Food and exercise margin of error

photochic1124
photochic1124 Posts: 4 Member
in Food and Nutrition
What percentage should I account for?

I measure and weigh my food most of the time and have a fairly well balanced vegetarian diet with no sugar.

The exercise calorie count just seems off to me. How can an hr of Zumba burn more calories than an hr of HIIT when the latter is significantly harder? Should I mentally subtract 10%, 20%...?

I’ve been doing this since early March and my food was set to 1900 but I just changed it to 1600. I try not to eat my exercise calories, which according to the app is an average of 1000/day (I do 2-3 hrs various exercises/day) I’m usually still hungry at the end of every day but try not to eat any more.

I haven’t lost any pounds but I have dropped a pants size.

Replies

  • harper16
    harper16 Posts: 2,564 Member
    You eat 1600 calories, burn off a thousand, so you are only netting 600 calories a day?
  • photochic1124
    photochic1124 Posts: 4 Member
    Yes but surely I’m eating more and burning less since it’s not 100% accurate and I would have hoped to have slimmed down more than I have in 4 months. Or is a pant size a decent amount to have lost? Seems like an awful lot of work for not a lot of gain.
    So what percentage to add to food and subtract from exercise is good guess?
  • harper16
    harper16 Posts: 2,564 Member
    photochic1124 wrote: »
    Yes but surely I’m eating more and burning less since it’s not 100% accurate and I would have hoped to have slimmed down more than I have in 4 months. Or is a pant size a decent amount to have lost? Seems like an awful lot of work for not a lot of gain.
    So what percentage to add to food and subtract from exercise is good guess?

    How much weight are you trying to lose? Weigh and log everything you eat. Eat back half your exercise calories to start, and adjust after 4-6 weeks.
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
    edited June 2020
    HIIT doesn't actually burn more than the steady state version of the exercise if you are at intense level.

    The hard/easy nature of it leads to less calorie burn. It's harder during the hard part, it's much easier during the easy part, even if you are panting and wheezing.

    Just FYI.

    Oh - and a body given a huge deficit won't be happy - will get stressed, and adapt.
    One side effect of stress is increased cortisol and water weight slowly increasing.

    Good job measuring with pants besides just scale weight. Shows fat is still being lost.

    Obviously a stressed out body tends to lead to poor workouts compared to what it could be. So that's not good.

    What's the database entry for HIIT that you are comparing to the entry for Zumba?

    And spend a good week or two being very careful with logging - weigh everything but liquids.
    See how off you were on some items, not on others - when you measured some.
  • photochic1124
    photochic1124 Posts: 4 Member
    heybales wrote: »
    What's the database entry for HIIT that you are comparing to the entry for Zumba?.

    I use the one here on the app.
    Ex-1hr Zumba=722 calories where I barely break a sweat vs 1hr HIIT=367 calories which is intense the whole time and I feel dead at the end. But compare that to 1hr of running at 540 calories which is MUCH harder than the Zumba. So obviously these counts can’t be right (maybe the HIIT is but...). That’s why I asked what margin of error percentage I should account for.

    And re: food-I weigh/measure everything unless there’s not an option for it, and in that case I have to guess based on quantity or whatever.
    So again, add what percentage to food?

    10, 20, 30 %....+/- overall?
  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,809 Member
    HIIT isn't an exercise - it's a pacing/timing style, alternating periods of extremely intense (or maximal effort) bursts with recovery periods. If it's "intense all the time" then it clearly isn't HIIT. Maybe try to explain exactly what you are doing (equipment, exercises, timing) to get a better suggeston.

    Do agree that the number quoted for Zumba seems sky high.

    The database isn't out by the same or even a similar percentage for the hundreds of different selections you can make. That's part of the reason blanket recommendations to eat certain percentages aren't really based on good estimating logic.
    If is out by the difference between gross and net calories though - but that's clearly not a percentage (if my difference for an hour of exercise is 100cals then for low intensity/low burn exercise it's a high percentage but for high intensity/high burns it's a much smaller percentage.)

    As for food - again I wouldn't suggest altering by percentages. Throw out measuring spoons or cups (if you are using them) and weigh instead to get perfectly reasonable logging.

  • ritzvin
    ritzvin Posts: 2,860 Member
    Things like aerobics are pretty hard to quantify... the amount of work per time for varying (fairly subjectively selected) effort levels and differing movements is pretty massively high... Equations for things like running, based off of mileage and weight, will be pretty close to accurate though. In general, HIIT of whatever you are doing it in will often involve shorter time/distance than a (continuous lower effort) endurance day and result in way smaller number of calories burned.
  • photochic1124
    photochic1124 Posts: 4 Member
    The HIIT I do is alternating cardio (jumping jacks, running in place, etc) and circuits of bodyweight and/or resistance band strength exercises. Unless you take a sip of water there are virtually no rest periods.
    You can see the workouts on IG @eliteamenity to get a clearer understanding.

    And I stared choosing lower calorie exercise selections in the app to hopefully get a more realistic picture. Ex, I chose “dancing” instead of Zumba bc it’s about half the calorie count.
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
    So that is one of the workouts that HIIT was slapped into the description to pick up on the current fad nature of it.

    It's not really HIIT as it's been defined for years.

    It's calisthenics - been that for years.
    Use that database entry - and again start at 1/2 the time, or use 1/2 the suggested calories.
    (surprised there is HIIT in database, I think MFP took existing entry and rate of burn and put another name on it is all, the master METS database MFP pulled from has no HIIT entry)
    But true HIIT being less calories than running would be true. It's not done for calorie burn - but to improve some aerobic functions.

    Zumba sounds high - but do know the database is weight based - so it could be true for average intense class at your weight.

    Ditto to impossible to apply a general % off to anything as you are desiring to do.

    When you have a month of accurate average food logging, and realistic workout calorie burn for things normally done, and a real weight loss to look at - then you'll have some numbers where you can say "for this way of life and logging I appear to be 5% high on calories".
    You won't know how much of that 5% is in the food or how much is exercise - merely the combined total off.

    And as long as that routine keeps up then 5% off (or whatever your correction is) can be used.

    And it can be mighty useful, until something changes enough it no longer applies.
    Like you totally change focus on workouts perhaps and start doing something different.
    Or you decide to change eating routine in maintenance (like eating out) to very different.
    Then you'll have to get a new % off.
  • lisac957
    lisac957 Posts: 6 Member
    I’ve had consistent success with entering my exercises here and then cutting the calories it gives me in half. In other words, eating back half of my exercise calories.
    MFP usually gives me 2-3x the calories my Garmin does (which is based on heart rate), for what it’s worth.

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