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I thought I was but I keep reading people use the lingo eating in a deficit and it got me questioning myself lol
Thanks!!0 -
@_inHisGrace
I started out by weighing and logging what I was eating then stepping down from there.
Here is online TDEE calculator
https://tdeecalculator.net/result.php?s=imperial&g=female&age=42&lbs=305&in=61&act=1.2&f=2
I did it off similar stats you previously provided, but remember it is a sliding scale based on the inputs and TDEE calculators carry their formulas though most are close. These do include your activity level so more / less active than indicate will have impact.
Your current TDEE to maintain is estimated at
2377 cal / day
Deficit is anything less than that.
Many ppl do 15-20-25% deficit, so 1470 is pretty aggressive to me (38% deficit). I would not eat below this & potential eat more (food scale, weigh in grams, eat it log it). I fall into 20-25% camp, but this means potentially slower loss, but more sustainable day in day out to me.
7days * 1470 = 10,290
Current TDEE
7days * 2377 = 16,639
16,639-10,290=6349
3500 = 1 lb lost
6349/3500= 1.81 lbs average loss / wk*
* No guarantees, sleep, salt, stress, shark wk, activity etc impact this
I chose to spend my calories like money & not leave any on the table generally. It is a marathon not a sprint & you do not want to mess up your metabolism down the line.
Your body will learn to adapt with less over time, especially as you start weighing less as well so my thought process is you want to give yourself some room to reduce down the line. You go too far, your body tends to pick and choose where it puts calories = energy to use, picking most critical life functions.
I know throwing a lot at you, please try not to get overwhelmed, just trying to give you a baseline where MFP is coming up with the numbers from so you can decide what is best for your journey.2 -
@dcshima Thank you so much. I’m in a groove now and very happy with what I’m eating. I’m not feeling deprived and I’m actually full all day.
Something in me clicked and it’s just working for now. When it doesn’t I’ll switch thing up!4 -
So folks, here I am again lol
My husband's birthday is Saturday. How do I calculate calories in cake? I’m planning to make it but don’t know how to log.
I’m pretty sure I cannot go without a slice. He wants a vanilla almond cake.
It will be a double decker round vanilla cake with butter cream frosting.
Do I say cest la vie and just have a small slice and log a random high number or what?
I’ve been trying to stay around 1200 cals per day this week so I don’t go over 1470 for the daily limit when calculating for the week.
In my mind I’m saving 200 per day to add to my Saturday but I don’t know if it really works that way.
Thanks in advance for your help. I’m starting to obsess about this stupid cake. It’s making want to go crazy.1 -
_inHisGrace wrote: »So folks, here I am again lol
My husband's birthday is Saturday. How do I calculate calories in cake? I’m planning to make it but don’t know how to log.
I’m pretty sure I cannot go without a slice. He wants a vanilla almond cake.
It will be a double decker round vanilla cake with butter cream frosting.
Do I say cest la vie and just have a small slice and log a random high number or what?
I’ve been trying to stay around 1200 cals per day this week so I don’t go over 1470 for the daily limit when calculating for the week.
In my mind I’m saving 200 per day to add to my Saturday but I don’t know if it really works that way.
Thanks in advance for your help. I’m starting to obsess about this stupid cake. It’s making want to go crazy.
What I do is to enter the recipe in and calculate how many slices I will get from the cake. If you say that you will get 12 slices from that cake, then it's calories in ingredients divided by number of portions to get the calories per portion.
I don't think you will be too far out if you mentally allocate 350-400 calories for it, and work your day so that you can have that without going over budget too much.
For the record, I have fructose intolerances, and I would tend to eat half a slice, and leave the frosting on the plate, so my calorie burden tends less. If you eat the entirety of a piece and leave nothing but crumbs, that's a different matter. (grin)2 -
_inHisGrace wrote: »So folks, here I am again lol
My husband's birthday is Saturday. How do I calculate calories in cake? I’m planning to make it but don’t know how to log.
I’m pretty sure I cannot go without a slice. He wants a vanilla almond cake.
It will be a double decker round vanilla cake with butter cream frosting.
