How long to settle in and figure things out?

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moonangel12
moonangel12 Posts: 971 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I am finishing up week 2 of MFP and am slowly getting things figured out in terms of how best to use the information given and the most accurate ways of logging. I have started weighing most everything (Most meals are scratch made for a family of 6 and don’t have recipes most of the time so some of it is guesstimates, but if so I will overestimate if needed).

I am having the hardest time finding a calorie balance. I equate this to having a budget for my body, and being a long time money budgeter I know sometimes it can take a few weeks to get an accurate feel for things and iron out the wrinkles before being able to see a clear picture. Most days I feel like I need to eat light for breakfast and lunch because I think dinner will pack a bigger caloric punch than what it normally does so some days I am coming in WAY under, by a few hundred calories. I don’t do grains, sugar, or dairy well (autoimmune issues and they are very inflammatory for me - if I eat too much I end up with swollen, achy joints). I just ate part of a gluten free bagel with some butter and a serving of almonds to bump up my calories for the day now that I am understanding the goal is to essentially zero out at the end of the day. There has been only one day that I was in double digits for remaining calories and I have yet to go over...

All that to say: How long did it take the seasoned veterans to get a good handle on balancing out caloric intake throughout the day?

Replies

  • JeromeBarry1
    JeromeBarry1 Posts: 10,182 Member
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    Money budget skills transfer directly to calorie budgeting. You've got a head start. Listen to your own body to determine how you should budget your calories and macros throughout the day. There's no good answer to your question. You already seem to have a way of eating that works for you to stay in a calorie deficit.
  • DancingMoosie
    DancingMoosie Posts: 8,613 Member
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    Pre logging helps a lot. Do you plan your meals in advance? Use the recipe feature in the app. Log a whole day the day before and tweak it until it balances and you will have an idea of what a day should look like. Do this for a couple weeks and you'll start to get the hang of it.
  • LyndaBSS
    LyndaBSS Posts: 6,964 Member
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    It took about two weeks of logging for me to have a good list of foods that made logging a lot easier.

    Like others, I log into my food diary a few days in advance. This eliminates a lot of stress for me. It also makes me excited about my meals. Because they're planned ahead of time, my meals are absolutely delicious choices.

    I discovered the community right away. I've been involved in a few challenges that have motivated me and kept me disciplined.

    See what works for you. 💙
  • moonangel12
    moonangel12 Posts: 971 Member
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    Good to know that it’s normal to take time figuring it all out. I have always been a label reader, but more for ingredients and sugar content due to my hypoglycemia and gluten ataxia and my daughter’s allergies, less for calories so I am learning what fits where.

    I haven’t gone so far as prelogging, but I do look things up if I know ahead of time (especially when going out). Breakfast and lunch are fairly easy, I fix single portions and can measure accordingly (unless, of course, it’s supper leftovers :D ). Dinner is what gets me because around 4:30 I think, oh, beef stroganoff, that sounds good (thinking it would pack a caloric punch). A little of this, a little of that... that’s how I cook (just like my dad). I figure it all out and, huh, beef doesn’t have as many calories in it like I assumed it would... Ha!
    (We buy half a cow at a time so no handy dandy labels on the packs).

    I don’t do well meal planning - we (my husband and I) have tried planning things out, but life happens and then food ends up wasted because I never get to the meal it was planned for, cooking something else because it fit our time slot better. I will say, having an Instant Pot has helped tremendously in being able to cook meals i otherwise wouldn’t be able to fix in time. Maybe I could try again. I tried planning ahead with crockpots but found that my brain had a major inability to think about supper while I was eating breakfast! Ha! It’s a personal problem :blush:
  • moonangel12
    moonangel12 Posts: 971 Member
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    AnnPT77 wrote: »
    I'd observe, too, that close is good enough. If you're a few dozen calories (<100) high or low, it's no big deal, especially if you're high some days, low others, and pretty close on weekly average. Ditto for macros: Close is fine.

    You mention rarely being off by double digits. If you're within single digits on calories usually, that's more than fine. ;) Lots of us wander up and down, try to more or less balance by the week, just not go crazy low or high very often.

    Exact is optional.

    I was thinking along the same lines, that close is good enough most days. I am seeing results already (5.8 lbs, but there was a quick drop from water weight the first 48 hours so I don’t feel like it’s too much too fast... I was incredibly swollen!). I think today I just flat out didn’t eat enough so I need to do better with more calories earlier on in the day. Felt kinda blah most of the afternoon, and I don’t want to try and back fill extra calories with crap food, just “because I can.”

    I just need to not have 400+ calories left over every night. That, I think, will be my immediate goal - to both balance out the load throughout the day and not have such a big deficit after dinner.

  • koalathebear
    koalathebear Posts: 236 Member
    edited September 2019
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    It took me a couple of months to sort things out. First of all, it took me a while to figure out what foods I could eat. Protein shakes made me feel sick, there were certain foods that didn't agree with me after training ...

    I was on calorieking at first which didn't have the same reminders/safety floors as MFP and got a bit confused about things and realise now that I was undereating for a couple of weeks in the early days because I didn't have a handle on what the minimum was for me. I also had the typical view that losing weight must mean depriving oneself of food that one liked or eating food that one did not like but was 'healthy'.

    I fixed the undereating that pretty quickly ... once I conceptualised it as a daily calorie budget that i could supplement with exercise, and also potentially roll over to later days, it made things a lot easier. I also weighed myself daily and at different times so that I could understand what food and exercise did to my body and how it really varied depending on time of day and also time of week... I have a weird thing where my weight would remaining constant for most of the week but then the drop would show on the weekend which is why for me, I have my official weigh in on the weekend and don't officially call weight loss milestones until the weekend.

