@PAV8888

I am not sure where it is getting the numbers. My activity multiplier is 2.25 and I calculate my TDEE at around 3500 calories. That link calculates it at a touch over 4000.

NovusDies wrote: »

@PAV8888

I am not sure where it is getting the numbers. My activity multiplier is 2.25 and I calculate my TDEE at around 3500 calories. That link calculates it at a touch over 4000.

Did you run it backwards with your current state being maintenance and your starting state being where you were when you started? You would have to use expert mode and you would have to adjust the number of days first and adjust the uncertainty window possibly.

The planner is a math model of Hall's dynamic weight change prediction. Hall does account for some adaptive thermogenesis especially post month six. i.e. he predicts at the same deficit a higher rate of loss up to month six than afterwards for MOST PEOPLE.

We would have to look the make up of his samples but chances are fairly good that he would have more garden variety obese people in his samples as opposed to people starting where the OP is starting. So for someone like the OP the timeframe may well be longer than six months before the same effects are seen -- the effects could be, for example, based on fat percentage.

By the same token the whole thing is dynamic. Sure the parameters change but we also change and our activity factors are not a single number even though we enter them as such.

I personally think that Hall's model may be true DURING weight loss (if posting the deficits as entered); but that it may not capture post weight loss after several months as perfectly (i.e. that post weight loss at maintenance there is a reversal of some of the effects).

In any case, it is ONE model. For myself, to the best I can determine, it under-estimated how much I could eat during weight loss by about 300 Cal a day, and it under estimates what I can now eat, at maintenance, by about 200 Cal a day. And, as you may know, my numbers, in general, track pretty close to population means

So how is @glp2323 doing?

Are you logging everything you eat? What amount of Calories are you aiming for each day approximately? Do you log after the fact or before you eat? Do you go by packaging? By weight of food? By portion and estimate of how much of each item are in a portion? Are you finding it easy or difficult so far?

Who is the tiny tot in the picture?

Inquiring minds want to know and all that!

@glp2323 - I do a lot of cooking, and I log all my food in MFP. The recipe feature is a big help. If it's an online recipe, you can just copy the link into to recipe tool and with a little editing, MFP can calculate the nutritional content of all the ingredients (it works better in the web-based app rather than the phone app). For those no-recipe recipes, you can build a recipe manually by adding the ingredients yourself (and that works great in either app). After that, the only challenge is portion size. If it's not easy to eyeball the serving size you can weigh the empty serving dish before you cook and then again after it's ready to serve. The difference between the weights is the total weight of the recipe. If the recipe makes 6 servings, you'll portion out 1/6th of the total weight of your dish.

Yes, this all seems like a pain, but I tend to make the same 10 or so recipes. So if you repeat a stored recipe, you'll already know the weight of a serving size and the nutritional content. If someone else is doing the cooking, you'll want to enlist their help in measuring ingredients as they go if they are making one of those no-recipe dishes and ask them not to throw in an extras without making it part of the recipe.

Logging my food helps me make sure I'm getting enough protein in my diet, staying within my calorie plan, and when I was watching carbs, making sure that stayed under budget. Logging is the single most important tool I used to lose the weight. 450 days later, I'm still logging every day.

I have to weigh and measure almost everything...I might miss a stick of gum or a spray of Pam or a sugar free hard candy but I log everything else...I have accepted I will need to do this 90% of the time the rest of my life so I might as well grin and just do it!....I also make my food separately...we might eat about the same thing but it only takes a little extra effort to put mine in a different pan, like spaghetti sauce or pudding,vegetables, etc....I do the majority of cooking so I can control the ingredients...if someone else is preparing your meals, help them adjust some of the ingredients in your portion...” being overweight is hard and dieting is hard. choose your hard”

There are two sides to many coins.

Before logging my food (by weight, before eating) I was ready to give up losing weight because I was eating in a way I could not see myself continuing to eat long term.

I was making choices I thought were good.

But, in retrospect, while some were good choices, a lot that I thought were good at the time were, number-wise, a lot of effort and suffering for little profit.

And I had been overdoing my deficits which was leading to burnout and spectacular reversals at times.

One of the first decisions I made after reviewing the logging of my food on MFP was trading three tablespoons of olive oil for another can of salmon in my salmon salad... even though olive oil was so healthy that I had been using every opportunity to add some to anything and everything 😹😹😹

My McDonald's fruit and fiber muffin (with peanut butter and jam packets) stayed in the books for a bit longer but was eventually replaced by two egg McMuffins no butter add 3x slivered and 3x red onion per sandwich. Only a few more calories but a more substantial and longer lasting meal for me. This came out of reviewing logging and comparing caloric cost to satiety and satisfaction.

TBH, "tactical eating" was an early part of the experiments: toss out one of the two egg McMuffins above and stuff two regular meat patties into the remaining one. Saves 100 Cal and to me, at the time, was an equally long lasting/filling meal.

