How projected weight works

steven1hughes
steven1hughes Posts: 1 Member
in Food and Nutrition
Does MyFitnessPal take nutrients into account when projecting weight when completing a diary? Or is it purely just based off calories? If so then that would be wildly inaccurate.

Replies

  • witchaywoman81
    witchaywoman81 Posts: 280 Member
    I think most seasoned members tend to ignore it, but I imagine it only takes calories into account, since a calorie deficit is all you need for weight loss (other nutrients and a balanced diet are important, of course, but eating fewer calories than you burn is all you need to lose weight).
  • kimny72
    kimny72 Posts: 16,013 Member
    It's just a gimmicky thing, so I'd guess it's just based off calories. It's about as reliable as one of those 10 question IQ tests on FB. After the first couple of days, I've never closed my diary.
  • concordancia
    concordancia Posts: 5,320 Member
    It doesn't. If you lived in a vacuum, with constant water weight and unevacuate poo and no muscle soreness and it were possible to log your calories eaten and burned within 10 calories per day, you might be able to rely on it.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,012 Member
    edited January 2019
    steven1hughes wrote: »
    Does MyFitnessPal take nutrients into account when projecting weight when completing a diary? Or is it purely just based off calories? If so then that would be wildly inaccurate.

    If you're talking about the "In 5 weeks" projection, it's calories . . . and assumes that your profile set-up is current and accurate (activity level, age, etc.), your intake is logged completely accurately, your exercise is logged completely accurately, you're exactly at the center (mean) of the bell curve for underlying research results used to derive the calorie-burn estimating equations, and that you will eat and exercise exactly those same calories every single day for the next 5 weeks.

    In other words, it makes ridiculous assumptions, so it can't be right.

    And it doesn't use nutrients in the calculation, because they aren't relevant to the calculation . . . except as affects your health/energy level (which only matters insofar as it affects your daily-life activity level and exercise intensity), and except as affects your satiation therefore compliance with calorie goals, both of which (if they changed) would imply a need to adjust the parameters I listed in my first paragraph. So, nutrition is irrelevant to the calculation.

    Bad nutrition is a bad plan, but it affects weight loss only indirectly, at most. Weight loss is about calorie intake and expenditure.

    ETA a belaboring of the obvious:

    Appropriate calories for weight management + well rounded, complete and balanced eating for nutrition + exercise for fitness = best odds of continuing long-term good health (no guarantees).

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