Do I say cest la vie and just have a small slice and log a random high number or what?
I’ve been trying to stay around 1200 cals per day this week so I don’t go over 1470 for the daily limit when calculating for the week.
In my mind I’m saving 200 per day to add to my Saturday but I don’t know if it really works that way.
Thanks in advance for your help. I’m starting to obsess about this stupid cake. It’s making want to go crazy.
@_inHisGrace
First, what you are doing is exactly how it works. The deficit is really a weekly average - 2 lb/week is 7,000 calories a week; you can divide that 7,000 however you like, and many, many people do as you are doing when they know a big calorie even is coming up. We call it banking calories.
Have you found the recipe builder on here? If you are baking the cake yourself, you can enter every ingredient you use and get an exact calorie count. If you are purchasing the cake, you make be able to ask the bakery if they have nutritional information; otherwise, just estimate by using an entry for a similar cake coming from a bakery, like Walmart or so.
But first and foremost, enjoy the day celebrating your husband and don't worry if you go over your deficit. Its one day, a special occasion, and one day in the grand scheme of things matters very little as long as you keep it to once in a while. With banking the extra calories and if you allow yourself to eat at maintenance on that day, you could easily be able to eat 2,000 calorie over your typical deficit and be fine.
Just note that you might see a water weight spike in the following days. Changing your eating routine can sometimes cause water retention, especially if you've been eating lower carb, not to mention having extra food waste in your system. If the scale spikes remind yourself firmly that one does NOT gain 2 or 3 or even 5 lbs overnight; that it's water NOT fat and will come back off. Don't let yourself panic!6 -
@AlexandraFindsHerself1971 & @bmeadows380 thanks a bunch!!1
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The recipe builder on here is really useful. I have lots of dinner/baked goods/smoothie/popsicles done up. You can get pretty accurate if you make the serving 1 gram and it's easy to do.
Put in all your ingredients for the cake and the frosting. Normally I do this ahead of time and put in for servings a guess like 12 and make sure MFP isn't out to lunch with the calorie counts it picks for each ingredient. Then I save it. I weigh the plate/cake stand before anything is on it, then make the cake. Once the cake is finished, weigh the whole thing in grams then subtract the weight of the plate. Enter that number as number of servings for example the apple pie I made last night was 1050 grams. Then serve yourself desired slice of cake, weighed in grams and boom pretty accurate count. Of the pie I had a slice that was 137 grams and 304 calories.
I have a list of my most used pots and pans and their weights.
If you make the same thing again, like stir fry, then just go back in and edit weights in the recipe and reweigh at the end.4 -
Can someone help me out with a little question?
When I'm looking through my macros, my iron is usually between 50-110% daily. I had my blood work checked at the beginning of June, and my iron levels were on the low end of the normal range, but still normal.
I know I've been getting more iron lately with eating oatmeal for breakfast some days and just better eating.
This morning, though, I was super hungry at breakfast, so I decided to have a bowl of plain cheerios with a sliced banana. I wasn't really thinking as I measured it out or anything, just measured the cereal, milk and weighed the banana.
But I was inputting it just now while preparing for lunch, and inputting my dinner I'm going to make, and I realized my iron will be up to 160%. I know you can have too much iron in a day, and it could be bad, but I can't figure out how much is too much I can't figure out how to see how many mg 160% is.
Should I be concerned about this number for the day? Should I just not eat the rest of the day? :P1 -
@rieraclaelin
Customary not a doctor/dietician disclaimer here!
I had some chats with my doc about this since I'm iron deficient and didn't do all that well on supplements. A person can safely consume ~40-45mg of iron each day. The average adult woman needs 17-19mg a day. For the sake of easy math, let's assume that MFP has you on the high end of that and the goal at 100% is 20mg. 20 x 1.6 is 32mg which still puts you well within the amount of iron a normal, healthy person can process each day.
Unless you're purposefully eating to consume a specific nutrient all day, it's a pretty big feat to overdo it to the point of sickness through diet alone. The bigger issues usually stem from not getting enough of a specific nutrient or over-supplementing for a long period of time.
