Suddenly confused - is it just me?
GrizzledSquirrel
Posts: 120 Member
Hi All! I’m in a strange position having suddenly lost confidence in what I thought I knew about food and weight loss and I need some advice, please. Or at least some different opinions / perspectives.
I love cooking and cook nearly all my meals from scratch. I have no food preferences (e.g. vegan) or allergies (fortunately).
I was a firm believer in CICO and straightforward calorie counting has always worked for me when I’ve wanted to “check” my weight (I always hover around the upper-normal, dipping into “overweight” BMI, so am often “aware” of my weight, albeit not often actively “dieting”.
Thing is - if you take any casual interest in food, like me, you find yourself absolutely peppered with recommended foods for “wellbeing“ like bircher muesli/breakfast bowls, avocado, nut butters (on EVERYTHING), protein balls....the list goes on. Thing is - these items are REALLY calorific. Sorry, but I cannot afford a breakfast bowl of 500 calories and a tiny protein ball “snack” at another 150 before lunch (my maintenance level is around 1500 cals and I am quite muscular- hence the upper BMI range).
What am I missing please? Is the assumption that these foods curb cravings/hunger - so the “expensive” calorie counts of these foods, save you from gobbling later? If so, it is of no benefit to me - as I stick within my calories whether I am hungry at the end of the day or not.
Is it that some of these calories are “better calories”? e.g. they don’t get processed by your body in the same way? If so, that goes against every CICO concept I’ve ever believed. I feel like the rug is being pulled from under me.
Is it just for people who are interested in nutrition only and less concerned about calorie/weightloss goals?
I just get the general impression that current trends into “healthy food” are not the same as “food for weight loss”. Yes - I understand the nutritional benefits of oats, “good” fats, nuts, seeds etc - but from a calorie-control basis, these foods don’t help much when you’re trying to lose a few pounds.
I’m not attacking anyone or dismissing anybody’s love of such foods or recipes (I love ALL food). I’m just interested if anybody has felt the same way when flicking through healthy recipe ideas.
I love cooking and cook nearly all my meals from scratch. I have no food preferences (e.g. vegan) or allergies (fortunately).
I was a firm believer in CICO and straightforward calorie counting has always worked for me when I’ve wanted to “check” my weight (I always hover around the upper-normal, dipping into “overweight” BMI, so am often “aware” of my weight, albeit not often actively “dieting”.
Thing is - if you take any casual interest in food, like me, you find yourself absolutely peppered with recommended foods for “wellbeing“ like bircher muesli/breakfast bowls, avocado, nut butters (on EVERYTHING), protein balls....the list goes on. Thing is - these items are REALLY calorific. Sorry, but I cannot afford a breakfast bowl of 500 calories and a tiny protein ball “snack” at another 150 before lunch (my maintenance level is around 1500 cals and I am quite muscular- hence the upper BMI range).
What am I missing please? Is the assumption that these foods curb cravings/hunger - so the “expensive” calorie counts of these foods, save you from gobbling later? If so, it is of no benefit to me - as I stick within my calories whether I am hungry at the end of the day or not.
Is it that some of these calories are “better calories”? e.g. they don’t get processed by your body in the same way? If so, that goes against every CICO concept I’ve ever believed. I feel like the rug is being pulled from under me.
Is it just for people who are interested in nutrition only and less concerned about calorie/weightloss goals?
I just get the general impression that current trends into “healthy food” are not the same as “food for weight loss”. Yes - I understand the nutritional benefits of oats, “good” fats, nuts, seeds etc - but from a calorie-control basis, these foods don’t help much when you’re trying to lose a few pounds.
I’m not attacking anyone or dismissing anybody’s love of such foods or recipes (I love ALL food). I’m just interested if anybody has felt the same way when flicking through healthy recipe ideas.
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Replies
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GrizzledSquirrel wrote: »Hi All! I’m in a strange position having suddenly lost confidence in what I thought I knew about food and weight loss and I need some advice, please. Or at least some different opinions / perspectives.
I love cooking and cook nearly all my meals from scratch. I have no food preferences (e.g. vegan) or allergies (fortunately).
I was a firm believer in CICO and straightforward calorie counting has always worked for me when I’ve wanted to “check” my weight (I always hover around the upper-normal, dipping into “overweight” BMI, so am often “aware” of my weight, albeit not often actively “dieting”.
