Calorie Counting 101

fuzzylop72 wrote: »

vismal wrote: »

JeromeBarry1 wrote: »

nahtilly wrote: »

Does everyone know what the ''net calories'' mean ? is it what your body has to work with?

That's (Calories eaten - calories exercised). If your Net Calories is less than your daily calorie allowance, you can calculate the new 'calories available to eat' as (calorie allowance - net calories). If math isn't your forte, do it vismal's way.

Even if you're excellent at math I still think it's a bad way to do it because getting an accurate "calories exercised" number is quite difficult.

assuming your nutrition logging is on point, and you have a reasonable period of data (6 weeks or so -- perhaps even more for women) can't you estimate the accuracy of caloric burn by looking at the average actual weight change vs weight change predicted by net calorie deficit to determine which percentage of exercise calories it's reasonable to eat back.

You could, but I find that there are FAR too many variables involved in that approach. First off, it requires you to have excellent logging for 6 weeks straight, not an easy thing for most people. You'd also need to have a pretty consistent exercise regimen and lifestyle. Its difficult to assess whether a fitness device or MFP or whatever is overestimating your actual exercise, your bmr, a particular type of exercise, etc. Thermic effect of food is important here as well so you're diet would need to be rather consistent as well.

The biggest caveat to this method is NEAT (non exercise activity thermogenesis). This all of your daily movement that isn't exercise or BMR related and it can make up between 15 and 50% of your total calories burned each day. Now using a step counter and keeping a consistent number of steps per day/week helps with the variability of this number but things like fidgeting or performing an activity while standing will burn calories but not register on the fitness device. This number is also shown to decrease as dieting is prolonged and body fat decreases.

I still think if you are logging very accurately you really don't need to track calories out. If you're consistently eating 2000 calories and your trended weight over time is not going down, you need to eat less. If you must track something else, track steps. This at least allows you to know if your weight is stalling due to a sharp decrease in overall physical activity. If you normally get 15k steps a day and all of a sudden for whatever reason are only getting 5k, then you can pretty much figure out why you've stalled in weight loss despite maintaining an accurate and fixed intake. IMO it's just the simplest way for most people to do it.

Eat a fixed number of accurately counted calories, monitor weight (trend), keep activity consistent. After doing that for 4-6 weeks ask yourself is weight trending down? If yes, keep going, if no, examine the accuracy of your counting, if inaccuracies exist, remove them, if your count is accurate, reduce intake. That is literally weight loss in a nutshell. It's simple and really only hinges on one variable, how accurate you count.