Is there Proof?

jakea1963
jakea1963 Posts: 23 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
Since the first of the year I am down 13% of body weight. I lost the first 10 with smaller portions with a focus on eliminating sugar and refined carbs. Took me a month and a half.

In the last month and half I have dropped 20 with IF and very few refined carbs.

So at this point all the easy weight to lose is gone. The water weight is long good. I have not gone up and down. I have had a few days that I stayed the same but no stalls.

Last week I was shocked. I dropped 4lbs. But here is the funny thing. I avg a 20 hr fast each day but I ate at no more than 100 calorie deficit. I have done min workouts in this time. Once a week with training focusing on stretching and MMA drills.

So my question is - if it CICO than how at this late date in the cut did I lose 4 lbs with almost no deficit??? And no water weight to lose and not having been stalled???

So it got me looking. What proof is there that a 3500 calories deficit leads to a one pound loss??? Once I looked I was shocked to find out that there much disagreement that one pound = 3500 calories.

For years I have found that 3500 calorie deficit week after week produced min results for me. I had to go much lower. But now to drop with almost no deficit really has messed me up.

I have no faith in the meaningfulness of a “calorie” other than its a representation of something that matters but in and of itself it does not tell the whole story.

Sorry for the long post but I am truly am interested in others opinions. Not looking for nasty debate. Just true personal opinions. Thanks.

Replies

  • kgeyser
    kgeyser Posts: 22,505 Member
    My best guess would be two possibilities. One, the smaller deficit and reduced exercise gave your body a break from the dieting that you have been doing for months. I would see significant drops during rest weeks where it wouldn't make sense since I wasn't carrying a larger deficit through activity. It was almost as though my body was relaxed enough to drop the weight.

    Two, the whoosh idea stated above. Here's the article that talks about it: https://bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/of-whooshes-and-squishy-fat.html/
  • riffraff2112
    riffraff2112 Posts: 1,756 Member
    From everything I read, 3500cal is about as good as an estimate to a lb of weight loss as there is. The important thing is to burn more than you eat in a given time frame. By tracking accurately you can tweak this number so that it works for you, kind of irrelevant what everyone else's number is.
    From a pacing perspective, it is safe and best to lose about 1lb a week (for most people), so a good starting point is to reduce 500 cals a day.

    Unfortunately we do not live in a lab, and we are going to have to use estimations for many things (cardio sessions, daily expenditure, 'actual' calories in food). The 500 cal a day rule works pretty darn well for people trying to lose 1 lb a week but is it exactly 3500 cal per precisely one pound??? Probably not


  • missysippy930
    missysippy930 Posts: 2,577 Member
    kimny72 wrote: »
    It wouldn't surprise me if you were to gain some or all of those 4 lbs back over the next week or two. :smile:

    I agree with this. And it may happen even if you eat at a deficit during this time.
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,254 Member
    Poof goes the proof!
  • L1zardQueen
    L1zardQueen Posts: 8,753 Member
    PAV8888 wrote: »
    Poof goes the proof!

    Pudding!
  • jakea1963
    jakea1963 Posts: 23 Member
    Thanks everyone. Makes me happy that there can be a good civil discussion on here sometimes. I appreciate all the opinions. However I truly hope not to give any back. I would like to drop another 20 but not my body will allow me to get that low. Or I should say that I am not sure I am willing to do what it would take.
    Thanks again.
  • pierinifitness
    pierinifitness Posts: 2,226 Member
    edited April 2019
    Time will tell.

    One can fall into a false sense of precision that honestly is hard to achieve because of measuring error. Hopefully over the long haul, the net sum of these errors is zero.

    I’ll tell you this based on my current journey, discipline, patience and perseverance wrapped with impeccable consistency will give you the results you want.
  • MelanieCN77
    MelanieCN77 Posts: 4,047 Member
    Water weight doesn't just go off at the beginning of someone starting to cut calories, it's always coming and going and we should all be glad of it! I'll drop fake pounds if I eat an exceptionally bland day as far as my usual food goes, because my body hasn't needed to keep any fluid to balance out the salt and whatever in the sassy snacks I had. It comes right back if I eat normally again, but isn't a gain in my weight any more than the lower scale number was a loss. It's why I see my abs in the morning when I'm dehydrated from sleeping but they disappear after breakfast for the most part. Come back, abs :'(
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,254 Member
    edited April 2019
    echmain3 wrote: »
    While I was actively losing weight I would ignore up and down “spikes” and focus only on the long-term average.

    I had my weight loss rate in MFP set at 1lb/week and lost 60 pounds in 60 weeks. Exactly as calculated.

    But if you look at my graph week to week there are some pretty crazy swings.

    I once lost 5 pounds over 5 days and gained 3 pounds in a single day even though I tracked calories exactly the whole time. I can’t explain those drastic changes but the average still worked out.

    There is nothing to explain unless you really want to look into it in detail and re analyse your daily events hoping to understand water weight swings.

    That's why so many of us use a weight trend app or web site to help us better discern our underlying weight trends.
  • lalalacroix
    lalalacroix Posts: 834 Member
    I keep 2 spreadsheets along with my weight loss app, my calorie app, and several exercise apps. Recently I looked at all my data for this year which was for most of the year so far. I was curious if there was any data that was absolute (like calories, protein) that would show why my weight loss was exceptional for January and February and crappy for March.