Thing is - if you take any casual interest in food, like me, you find yourself absolutely peppered with recommended foods for “wellbeing“ like bircher muesli/breakfast bowls, avocado, nut butters (on EVERYTHING), protein balls....the list goes on. Thing is - these items are REALLY calorific. Sorry, but I cannot afford a breakfast bowl of 500 calories and a tiny protein ball “snack” at another 150 before lunch (my maintenance level is around 1500 cals and I am quite muscular- hence the upper BMI range).
What am I missing please? Is the assumption that these foods curb cravings/hunger - so the “expensive” calorie counts of these foods, save you from gobbling later? If so, it is of no benefit to me - as I stick within my calories whether I am hungry at the end of the day or not.
Is it that some of these calories are “better calories”? e.g. they don’t get processed by your body in the same way? If so, that goes against every CICO concept I’ve ever believed. I feel like the rug is being pulled from under me.
Is it just for people who are interested in nutrition only and less concerned about calorie/weightloss goals?
I just get the general impression that current trends into “healthy food” are not the same as “food for weight loss”. Yes - I understand the nutritional benefits of oats, “good” fats, nuts, seeds etc - but from a calorie-control basis, these foods don’t help much when you’re trying to lose a few pounds.
I’m not attacking anyone or dismissing anybody’s love of such foods or recipes (I love ALL food). I’m just interested if anybody has felt the same way when flicking through healthy recipe ideas.
Eating for weight loss and eating for health can be totally separate things. While nut butters are "healthy", I would blow threw my calories if I ate them regularly.9 -
@psychod787 Yeah - totally the same for me re: nut butters.
I think there is a lot of confusion between wellbeing and weight loss. I’ve just read elsewhere in the community spaces somebody saying “I turned vegan...why am I overweight?!?”. This is kind of what I am talking about. There are a lot of decent arguments about the health benefits of an entirely plant-based diet. Doesn’t mean you lose weight though.2 -
How and where do you get "peppered with recommended foods"? Any adverts are just going to be for whatever the manufacturer / blogger has paid to have advertised. All of these foods, on their own, might well be good for your well being, IF they are part of a nutritionally balanced diet. But the manufacturer really doesn't know anything about you and, actually, probably doesn't care - they just want you to buy their product. Same with bloggers - they get paid if you click a link and buy the product.
I don;t know where you live, or if this is true in other countries anyway, but nutritional info in the UK is generally "based on 2000 calorie diet". My maintenance number is 1320 so, if I were to eat 2000 cals a day, I'd soon be back to looking like a tub of lard (unless I did an awful lot of exercise to earn more cals).
I stick to my cals. By trial and error, I know that some things make me feel more satiated than others. Some things may not be considered particularly healthy but they form part of my diet because they fit with my calories and I like them. Ads for something that sounds interesting (or seeing something new in the supermarket) might get my attention for about 30 seconds but, if the nutritional info won't fit with my diet, I just forget about it.2 -
GrizzledSquirrel wrote: »@psychod787 Yeah - totally the same for me re: nut butters.
I think there is a lot of confusion between wellbeing and weight loss. I’ve just read elsewhere in the community spaces somebody saying “I turned vegan...why am I overweight?!?”. This is kind of what I am talking about. There are a lot of decent arguments about the health benefits of an entirely plant-based diet. Doesn’t mean you lose weight though.
These could be a vegan diet..
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@Strudders67 You’re right. I should only judge this stuff in context.
By “peppered”, I am not talking about explicit ads/blogs - but chefs, TV shows, recipe websites - so you are right, in that these people all rely on this content for their livelihoods, albeit in a more subtle way.
I am a Brit (albeit living abroad) - so am familiar with the 2k recommendation (if only, eh!). From the UK, I’ll give you a concrete example of what I am talking about by “peppered”: Tom Kerridge - (for non-Brits - an excellent, multi-starred chef whom I greatly admire). He was a big guy and lost an extraordinary amount of weight and has recently written books and done shows concentrating on weightloss. One recipe was a chocolate fudge brownie. A small square was 210 cals - only slightly fewer than a mars bar. It was made out of black beans. Suddenly it is in a weight loss cookbook.
I get that RATHER than a mars bar, it might be HEALTHIER for you to eat the brownie (e.g. more fibre), but for weight loss, I recommend neither (unless you are really lucky and have calories to spare and REALLY want it).
Thing is - this narrative from “trusted sources” is permeating everyday life and weirdly turning into accepted fact. I will have friends who bring round homemade banana bread which contains only “natural sugars” and no butter “only extra virgin olive oil” who tell me that it won’t spoil either of our diets. I LOVE olive oil - but I portion it out by the half tablespoon like liquid gold - because the calories are scary.
