone and do not log any exercise by yourself on MFP, your gear 2 should be spitting out a single figure saying how many calories it thinks you have spent by the end of the day.

What is that figure?

Take a 20 to 25% cut from that figure and EAT the remaining 75% to 80% Calories to create a sane and sustainable deficit.