TDEE calculators underestimating?

Yeah, all you can do is experiment. The online calculators are just a starting point.

I eat a full 500 calories per day more than any of the calculators tell me I should be able to eat, but I only found that out by meticulous logging.

Some people can intuitively figure it out. It's up to you, always.

lilac12321 wrote: »

L1zardQueen wrote: »

How accurate is your calorie counting?

As accurate as it can be. I weigh and measure my food.

Weigh is good. How do you measure? Cups and spoons? How do you calculate your calorie burn estimates?

I am picking at nits, i guess, but I am curious about the statement:

lilac12321 wrote: »

if I didn't count calories and listened to my body

Counting calories, for me, is literally there to double check on what "my body" is telling me.

Or rather, and to be more precise, counting calories is there to provide a "supervisory uber-hamster" to the chorus of "eat more good stuff" mind hamsters that are all lying when they swear up and down that the "body hamsters" have informed them them that they're all starving for more ice cream!

I mean, if my mind hamsters weren't 100% invested in playing "broken phone" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers, and if I was reliably willing to actually listen to my body hamsters (who dutifully report their true energy status) then I wouldn't need to invest in supervisory uber-hamsters--would I?

So the big question with your above statement is: is your body telling you you should be eating more?

The question of logging (of both calories in and out) has already been asked. Past that and into more zebra type hoof-beats...

First issue to tackle is that calculators are ESTIMATORS. By the nature of the estimates you are dealing with "best fit curves". Most people fit in there perfectly. Quite a few have estimates that are a little bit off. A very few people have a reality that makes the estimates quite far off.

Even if 1% of the people are very far off the estimates, if you take eight billion people, this would leave 80,000,000 with pretty sucky estimates. And if 0.01% people get supremely extremely sucky estimates, that's still eight hundred thousand people.

Are you likely to be one of them?

Would you undertake a medical procedure with a 99% success rate--and just a 1% risk of serious complications? And a measly 0.01% risk of death?

But you COULD be.

So the answer there is to compare your WEIGHT TREND over 4 to 6 weeks to what your logging indicates your weight should be doing. And to continue doing that while you slowly increase your average caloric intake.

Furthermore, the possibility DOES exist that you could be maintaining weight with fewer calories and still be able to establish a maintenance point where you would be eating more calories without "real/appreciable" weight gain.

The condition would be defined as you currently eating a number of calories that has resulted in some adaptive thermogenesis where both bodily process and activities have slowed down a bit.

By increasing calories you would, potentially, reverse that and bodily processes would resume at a higher level and, quite possibly, activities/exercise would increase and be more vigorous in actual fact.

We are talking here about things that to a large extent are part of NEAT. Fidgeting, flexing muscles while you sit, hoping from leg to leg, skipping and dancing around slightly increased core temperature as compared to what may be a lower than normal for you core temperature if AT has set in, slightly higher heart rate. And other things like that.

Is it likely that all this would amount to 500 Cal? I think that 500 Cal is a bit extreme for that. 500 Cal and the numbers you propose translate to a range of 16% to 23% of TDEE (400/2500, 700/3000). That would correspond to fairly substantial AT. Is that likely? Have you lost a lot of weight and done so by using a steep deficit. How much weight have you lost in recent memory? What sort of deficits did you apply? For how long?