My cry for help is that I am not impermeable to this narrative. I find myself hovering in the aisle of the supermarket wondering if I should be piling my basket with maple syrup, almond milk and chia seeds.1 -
My view is that my need to lose weight far outweighs (hoho) my need to eat super healthy as I am more likely to die from obesity related illness than from not eating enough peanut butter or avocado.
As it happens, I do eat reasonably most of the time but that is because a lot of food I am lucky enough to enjoy is pretty healthy but calories are always king.
And as for Tom Kerridge, I doubt he lost all that weight by eating what is in his recipe books, which is out there with a view to making money on the back of weight lose rather than being a how-to guide.
He did a TV show recently and it was dreadful dreadful dreadful dreadful with people eating food they could not possibly have at home under normal circumstances (he is a chef!) and a lot of it was far higher in calories than most of us could countenance, balanced by the fatties being run ragged by personal trainers for hours and hours each day to burn off the monster breakfast he had just fed them.
It was an entertainment show first and did little to help anyone in the audience with a weight issue lose and keep it off.
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A couple of thoughts.
First, and wildly obvious: Different people have different calorie goals. Bigger, active men can easily have a maintenance calorie goal in the 2500+ zone. A 210-calorie brownie that brings some nutrition with it, in that context, is NBD. For a smaller, maybe older, more sedentary woman whose maintenance calories are 1300-1400, who values nutrition, 210 calories needs to bring along quite a lot of nutrition, and even a *black bean* brownie might not deliver that.
Second, the concept of "superfoods" is kind of simple. Eat a basketful of them, attain health, including a healthy weight. (Yes, that's not true. But it's kind of simple. And it has the sacrifice built in that some people think is necessary for health - eating things they don't personally think are tasty, but are "super". We see that myth played out regularly in posts around here, too.)
Actual balanced nutrition, by contrast, seems complicated and full of arithmetic and other icky, difficult stuff. Grams of macro- and micro-nutrients, and IUs and RDAs and percentages, Oh My! It's like a crazy combination of Tetris and Sudoku, but with a person's health at stake if they don't get it right!
Now, I"m exaggerating (but only a little).
Looking at it another way, the overall population has been unmoved by dietary guidelines, mostly. At the population level, we keep getting fatter and eating boatloads of many less than nutrient-dense foods. So, for celebrity chefs (and others) to take a stab at enticement to *slightly* better eating may make sense, since true change hasn't gone over all that well. Voila, black bean brownies. Just that tiny bit more nutritious, still tastes yummy because it's a *brownie*!! (?)
Over a long sweep of time, it's seemed obvious to me that people like to think of themselves as "eating healthy", but in actuality respond to the evolutionary triggers (sweet, fat, salt . . . .). So, healthier choices get introduced, but over time they . . . shift. I'm really old. The fast food places didn't generally have salads at all, back in the day. Then they did. Then the salads got crispy chicken instead of non-fried chicken. Whole grains were good, so Granola bars happened. Then, they started getting chocolate chips, marshmallows, etc. Some protein bars are now going through kind of the same candy-bar-ification process, I think.
Popular culture always has (frankly) a bunch of nonsense in it, meeting people where they are; posing the things they need as things they want (like those black bean brownies) or the things they want as what they need (like the fried-chicken "salads" and the chocolate granola bars). In this milieu, logic does not apply.
IMO, the best tack is not to even expect popular culture to make sense. You know your calorie needs, you (I expect) understand nutrition, you know what to do. People who know less, but think they ought to be doing something, are going to get swept up in the nonsense, at least at first, sadly.8 -
Throw all of the dieting dogma out with bathwater. It only causes more mind warp.
I make all of my own food, too. I know slick marketing tricks when I see them. Some of these extra fancy paleo foods are just a bunch of hippy dippy happy horsesheet. You'd be better off if you ate the wrappers.
Paleo nut balls and fat bombs vs. fur balls and gut bombs. Paleo, my rearend.
Don't overthink it. I'm not going out like that.4 -
@freda78 Thanks. Your post did make me laugh. I agree with you re: remembering the motivations of people out there offering “advice”. I’m sure (or at least, hope), that individuals don’t set out to explicitly deceive - but there are certainly many factors at play other than pure altruism. I guess by definition, the easy and sound weight loss advice of: “eat a bit less” probably doesn’t sell cookery books.