Or put three beef patties on a side salad no dressing. Not gourmet, right? But add a vanilla cone as the meal's highlight to kiss and make up, and that's another sub 600 Cal McD meal (yes i used to do a lot more McD's than I do now). And no, logging says that the fried fish or chicken patty is not any healthier than the beef patty. And losing the weight was much more important (in the beginning and for overall health) that the type of foods that helped me do so.

So fully costed logging helped me to re evaluate what was worth it to me and what was not.

Let's face it.

In the beginning it was a trade off of more filling for less calories. Calories are all that matters for weight control success, so this helped to establish the base of the pyramid for me.

Then, for me, things evolved into finding options that were both filling for right now that I'm eating, but also more filling for more hours. i.e a min max problem trying to get maximum hours of "I'm happy enough with what I've eaten" for the minimum number of calories

Then it evolved into total satisfaction: hey, maybe I'm willing to forego some satiation because this tastes better then that, or because it offers some level of satisfaction the other doesn't.

And way way later it became a game of hitting nutritionally sound goals.

Not 5 but 10 portions of vegetables and fruits, at least so much protein, always say least so much fiber, minimize saturated fats, minimize sodium (should get back to doing that). I've never gone the less sugar route; but I don't see anything wrong with wanting to reduce non intrinsic added sugars.

Again, all that came from reviewing my logs. And adjusting over time

During initial weight loss I would log before eating to make sure I was on track. I was operatin on tighter margins than you might be because I started at sub 300 and didn't get to MFP till I was already in the 240 range.

All this careful logging took time, especially in the beginning. Which made it hard to do if I had let myself get too hungry. Which led to me consuming an easy to quickly weigh and prepare apple or two during cooking and logging. Which helped me cut down on hunger and total eating. And helped me eat smaller portions more regularly instead of eating larger portions to avoid getting hungry before the next meal. (Again this changed in the future as I will often now eat a bit more to reduce continuous nibbling; but I wouldn't have been successful at doing this now had I not previously reduced "customary" / "expected" portions by going the smaller portion route initially)

So logging and a few early "rules" about treats (have to eat pre weighed individually packaged-by me-treats; have to get up to get one from kitchen; sit down to eat it undistracted, not while watching tv or reading; have to get up to get second one, sit back down to eat, get up and go for x amount of walking before third, etc) helped me keep to my calories early on, see that results were possible, and got me interested in figuring out how to make things easiest on me by maximizing what I would get to consume while still meeting reasonably defined goals.

Further changes and optimizations built on each other till my day today satisfies me just as much (that's a lie: it actually satisfies me much more) as it did when I was obese; but it looks quite
a bit different--the vast majority of the time.

But yes i had to review logs and I also accepted early on that I was on a journey of self discovery where I WOULD be making changes.

So I wasn't trying to minimize changes.

I was 48 and could already see severe limits as to the options I would have available to me based on my physical abilities during the last third of my life

So I was trying to just make smarter and better choices that I could see myself keeping to long-term, and which would, hopefully, help me run into less limits during that last third.

So far, six years later... it is still working

PS: spray of Pam..... scale works fine for that.

Direct addition to pan/pot, for sure if sensitive enough. Else 0.5g to 1g oil.

Also subtraction from can weight. Propellant has some weight but the 0.25g of propellant per few grams of oil is minimal vs the actual drops of oil.

I can easily use 100Cal of Pam over a few sprays during cooking if I don't pay enough attention!

I do the family's cooking, so I put the recipes into the "Recipe" tab. I've done this with a lot of things because I don't salt a lot while cooking, and many recipes I get online I modify, and that changes the calorie load (Sweet and sour sauce made with sucralose instead of sugar, for example).

And since I do a five week menu plan for dinners and we eat the same things for lunch every week, by eight months in everything's pretty much in the food log already.

I weigh and measure. I have a food scale, and when I made enchiladas today I measured out a third of a cup of shredded cheese and two ounces of diced cooked chicken. I didn't measure on my partners' enchiladas, but they aren't dieting, so an extra ounce of cheese is neither here nor there. Tonight I measured my rice using a four ounce portioning scoop, and then weighed the swiss steak portion to get four ounces. (And that was almost too much. I was FULL when I got done.)

I bought several smaller dishes; my small pinch bowls if filled to the thick rim around them are a quarter cup. So if I have trail mix I have it in that. The small blue plastic bowls are one cup if fully filled. The little footed glass dishes are just the right size for a single scoop of ice cream or a pudding cup. I eat off lunch and bread and butter plates, rarely a full-size dinner plate.

I figure that I can't judge portions accurately and I will be measuring and weighing my food for the rest of my life, and if that's what it takes to be able to play with my grandchildren and be active into my old age, it's a small price to pay.