Excellent Supplement to Tracking on MFP

What I did was I created a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel: See Link Below:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/22527300/Weight Loss Program Template.xls

On the first tab titled "detail" you can input your goal calories to consume each day, the number of calories you burn daily (this would be what MFP tells you or maybe an average across several websites that have calculators for this), the calories required to burn one lb (3500ish) and your beginning weight.

Then in the following chart you can input your actual calories consumed (first column in grey), and your calories burned from fitness (second column in grey) each day.

It will perform the rest of the calculations for you..

On the second tab titled "summary" it will summarize each week for you as they pass. you can log your actual weigh in for that week (first column in grey), and you can also input your personal goal weight for each week.

It will then calculate your actual weight loss each week and compare to your goal weight loss as well as what I call "the mathematical weight loss"; the weight that you should have realized based on your caloric intake, calories burned daily and calories burned from fitness.

The very last column on the this sheet gives you what I call a "Mathematical Variance" or the difference as a percentage, from what you should have lost mathematically and what you actually lost.

So what do you do with this number?

Because this number is directly linked to your "Calories Burned Daily Average" on the first tab "Detail" (this would be the calories you burn not including fitness, but just from normal every day activities that you calculated earlier), you can then adjust this number on the "Detail tab" until your mathematical variance shows as 0% for the week.

Basically what you are doing is adjusting the amount of calories you think you burn on average per day to what you are actually burning, based on your caloric intake and actual weight loss. By changing this number until your "mathematical variance" is 0%, you are essentially truing up the math and your actual daily caloric expenditure.

You may want to "true up" these numbers weekly or every other week as your "calories burned daily average" will change as you get skinnier and it will help keep your calculations accurate on the spreadsheet through out your tracking.