Nice to know it isn’t just me thinking things have all gone a bit crazy. I will continue with your (and my) mantra of: Calories are King.2 -
I understand where you are coming from! I see these foods and recipes right here on MFP! I ignore all of it unless it looks really good and then I try and figure out how it can work for my eating plan. For instance, the overnight oats ... oats are good for you but high in calories and carbs so I make half portions around 150-200 calories as opposed to typical ones that are around 350 calories. It is super filling and I personally cannot see how someone can easily eat a whole portion. I then tweak my lunch ( double portion of salad greens) on those days that I have overnight oats to compensate.
Those "healthy" recipes that are high in calories can have a place, but not a regular one, in your eating plan. And if I want something sweet, I am NOT going to eat a black bean brownie ... it's gonna be the real thing! An extra fast paced mile walk is worth stockpiling a few calories for the real thing.3 -
A lot depends on your personality and exercise level. My regular breakfast is around 550 calories of steel cut oats with walnuts, fruit, almond butter, cacao powder, and Greek yogurt, plus cottage cheese topped with salsa. It’s a lot of food and I sit for a long leisurely 30 - 45 minutes enjoying it. On the other hand my dinner is sometimes half a sandwich and a bite of dark chocolate, or a modest piece of salmon and some greens. This works for me since I work from home and don’t often eat with others apart from my husband, who prepares his own meals. For someone with a family expecting a big shared dinner every night with only 5 minutes to grab and eat breakfast it really wouldn’t work so well.
Nut butters, avocado, and so on, are arguably healthier than the same amount of steak fat, butter, and cheese - and I think probably a majority of Western diets regularly involve those things, so they can stop eating them and sub in the other without adding calories.
On long run days I can afford to eat pretty much whatever I want, within reason.2 -
I think walking down health food isles can be really confusing with all the different products like muesli, granola, chia seeds, almond milks, random health seeds and powders etc all advertising these different health claims where clearly someone is making profits off.
Whereas you don’t have the claims jumping out at you when you look at the fruits/vegetables/lean proteins like chicken and seafood etc when these foods are often lower calorie and higher in nutrients compared to the others so better to include in your diet when trying to lose especially.
I think it’s important to get healthy fats from things like nuts, avocado, olive oil etc but you only need a smaller portion to get the benefits and stay within your calorie budget1 -
From basic foods consumed by huge masses of people over centuries or at least decades, selecting the least calorie dense from the most nutritious will always be safe and effective. Some goofy nut butters and oddball plant parts we used to throw away are not going to make you healthy and not going to help with weight loss. Ignore that stuff. Eat fresh fruits and vegetables, grains and tubers, fish and crustaceans, and not wholly excluding fats and oils like lard, butter and olive oil.3
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If you're "quite muscular" and that's putting you at a higher BMI, why are you trying to lose weight? (Not looking for personal details, just wondering if you're pursuing an arbitrary scale # despite possibly having a decent BF%.)
Even if you do need or want to lose some fat, 1500 cal is the minimum for a man (didn't check your profile -- making an assumption based on the photo you've chosen for your avatar and the words "grizzled" and "muscular" in your name and OP -- apologies if the assumption is incorrect), and most likely not ideal if you're muscular and trying to trim from an OK BF% to a better BF%.
So you may have room to include some of those "healthy" but more calorie dense foods if you reconsider your calorie goal.0 -
What are your stats?
1500 is almost no-one's maintenance level (well... it can be. But if youre young and healthy i doubt it) ... are you tiny and or old as well as truly sedentary? Do you have a medical condition?
For reference... im female, 5'5" and 126 lb and i maintain at 2100. I know i am home woth my toddlers but even if i had a desk job my maintenance would be at least 1900 (i seem to burn about 100 more than calculators tell me i do, based on all the data ive collected these past 6/7 years). I am not muscular.
You say you are muscular and at the top end of bmi... you therefore would have a higher maintenance of at least 1700 (probably more) unless you are calculating things like you intake, or burns wrong. Or have a medical condition like pcos or thyroid problems or something.
Are you confusing BMR for maintenance calories? You burn more per day than your BMR unless youre in a coma... which since youre posting, i dont think you are...
Do you have any data to show that you maintain on 1500?
For example, i keep a spreadsheet of my intake and burns every day for the month, calculate my weekly and monthly aversge net calories and can back calculate my maintenance based on how much i lose/gain or stay the same weight. I store the data in another page so i can see the history and completeness of the data.
