Goal - Food + Exercise leaving me with 1500+ calories remaining.
brettlandis1991
Posts: 3 Member
Not sure of what to do with this. I'm eating 3 meals healthy food. It's harder on certain days because of work, I work an overnight 12 hour shift 4 days out of the week, sometimes more. My fitbit give me 1000 to 1200 extra calories and my 30 min workouts just add to that. Past few days I'm only barely getting 300+ net calories, and at the end of the day the the app saying I'm going to be 182 in 5 weeks, which obviously isn't healthy.
I'm a male 6'1 210 pounds with a goal weight of 175. When I look at the fitbit dashboard it showing 2500 calorie deficits.
I'm a male 6'1 210 pounds with a goal weight of 175. When I look at the fitbit dashboard it showing 2500 calorie deficits.
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Replies
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fitbit often over estimates the additional exercise calories. I would just stick to the calculated calories without the extra fitbit calories and see how you feel and what you weight loss looks like over a few weeks.9
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I'll try that and see. I don't think I could possibly eat an extra 1500 calories. I can barely hit the goal (amount) and when I do I feel awful and heavy. My first weigh in is Friday so hopefully it looks all right, I don't want to lose the muscle I have.0
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My Garmin gives me so many extra calories. If I ate them all I'd never lose weight, I'd actually be gaining. My best advice is to listen to your body, and see how hungry you are as the days progress. Some signs of undereating are also things like being overly tired, and being moody. Some of that is normal as you work into a deficit, but if it becomes unbearable try eating back some of the calories a couple days a week. Most weeks I am fine and feel fine not eating any exercise calories back, but some weeks I save a portion of them for a saturday night out.
How many you eat back also depends on how accurate you think your original calorie inputs are. If you aren't measuring/weighing everything, or maybe not tracking things like cream in your coffee, a little piece of candy at work, then you are likely eating a bit more calories each day than you are logging. Having some exercise calories left over each day can help balance out logging errors.
This is what has worked for me. I am averaging ~about 1.5 lbs per week over the last 20/21 weeks. Keep an eye on the scale and listen to your body for 2-4 weeks and adjust as necessary. You'll need to understand that process when you get to maintenance anyways from what I've learned on these forums. I am not there yet, but I like to day dream about that day coming
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if your fitbit is giving you so many extra calories - you might want to up your activity level - the MFP activity level DOES NOT include purposeful exercise. From what you are saying, you may have it set as sedentary, but you really aren't
that being said - MFP calorie goals also do not include purposeful exercise - it expects you to eat back at least a portion of your calories9 -
I've been eating my Fitbit calories back for years and never gained weight. However, I have always used a food scale and weighed everything to the gram. If you don't do that and/or have "cheat" meals/days, it's better to start eating a percentage back and adjust after a few weeks when you compare your actual rate of loss to the rate of loss you set on MFP. The only incorrect amount to eat back would be zero.11
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brettlandis1991 wrote: »Not sure of what to do with this. I'm eating 3 meals healthy food. It's harder on certain days because of work, I work an overnight 12 hour shift 4 days out of the week, sometimes more. My fitbit give me 1000 to 1200 extra calories and my 30 min workouts just add to that. Past few days I'm only barely getting 300+ net calories, and at the end of the day the the app saying I'm going to be 182 in 5 weeks, which obviously isn't healthy.
I'm a male 6'1 210 pounds with a goal weight of 175. When I look at the fitbit dashboard it showing 2500 calorie deficits.
If using a device that does HR-based calorie burn for exercise - it may see your work as having many spots of time where it's doing that - and that would be inflated unless it really was like exercise aerobic steady-state.
Otherwise it's using distance-based calorie burn - so if you have a stride length off, and it things your work/life steps is leading to a greater distance than reality - inflated calorie burn.
Ever walked a known distance 1/2-1 mile at 2 mph and confirmed Fitbit saw the distance right?
I would suggest though that "listening to your body" is usually a failure - vast majority are here trying to lose weight because they did just that - not realizing it's a foreign language that if they don't understand it they get the wrong info from the attempt.