    To help myself out, I ate a lot more calorie-controlled meals in the beginning (youfoodz etc) and then as I got a better understanding of reading nutritional labels and exercise, then I transitioned over to more and more normal food and eating out etc. I can honestly say that I was pretty much clueless for the first few months. 9 months in and I've lost 32kg and am at goal so have been transitioning to maintenance over the last few months - I wish I knew then what I know now.

    ETA: I wanted to add that in the beginning I tried to do lots of swap outs. Then I realised that gluten free flour or all types of substitutes are equally high in calories. I discovered that baking tastes awful with butter substitutes and I hate sugar substitutes. I love baking so what I do these days is I keep the butter full fat, use reduced milk which tastes fine, I use full sugars - I just reduce the amount of sugar. Then I just make sure I keep an eye on how much I eat of what I bake. But I learned that trying to swap out too many of the ingredients with stuff like stevia or nutellex made it tastes a bit yuck. I threw out an entire ricotta cheesecake because the stevia made it taste BLAH. :D
  • riffraff2112
    riffraff2112 Posts: 1,757 Member
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    Got the hang of it pretty quick, especially since I tend to eat a lot of the same foods for breakfast and lunch, which made entering pretty easy. MFP did a great job of estimating my requirements so I was seeing results immediately.
  • Lobsterboxtops
    Lobsterboxtops Posts: 92 Member
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    AlabasterVerve wrote: »
    A clever way one poster used to handle variable calorie dinners was to always log their dinner on the next day. That way they knew exactly how many calories they had for breakfast and lunch and didn't have stress about having a larger or smaller dinner than usual.

    .


    Thank you! This is genius. I just got back from a work trip, and while I’m pretty good at managing my calories at home, this trip was a challenge for me to figure out how to anticipate my calories and meals. I was just saying, that it was an interesting experiment since this was my first time tracking while on a work trip. And I am going to have figure out some strategies for next time. I think I may have to try this to see if it helps.
  • moonangel12
    moonangel12 Posts: 971 Member
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    Koala - interesting about your weekend weight... I am curious to see what fluctuations I notice in time.

    I used to bake until food allergies hit our home... I liked the simplicity of fresh ground whole wheat flour and a few other ingredients, not xantham gum, potato starch, etc. :tongue: i like whole foods and try to allocate for the real stuff as much as possible (heeellllloooo Irish butter - yum!). Now I did discover stevia isn’t terrible in soda (just have to take it easy - too much in a short amount of time and I feel icky), and I don’t mind a little bit of True Lemon stevia in my iced tea, but I don’t like it steeped into hot tea. Honey there for sure.

    I have seen a few people mention rolling over calories, especially for special occasions (banking them?)...
  • cbihatt
    cbihatt Posts: 319 Member
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    I think it took me about two months before I really had a handle on hitting my calorie target. I am not very strict in my measurements, but I found myself eating under my daily target. Around week 12, I took a diet break to eat at maintenance levels for 2 weeks. Since getting back to cutting level calories, I have been much better at eating my target calories. I am not perfect, and I still am a lazy measurer, but I feel much more confident in my ability to lose the weight and maintain it when I eventually reach goal. My weight loss has slowed down (as expected), but it is still progressing steadily.

    I should also add that I am not a person who pre logs my food. I usually don’t know what I am having for dinner until I start making it, except for Fridays because I plan out what I am going to have my son cook.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,127 Member
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    moonangel12 wrote: »
    Koala - interesting about your weekend weight... I am curious to see what fluctuations I notice in time.

    I used to bake until food allergies hit our home... I liked the simplicity of fresh ground whole wheat flour and a few other ingredients, not xantham gum, potato starch, etc. :tongue: i like whole foods and try to allocate for the real stuff as much as possible (heeellllloooo Irish butter - yum!). Now I did discover stevia isn’t terrible in soda (just have to take it easy - too much in a short amount of time and I feel icky), and I don’t mind a little bit of True Lemon stevia in my iced tea, but I don’t like it steeped into hot tea. Honey there for sure.

    I have seen a few people mention rolling over calories, especially for special occasions (banking them?)...

    Yes, I do this. Not so much for truly special occasions (i.e., kind of rare), but for more frequent (once a week, or so) more indulgent day(s) or meal(s).

    I feel like if I bank 1000 calories to spend my birthday that's 2 months away, I'm just deciding to lose 1/3 pounds now, and gain it back on my birthday (which, to me, seems kind of silly ;) ).

    A common "banking" scenario is among those unfortunate people who still have to work 5 days a week (I'm retired ;) ): They may have more structured, lower calorie days during the work week, but want to be a little more indulgent/unstructured on the weekend.

    Another scenario is people with big weekend workouts (distance cycling, say) who don't choose to eat all of the exercise calories on the day they ride (more, for sure, but maybe not all), then eat more on some other day, or spread it over the week more.
  • Diatonic12
    Diatonic12 Posts: 32,344 Member
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    Simply follow the constructs of MFP. It's subtle and not in your face but it works. Track your data points and you can tweak your micros as you go along. You'll get the hang of it in no time at all. It's all fun. Really.

    You'll learn to love tracking your data points. It's comforting and it's your place. A place just for you and no one else gets to tell you what you should be eating. There's no hard fast food rules because we all know that CICO rules the day. It's more important than anything else. Enjoy yourself. Create your own positive food management plan with the foods that you actually like to eat. Do everything on your own terms. That's what MFP is really all about within your CICO boundaries. They are reasonable restrictions and not overrestrictions. MFP works as long as you choose to work it.

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