Its a bit much probably for some people... but after the inital set up it makes it really easy for me to tell whats going on and how my body is processing things.
Im not saying for sure you are mistaken on the number... but id like to see some justification on that. Then after that maybe we can help you pinpoint things to fit items you want to eat into your goal better.
To answer a question... the foods you are likely talking about are nutrient dense. And that is often the main perk. Sometimes they help with feeling full as well. You say you stay in goal even if you are hungry... but you mught not have to continue to feel hungry, even if you have the willpower.
That being said. Its not like the foods are magical. If you dont want to eat them, dont. A lot of the articles you read online make a base assumption your existing diet is lacking or unbalanced. Theyll be like oh eat avocados because omgea 3! Meanwhile if you are not eating that but eating salmon or even taking a supplement (or something) youre still getting it. Not to mention all the conflicting info out there about nutrition.0 -
"Healthy" nutrition and calories aren't one in the same...there are many highly nutritious foods that are also high in calories and food pretty much void of nutritional value that have very few calories. Are healthy fats good for you? Of course...but the quantity consumed needs to be balanced with calories and one's calorie needs. Just because nuts, for example, are healthy doesn't mean they should be consumed in mass quantity and consumed all of the time.
Also, one's individual calorie needs have to be taken into consideration. I lose about a pound per week eating around 2500 calories...so eating an avocado or something on the regular isn't a particularly big deal.3 -
Some people have a high enough TDEE that calorie dense foods enable them to eat ENOUGH without being overly full. Some days I'll eat 5,000+ calories so I'll add olive oil to a meal or MCT oil to a shake just so I can consume enough calories without going into a food coma.
What works for you won't work for me and what works for me won't work for you.1 -
Thanks for all your interesting feedback. @lynn_glenmont (and @verykatie), your assumptions about me are very fair from my limited profile clues - but, I’m actually an early-40s woman. I’m 5”5 and 150lbs (still quite “grizzled” though).
When losing weight, I really battle to ever get under 140lbs but usually feel good in the early 140lbs. (I can only dream of being 126lbs @VeryKatie!) and have made peace that the 130s of my 20s will never return.
I work an office job from home and live in a city where I walk everywhere, so my activity is one of extremes - so some days, I barely move - others, I’ll walk a lot and might even get a bit of explicit exercise in, so for safety, I err on the “lower activity” side.
This would put me at a BMR of 1360 with TDEE of 1635. This got me thinking - why does 1500 target tend to work for me? Well - it’s probably because it is an average over the week EXCLUDING the odd “going out” night. I drink and frequently eat out when socialising. On these nights, I will go over my 1500 calories easily. I live on the Med, so eating out isn’t “junk” but it is still calorific. Unlike all the meals I cook at home, it is hard to accurately track these meals, but it must push my weekly average significantly above 1500 per day - without me realising. This is probably why 1500 seems to work for me on the other days.
I admire those of you (@ironismytherapy and @cwolfman13) who can eat well over 2000 calories per day without really worrying about it. I’d be reaching for the walnuts by the handful if that were the case (and if I was in that kind of shape, I might even crack them between my thighs too, just because I could).
However, maybe I am closer to you guys than I think - it’s just that I might choose a few glasses of wine and a bowl of pasta once a week over some similarly calorific (but arguably “healthier”) almond butter chickpea blondies.
Interesting.
I started this post genuinely perplexed about the “health food narrative” and interested in whether I had genuinely missed something - whilst not really applying it to my own situation. Your comments have strengthened my belief that CICO always comes first in weight loss (which is reassuring) - but as it relates to my own situation, maybe I was a bit blind. It appears that I too could be an avocado-munching goddess with glowing skin and fit a few more of these delicious calorie and nutrient-dense foods if I wanted - but I choose wine instead (with its magical stress-busting benefits). And that’s fine too - as long as I realise that I AM choosing one over the other. This revelation also makes it less mystifying how others can probably fit these sorts of food into their own calorie goals.
Thanks for the change of perspective, guys. It’s helped - albeit in a slightly unexpected way!5 -
GrizzledSquirrel wrote: »Thanks for all your interesting feedback. @lynn_glenmont (and @verykatie), your assumptions about me are very fair from my limited profile clues - but, I’m actually an early-40s woman. I’m 5”5 and 150lbs (still quite “grizzled” though).
When losing weight, I really battle to ever get under 140lbs but usually feel good in the early 140lbs. (I can only dream of being 126lbs @VeryKatie!) and have made peace that the 130s of my 20s will never return.