    Calories were actually all over the place. Some weeks I adhered to my 1500 calorie goal, some weeks I ate at around 1800 calories and some weeks were at maintenance. So that really didn't align with my losses at all. Actually when I had good adherance I didn't necessarily have a good loss that week or the week after. I also looked at protein levels, which varied between lower 70s to over 100 for weekly averages. Nothing there. Finally I checked out my exercise data. That didn't correlate at all to my good losses or slow losses. But I wasn't surprised there because I usually eat every single earned calorie.

    Maybe I don't have enough data to come to any conclusions. But one thing I did realize is that I thought I had water weight masking a month of pretty crappy losses. And when 3 pounds fell off last week I realized it must have been true. (I'm premenopausal and hadn't had a period for 3 months and didn't know when it would happen. Period came, weight fell off.)

    Looking at my data kinda drives me crazy because I very much want to see the patterns, but there just doesn't seem to be any. Except for one. The weeks that I ate at maintenance I didn't lose weight except for maybe .02 of a pound. I've had several maintenance weeks this year and never have losses, but that could also be masked by water gain and just having more food in digestive track.

    If my maintenance calories have been correct, and who really knows actually?
    I gain a lot of exercise calories which could be throwing off all of this data. Then my general deficit has been only on average 400-100 per day this year. I have lost 21 pounds this year which is over 1 pound per week. My deficit ≠ my losses.

    Conclusion: I have no *kitten* clue whatsoever. Lol. But something is working right so I'm gonna keep on eating at a deficit.
  • ninerbuff
    ninerbuff Posts: 48,989 Member
    If one reduces exercise or physical activity pretty significantly, the body will REDUCE the amount of water it stores because their will be LESS glycogen restoration and LESS muscle repair.

    A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
    IDEA Fitness member
    Kickboxing Certified Instructor
    Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition
    9285851.png
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,254 Member
    edited April 2019
    lalalacroix wrote: »
    I keep 2 spreadsheets along with my weight loss app, my calorie app, and several exercise apps. Recently I looked at all my data for this year which was for most of the year so far. I was curious if there was any data that was absolute (like calories, protein) that would show why my weight loss was exceptional for January and February and crappy for March.

    Calories were actually all over the place. Some weeks I adhered to my 1500 calorie goal, some weeks I ate at around 1800 calories and some weeks were at maintenance. So that really didn't align with my losses at all. Actually when I had good adherance I didn't necessarily have a good loss that week or the week after. I also looked at protein levels, which varied between lower 70s to over 100 for weekly averages. Nothing there. Finally I checked out my exercise data. That didn't correlate at all to my good losses or slow losses. But I wasn't surprised there because I usually eat every single earned calorie.

    Maybe I don't have enough data to come to any conclusions. But one thing I did realize is that I thought I had water weight masking a month of pretty crappy losses. And when 3 pounds fell off last week I realized it must have been true. (I'm premenopausal and hadn't had a period for 3 months and didn't know when it would happen. Period came, weight fell off.)

    Looking at my data kinda drives me crazy because I very much want to see the patterns, but there just doesn't seem to be any. Except for one. The weeks that I ate at maintenance I didn't lose weight except for maybe .02 of a pound. I've had several maintenance weeks this year and never have losses, but that could also be masked by water gain and just having more food in digestive track.

    If my maintenance calories have been correct, and who really knows actually?
    I gain a lot of exercise calories which could be throwing off all of this data. Then my general deficit has been only on average 400-100 per day this year. I have lost 21 pounds this year which is over 1 pound per week. My deficit ≠ my losses.

    Conclusion: I have no *kitten* clue whatsoever. Lol. But something is working right so I'm gonna keep on eating at a deficit.

    But you DO have a clue.

    You have the clue that your purported deficit based on your food and exercise logging was 100,000 Calories (or whatever it was)

    But that your deficit according to your weight trend (and I would use weight trend rather than scale weight though over the course of a year they will be very close) was 21*3500=73,500 Calories approximately.

    So your "error" was about 26,500 Calories

    Out of, the say, 250,000 you thought you had spent.

    So it was, for this example, 10.6% of your TDEE

    So now you would know that you only burn 90% of what you think you burn.

    Or, conversely, that you underlog your calories in by 12% (or whatever that works out to) or a combination of the two.

    But knowing this is the case is enough to guide you so that you can adjust your deficit or eat back.

    Or, frankly, not worry too much about it since you're getting the results you want!!!! :)
  • jakea1963
    jakea1963 Posts: 23 Member
    I find all of these experiences very interesting and it helps to know that sometimes there just isn’t an easy answer. I think it comes down to the fact that each person burns calories different. I also think macros matter a ton. In that some people can burn carbs and others have trouble. Talking refinded carbs there. They seem to give me problems except in small doses.

    I need to go back all of my data and see what my true burn rate seems to be. That is assuming my calorie logging is correct which I think it’s very close. Years ago I know there was a way to download all of that into a spreadsheet.

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