Like the extra loss of muscle mass from a steep deficit isn't "heard" until you reach goal weight and discover you are skinny fat (healthy weight but high % bodyfat) - and then a ton of work to correct would could have been prevented in the first place.
Undereating for too long can stop you from feeling hungry, and at certain level that's not good either, not long term.
The food logging point is so true though - unless very accurate, probably eating more than you realize and deficit may not be that great.7 -
Let's take a step back. How many cals per day are you eating? If I'm reading your post right... 1000-1200 cals from fitbit + 300 cals net... are you only eating 1500 cals per day?3
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fitbit often over estimates the additional exercise calories. I would just stick to the calculated calories without the extra fitbit calories and see how you feel and what you weight loss looks like over a few weeks.
So because of concerns of possible overinflated numbers, it’s better to eat zero extra calories? The one number for calorie burn that is definitely wrong? There is a vast difference between zero and 1000-1500 as OP said he’s being told he’s burning. To ignore those calories and net 300 calories is potentially dangerous not to mention completely unnnecessay.
Also for what it’s worth, my FitBit has always been accurate for me and countless other members here on MFP who use the tools as designed, syncing them, logging accurately, and monitoring and adjusting based on actual results.13 -
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I'm in virtually the same boat except I'm 10 pounds less , its estimating I'll lose 2kgs a week and have between 2000-1500 calories remaining , haha have 12 hour night shifts which occasionally makes me miss a meal0
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What is your activity level set to on MFP? What is your calorie goal before fitbit? You might be double dipping here.
In terms of eating more calories, just substitute some of the "healthy" options you have now with foods that you used to eat.0 -
brettlandis1991 wrote: »
You should probably be eating a bit more regardless... but 1800 isn't *crazy* low. You don't have to eat more volume, just eat more calories/nutrients.
I'm 5'8", 180lbs and I'm on 1900 per day before exercise.4 -
What is your activity level set to on MFP? What is your calorie goal before fitbit? You might be double dipping here.
In terms of eating more calories, just substitute some of the "healthy" options you have now with foods that you used to eat.
What do you mean by double-dipping?
Unless you mean screwing up the start time for a manually entered workout, there is no double-dipping.
Even mis-syncs result in the inaccuracies going to wrong direction to understated.2 -
What is your activity level set to on MFP? What is your calorie goal before fitbit? You might be double dipping here.
In terms of eating more calories, just substitute some of the "healthy" options you have now with foods that you used to eat.
What do you mean by double-dipping?
Unless you mean screwing up the start time for a manually entered workout, there is no double-dipping.
Even mis-syncs result in the inaccuracies going to wrong direction to understated.
You can double dip if you set your daily activity level to "Intense" or even "Moderate". Those settings are useful if you don't log exercises because MFP will automatically bump your daily calorie goal to accommodate.
However, if you log exercises after selecting "Intense", then you're getting extra calories piled on top the boosted calorie goal MFP started the day with.
Anyway, I've found that MapMyRun (w/my watch) adds far too many calories anyway. It was fine when I was heavier and struggled to run each morning. But as my weight dropped and I got better running, there were far too many calories being added.
I pretty much cap the calories logged exercises add now on my workout days and I always have the same calories for those days. Then scale back the calories to the default on my rest days.
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Scotty2HotPie wrote: »What is your activity level set to on MFP? What is your calorie goal before fitbit? You might be double dipping here.
In terms of eating more calories, just substitute some of the "healthy" options you have now with foods that you used to eat.
What do you mean by double-dipping?
Unless you mean screwing up the start time for a manually entered workout, there is no double-dipping.
Even mis-syncs result in the inaccuracies going to wrong direction to understated.
You can double dip if you set your daily activity level to "Intense" or even "Moderate". Those settings are useful if you don't log exercises because MFP will automatically bump your daily calorie goal to accommodate.
However, if you log exercises after selecting "Intense", then you're getting extra calories piled on top the boosted calorie goal MFP started the day with.
In the context of this topic by OP - that is incorrect for what was stated. Hence why I wondered someone would think double-dipping is possible. Which is common misunderstanding of how things work.
Because in this topic - Fitbit is syncing.