I work an office job from home and live in a city where I walk everywhere, so my activity is one of extremes - so some days, I barely move - others, I’ll walk a lot and might even get a bit of explicit exercise in, so for safety, I err on the “lower activity” side.
This would put me at a BMR of 1360 with TDEE of 1635. This got me thinking - why does 1500 target tend to work for me? Well - it’s probably because it is an average over the week EXCLUDING the odd “going out” night. I drink and frequently eat out when socialising. On these nights, I will go over my 1500 calories easily. I live on the Med, so eating out isn’t “junk” but it is still calorific. Unlike all the meals I cook at home, it is hard to accurately track these meals, but it must push my weekly average significantly above 1500 per day - without me realising. This is probably why 1500 seems to work for me on the other days.
I admire those of you (@ironismytherapy and @cwolfman13) who can eat well over 2000 calories per day without really worrying about it. I’d be reaching for the walnuts by the handful if that were the case (and if I was in that kind of shape, I might even crack them between my thighs too, just because I could).
However, maybe I am closer to you guys than I think - it’s just that I might choose a few glasses of wine and a bowl of pasta once a week over some similarly calorific (but arguably “healthier”) almond butter chickpea blondies.
Interesting.
I started this post genuinely perplexed about the “health food narrative” and interested in whether I had genuinely missed something - whilst not really applying it to my own situation. Your comments have strengthened my belief that CICO always comes first in weight loss (which is reassuring) - but as it relates to my own situation, maybe I was a bit blind. It appears that I too could be an avocado-munching goddess with glowing skin and fit a few more of these delicious calorie and nutrient-dense foods if I wanted - but I choose wine instead (with its magical stress-busting benefits). And that’s fine too - as long as I realise that I AM choosing one over the other. This revelation also makes it less mystifying how others can probably fit these sorts of food into their own calorie goals.
Thanks for the change of perspective, guys. It’s helped - albeit in a slightly unexpected way!
Great response! And yeah that answers my question. And i did say you probably maintain closer to at least 1700 haha. I assumed you were a woman, dunno why. Same height as me less than 10 years older but different lifestyle. It sounds like you log in a more relaxed - not weighing everything, eating out sometimes kind of way too (totally fine if it works for you) so id say that answers my question as to your daily burn. Your assumption that youre eating 1500 is likely a little off and you probably have a tdee higher than 1635 based on the activity you mentioned. A totally sedenary office day would be 1635 ish but a walking day is likely more.1 -
Glad you got some insight. Nutrition is very individual, there's really not size fits all plan. I should also note when I'm eating 5000 cals/day, I'm in a surplus. My TDEE doesn't go much over about 4,200cals and I'm pushing pretty hard to be there. My BMR is about 2400 cals.1
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@IronIsMyTherapy Ah-ha! That has “translated” something else for me - i.e. when some people post their astronomically high TDEEs on MFP, it might include an element of surplus (presumably when building muscle?) as well as super-activity/muscle-mass. That’s also reassuring to hear.
Still - despite being in surplus I’m still in awe that you can push your TDEE to 1800 cals above your BMR. Makes me tired just reading about it. Bravo! I hope you achieve your goals!1 -
(Above), I should have said “astronomically high daily calorie consumption” as opposed to TDEEs.1
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Remember portion control.
I do eat healthy foods like avocados, olive oil, nuts- which are high in calories. But small portions, and I stay under 12-1300 calories a day.
I have less to lose, so my focus is on health. but the benefit is when I eat healthy, I do lose more weight.
I know this is debated to death, but ex., a low calorie fake snack food does not help me lose. An apple dipped in peanut butter does.0 -
I understand your frustration and confusion in this. It makes me SMH when I see a picture of something really yummy, advertised as healthy, then search all over creation for the recipe, only to find out the calorie count is outrageous. It happens all the time.
Someone suggested the basics; veggies, fruits, fish, whole grains, good fats. Build from there within the calorie limits for you.
Had to chuckle at the vision of you in the supermarket wondering if you should buy chia seeds, maple syrup and almond milk. I did exactly that and made overnight oatmeal. Dang, if that stuff didn't have about 500 cal. and little eating satisfaction. For that amount of calories I could've made an extra large omelet, filled with veggies, sides of fruits, and maybe even breakfast meat. A whole lot of satisfaction and more protein/vitamins to boot.
Yep, it's pick and choose.1
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