Your body also has no clue when one day ends and another begins. Those 50% days balance out your 160% days on the macro level.2 -
@rieraclaelin
Looking at my nutrition report for the last month, my daily iron intake averaged out at around 18.3mg. That is around 2.3 times the RDA, but still far less than the maximum threshold.
Here is the science.
The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for all age groups of men and postmenopausal women is 8 mg/day; the RDA for premenopausal women is 18 mg/day. The median dietary intake of iron is approximately 16 to 18 mg/day for men and 12 mg/day for women. The Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL) for adults is 45 mg/day of iron, a level based on gastrointestinal distress as an adverse effect.
So to cut the long story short, don't worry about this at all. Also, even if you DO pass a tolerable limit for a certain micronutrient, have in mind the following:
1. If you feel fine, don't worry about it. Only some people have acute symptoms, and the levels published are based on the lower range of tolerability, so that those people are protected. Sure, eating a whole Polar Bear liver is not a good idea for your health (1) - unless you are an Orca Whale, that is, but slightly going over your iron DRI is nothing to get anxious about.
2. Your body does not work in 24hr increments. One day rolls on into the next. If you eat over on Tuesday and under on Wednesday, you will be square on Friday.
Hope that helps!2 -
Thank you so much for the advice! I really appreciate it! ♥️2
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Hi gang!
I need some scale advice. Disclaimer this may have TMI.
I started my period again for the second time in two weeks. I have an endocrine disease that gives me insulin resistance and too much testosterone.
I have been limiting my carbs to under 30% per day so more protein and fat.
I have been at or a tiny under my daily calorie allotment of 1410.
But with my irregular periods, I’m literally afraid to step on the scale.
My question to you... would it be detrimental to my success if I weighed in only once a month?
I think seeing the scale go up and up while I’m eating 1410 calls or under per day will cause me to say forget the whole thing.
Thoughts? Advice?1 -
_inHisGrace wrote: »Hi gang!
I need some scale advice. Disclaimer this may have TMI.
I started my period again for the second time in two weeks. I have an endocrine disease that gives me insulin resistance and too much testosterone.
I have been limiting my carbs to under 30% per day so more protein and fat.
I have been at or a tiny under my daily calorie allotment of 1410.
But with my irregular periods, I’m literally afraid to step on the scale.
My question to you... would it be detrimental to my success if I weighed in only once a month?
I think seeing the scale go up and up while I’m eating 1410 calls or under per day will cause me to say forget the whole thing.
Thoughts? Advice?
You do you. If the daily scale numbers are freaking you out then don’t get on it daily. Personally I have to see it everyday and track my trends.
Once a month seems so far, maybe every other week? Though really it’s what works for you and your brain to stick with it!1 -
_inHisGrace wrote: »Hi gang!
I need some scale advice. Disclaimer this may have TMI.
I started my period again for the second time in two weeks. I have an endocrine disease that gives me insulin resistance and too much testosterone.
I have been limiting my carbs to under 30% per day so more protein and fat.
I have been at or a tiny under my daily calorie allotment of 1410.
But with my irregular periods, I’m literally afraid to step on the scale.
My question to you... would it be detrimental to my success if I weighed in only once a month?
I think seeing the scale go up and up while I’m eating 1410 calls or under per day will cause me to say forget the whole thing.
Thoughts? Advice?
It's all up to how your brain works. For me, if I don't weigh every day, I start to game the scale, eat differently the day before I weigh, etc. and that's silly and unnecessary stuff, which I can eliminate by just weighing every day and seeing what the number is. It's been interesting because I can watch it vary due to sodium intake and to doing heavy work that left me sore, and get a much better feeling how my body is working day to day. Sometimes I weigh at night and am starting to get a feeling for what my daily variance is (about two pounds). I didn't weigh this morning because I got up an hour early due to a mental health crisis (not mine) and had drunk a large glass of water before I thought about it. Eh, I'll get it tomorrow. No big deal.
If weighing daily will mess with your head, don't do it. I would say weigh every other week or every week, and see if you can be good with that. Give it a try, and see what works for you one way or the other. Every one of us is experimenting to see what works and is good and sustainable for us while we're on this journey, and sometimes it just takes trying stuff to see what works.2 -
_inHisGrace wrote: »Hi gang!