And besides, even with MFP method, the MFP activity level is your day/weekend with OUT exercise accounted for - and most people with kids/pets/household duties even with desk jobs are Lightly Active or more.
Exercise gets added to that and would not be double-counting.
The MFP activity levels usually don't ramp up fast enough to account for much exercise being done - if walking 30 min daily, sure not a problem increase level - and indeed then do not log the walks.2 -
fitbit often over estimates the additional exercise calories. I would just stick to the calculated calories without the extra fitbit calories and see how you feel and what you weight loss looks like over a few weeks.
Even if the Fitbit is over estimating, if he's getting 300 net calories at the end of the day...even if that's not the true number...it's an indicator that he's substantially under-eating. The minimum calorie recommendation for a sedentary adult male is 1500 calories.2 -
Scotty2HotPie wrote: »What is your activity level set to on MFP? What is your calorie goal before fitbit? You might be double dipping here.
In terms of eating more calories, just substitute some of the "healthy" options you have now with foods that you used to eat.
What do you mean by double-dipping?
Unless you mean screwing up the start time for a manually entered workout, there is no double-dipping.
Even mis-syncs result in the inaccuracies going to wrong direction to understated.
You can double dip if you set your daily activity level to "Intense" or even "Moderate". Those settings are useful if you don't log exercises because MFP will automatically bump your daily calorie goal to accommodate.
However, if you log exercises after selecting "Intense", then you're getting extra calories piled on top the boosted calorie goal MFP started the day with.
Anyway, I've found that MapMyRun (w/my watch) adds far too many calories anyway. It was fine when I was heavier and struggled to run each morning. But as my weight dropped and I got better running, there were far too many calories being added.
I pretty much cap the calories logged exercises add now on my workout days and I always have the same calories for those days. Then scale back the calories to the default on my rest days.
I think you probably don’t understand how FitBit (and other trackers) work and sync with MFP.
There is no double dipping because there is no logging. At least not of step based activities.
And while some people do leave their activity at Sedentary when they are not really, I personally find it helpful to have the activity level more accurately aligned to my day to day activity so that when I do exercise the adjustments are representative of my above and beyond daily activity efforts.3 -
brettlandis1991 wrote: »Not sure of what to do with this. I'm eating 3 meals healthy food. It's harder on certain days because of work, I work an overnight 12 hour shift 4 days out of the week, sometimes more. My fitbit give me 1000 to 1200 extra calories and my 30 min workouts just add to that. Past few days I'm only barely getting 300+ net calories, and at the end of the day the the app saying I'm going to be 182 in 5 weeks, which obviously isn't healthy.
I'm a male 6'1 210 pounds with a goal weight of 175. When I look at the fitbit dashboard it showing 2500 calorie deficits.
Just to level set a bit, what kind of work are you doing 4-12 hr shifts and what are you doing in your 30 minute workouts?1 -
Just to interject some sanity, the op is getting 4000 + calorie TDEE estimates from his Fitbit and eating 1500 to 1800 calories a day.
The year I got ~3225 as my average TDEE and lost 72.5 lbs, my average calories eaten were over 2500.
So, yes these things vary l, but hey it shouldn't be too hard to eat a bit more.
And if we've got someone with a four thousand calorie burn, yeah eating so little is bound to eventually cause some issues.
Semi accurate logging both of calories in and activities is obviously a requirement...1 -
You didn't get to 201lbs by struggling to eat calories. At some point you were eating in a way that allowed you to consume calories in sufficient quantity to achieve an calorie surplus of some level. So it follows that you're entirely capable of eating more calories than you currently are. This mean that the problem isn't that you can't eat more calories, since you can and have previously
This to me suggests one of two things:
1. Your logging is inaccurate and you're eating more than you think. This can come from a number of different factors like incomplete logging, inaccurate measuring or poor database item selection.
2. The changes you've made to your eating habits that are killing your appetite because they're ill-suited (you're forcing yourself to eat foods you don't want to eat) or overly extreme and restrictive.
If it's the former than try being a bit more diligent and accurate with your logging, if it's the latter than ease up, relax your standards and give yourself a break.4
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