Would anyone be willing to help me work out how many calories I need to lose weight and train?

Claire5520 wrote: »

Thanks for all these replies. I was wondering how the 'fitness goals' impacted, so good to hear they have no bearing on calorie adjustment.

I've gone with MFP automatic suggestions as you've all pretty much recommended, based on being sedentary all day, set to lose 0.5lb per week. That brings me in at just under 1400 calories, which I'll set as my baseline. I'll plan to eat half my exercise calories on top of that.

The one thing I can't work out, and @sijomial you may know the answer to this:

I'm using a Wahoo bike computer + Wahoo HR monitor for rides. So this monitors calorie expenditure for bike rides and gets uploaded to Strava, which then syncs to MFP.

I've also use a Garmin Vivoactive3 as my day-to-day watch. It tracks steps and activity - increased HR at the gym, walking etc. You can also sync that to MFP so active calories are also logged.

However, if I wear the Garmin during a bike ride - and it therefore captures the bike ride calorie expenditure (simply because it's on my wrist, I'm not using it for tracking) - I'm assuming bike calories will be double-counted? (once on Strava via Wahoo, once on Garmin)?

I know one solution just to remove the Garmin whilst I'm cycling.. I'm just wondering.

Thanks for being patient with my over-thinking! Will look up those cycling threads and maybe see you on Strava :-)

Personally I hated it when I synced devices to here so keep everything disconnected and just enter my rides manually with the numbers I believe are best estimates.
I have no interest in tracking daily activity though, I feel no need to micro manage something so variable.

You really don't want your HR for gym workouts to be involved in calorie estimates though - unless you have a mode for weight training on your watch when it might be able to interpret the spikes in HR which really have almost no relationship to energy expenditure during strength training.

Strava changed last year to take the calorie estimates from some partner apps rather than calculate its own estimate from speed/distance/geography - Garmin are one of those partners but you would have to check if Wahoo are too by seeing if the numbers are identical.
Personal experience was that Strava was actually better for estimates and Garmin is OK for brisk or fast rides but badly underestimates for gentle rides where I seem to produce more power at low HR than Garmin believes.

Strava (via my phone app) underestimates when I'm using a hybrid bike for urban transport - its assumed power output is ludicrously low, less than I produce during a warmup. Being a gross estimate instead of net calories actually brings it back closer to reality.

There's a pervasive myth about eating back half exercise calories on here which seems ingrained in a "group think" despite being mathematically and logically unsound as general advice. As you can see from above examples exercise estimate inaccuracy includes underestimates as well as overestimates. Garmin gives me about 180,000 cycling calories in a 12 month reporting sample, I would be horribly under-fuelled and underweight if I only ate half of them!