I need some scale advice. Disclaimer this may have TMI.
I started my period again for the second time in two weeks. I have an endocrine disease that gives me insulin resistance and too much testosterone.
I have been limiting my carbs to under 30% per day so more protein and fat.
I have been at or a tiny under my daily calorie allotment of 1410.
But with my irregular periods, I’m literally afraid to step on the scale.
My question to you... would it be detrimental to my success if I weighed in only once a month?
I think seeing the scale go up and up while I’m eating 1410 calls or under per day will cause me to say forget the whole thing.
Thoughts? Advice?
There are two schools of thought:
1) Weighing daily will eventually desensitize you to fluctuations and you will be able to be more objective. In addition, you won't be as likely to miss low weights.
2) Weighing more infrequently will teach you to trust the process. You will come to focus more on NSVs and other more meaningful forms of measurement. You run the risk of having a block of time be met with zero loss or a gain if you manage to retain water at the wrong time.
You aren't marrying the decision. You may change how you feel about things as time progresses. You can weigh monthly for a time and then try more frequently again. If monthly still works better for you, you can switch back. I weighed very infrequently in the beginning and as my confidence grew and my relationship with the scale improved I was able to weigh more often. That could happen to you, or it might not.
It also does not have to be only once a month. You are free to get creative with it because you are in charge. You can wait 30 days and then weigh daily for 3 or 4 days then wait another month before doing a few days of daily weighing again.
People lose weight without ever weighing at all. As long as you remain open to this being an educational process that will have hits and misses there is no reason to think it will be detrimental to your progress.
6 -
FWIW - I do a hybrid of the two schools.
I keep two logs of my scale weights. One of them is a TDEE spreadsheet where I am being absolutely dogmatic about daily weigh-ins and careful counting of calories - I'm treating that sheet as a scientific experiment on myself. I can see how my body reacts to nutritional intact, overages, times when I'm under on calories, and I do that with full recognition that it is going to swing up and down. For example - last Thursday, I weighed 321. Two days later - 328. Today, 323.4... so I don't allow those numbers to be discouraging at all because I'm doing a second sheet that keeps track of my Wednesday morning weigh-ins only. That enables me to see the overall downward trend without all the fluctuations. I enter my Wednesday morning weights on MFP.
I opted for Wednesdays - because when were more social (thanks a lot Pandemic) we would spend time with friends and family Friday and Saturday evenings, and I tended to intake a bit more calories, so it took a couple of days for the real weight to re-establish.
That sheet is what I look at - if I see an increase trend in that sheet - then I adjust what I'm doing. Because that means the weekly average is on the up, particularly for a couple of weeks - then I need to make an adjustment to CICO.
The daily fluctuations are just what it is, I try not to pay too much attention to them with regards to adjusting the process - despite feeling a tiny punch in the gut when I got on the scale Saturday morning and saw that 7 pound swing. I knew it would swing back - but wasn't sure how long it would take.3 -
Thanks guys!!1
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Quick q for those of you who have TOM come visit!
My calories dipped recently and I'm having a lot of trouble sticking to them during TOM. I'm thinking about lowering my deficit to a 1-1.5lb loss just during this week of my cycle to give myself some more leeway. I'm cool with a slightly slower rate of loss but I was wondering if anyone had tested this out or had any thoughtful suggestions for me?1 -
emmyjaykay wrote: »Quick q for those of you who have TOM come visit!
My calories dipped recently and I'm having a lot of trouble sticking to them during TOM. I'm thinking about lowering my deficit to a 1-1.5lb loss just during this week of my cycle to give myself some more leeway. I'm cool with a slightly slower rate of loss but I was wondering if anyone had tested this out or had any thoughtful suggestions for me?
Personally I find it impossible to stay at my calorie goal the day before I start + the first day of my period. So those two days I shoot for maintenance calories instead. I haven't seen any noticeable difference in my loss rate by doing this and even if I did, I would keep doing it just for my own sanity. The hunger and cravings on those days are massive and weight loss is hard enough as it is, so I've chosen not to fight that fight.2