Not losing weight in a deficit
DonnaMiles1966
Posts: 11 Member
I'm 53 years old and weigh 87kgs. I excersise 5 days a week, around 60 minutes weight/compound (includes rest time between sets) followed by 30 minutes of cardio. I am in a caloric deficit of 1300, that I consume on my non gym days, but when training I consume burnt calories. So for eg my 1300 base, then add say 550 burnt during excersise, I consume those calories back, including my 1300. My macros are set to 40% protein, 40% carbs, 20% fat. If anything I'm gaining weight, or staying the same, not losing. What am I doing wrong? Any suggestions would be appreciated. 
I should mention I've kept at this routine for approximately 6 months now.
I should mention I've kept at this routine for approximately 6 months now. 1
Replies
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Do you use a food scale? Do you pick the right entries from the database? How do you calculate your calorie burns from exercise?11
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Second vote for a food scale.9
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I use barcodes on any packed foods, scanning them into my food diary, I also Google calories in certain foods that aren't logged in MFP. I spoke to a trainer who says estimates burning approx 300 plus calories burnt during my weight training per the hour, then whatever the cardio equipment I'm using in the 30 minutes shows burnt calories. eg: 10 minutes on stair treadmill I burn approx 100 calories, as per the computer on the machines. MFP tends to add the burnt calories automatically when putting in excersise performed, and as a rule I change it to lower numbers as it tends to show higher numbers. Hope that makes sense.2
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I have had minimal luck with barcode scanning - either they are the incorrect serving sizes or out of date info (sometimes it’s not even the right food!). Double check anything and everything you scan, I rarely use what pops up. And packaged goods can vary by weight from what it says. Per pkg/piece/slice is not your best bet. Get an inexpensive food scale and weigh everything, it is quite eye opening! Especially with calorie dense foods - they add up fast.12
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It sounds as if you may be overestimating your exercise calories. I also vote for a food scale and measuring food in grams.12
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Strength training, whilst awesome, really doesn't burn many calories, and exercise machines are notorious for over-estimating cals burned.
As others have suggested, get a food scale, weigh everything, making sure you verify the accuracy of database entries you're using, and go with eating back maybe half of estimated exercise cals for now.12 -
My advice would be not to add estimated calories burnt back into your daily allowance. It is difficult to accurately gauge the amount of calories you are burning. The number provided by the equipment is simply generated from an algorithm and there are many factors it does not account for. If your goal is weight loss, adding those calories back negates your hard work and is self sabotaging in my opinion.5
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shanek1990 wrote: »My advice would be not to add estimated calories burnt back into your daily allowance. It is difficult to accurately gauge the amount of calories you are burning. The number provided by the equipment is simply generated from an algorithm and there are many factors it does not account for. If your goal is weight loss, adding those calories back negates your hard work and is self sabotaging in my opinion.
MFP is designed to add additional calories from exercise, it's not a TDEE method. By not adding any back, you are under-fuelling. It's a fairly simple process to work out how many of your exercise calories to eat, and infinitely better than eating none of them at all. Your calorie allowance is generated from an algorithm too, are you throwing that out as well?
How to fine tune those things to yourself? Track cals in meticulously, eat back 50-75% of estimated exercise calories, after 6 weeks check your average weekly weight loss against your expected loss (ie, what you set MFP to), adjust calories up or down if necessary.14 -
Nony_Mouse wrote: »shanek1990 wrote: »My advice would be not to add estimated calories burnt back into your daily allowance. It is difficult to accurately gauge the amount of calories you are burning. The number provided by the equipment is simply generated from an algorithm and there are many factors it does not account for. If your goal is weight loss, adding those calories back negates your hard work and is self sabotaging in my opinion.
MFP is designed to add additional calories from exercise, it's not a TDEE method. By not adding any back, you are under-fuelling. It's a fairly simple process to work out how many of your exercise calories to eat, and infinitely better than eating none of them at all. Your calorie allowance is generated from an algorithm too, are you throwing that out as well?
How to fine tune those things to yourself? Track cals in meticulously, eat back 50-75% of estimated exercise calories, after 6 weeks check your average weekly weight loss against your expected loss (ie, what you set MFP to), adjust calories up or down if necessary.
The OP said she is not losing weight and may be gaining so something is off. She said she is maintaining and maybe gaining. She is logging about 550 per day in exercise calories.
If her goal is 1 lb a week loss then she should not log them and if her goal is 1/2 lb a week then she should log half.
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Nony_Mouse wrote: »shanek1990 wrote: »My advice would be not to add estimated calories burnt back into your daily allowance. It is difficult to accurately gauge the amount of calories you are burning. The number provided by the equipment is simply generated from an algorithm and there are many factors it does not account for. If your goal is weight loss, adding those calories back negates your hard work and is self sabotaging in my opinion.
MFP is designed to add additional calories from exercise, it's not a TDEE method. By not adding any back, you are under-fuelling. It's a fairly simple process to work out how many of your exercise calories to eat, and infinitely better than eating none of them at all. Your calorie allowance is generated from an algorithm too, are you throwing that out as well?
How to fine tune those things to yourself? Track cals in meticulously, eat back 50-75% of estimated exercise calories, after 6 weeks check your average weekly weight loss against your expected loss (ie, what you set MFP to), adjust calories up or down if necessary.
The OP said she is not losing weight and may be gaining so something is off. She said she is maintaining and maybe gaining. She is logging about 550 per day in exercise calories.
If her goal is 1 lb a week loss then she should not log them and if her goal is 1/2 lb a week then she should log half.
I was responding to the person who said not to add ANY exercise calories, as a general statement not just directed at the OP. Pretty sure I was clear in my separate response to the OP that she needs to tighten up logging and that she's over estimating exercise cals.10 -
How do your clothes fit? Do you look better? Strength training for 6 months, I would expect to see body composition changes, even if your weight is staying the same. The scale doesn't always tell the full story.
Aside from that, as has been said before, it sounds like a good idea to check the accuracy of your food logging and your exercise calories do sound like they could be a bit overestimated. For your food logging, you could make your food diary public and let us see if there are some easy mistakes we can spot or improvements we can suggest.
PS can I just say: kudos for sticking with this for 6 months, great commitment! We get a lot of people here asking why they haven't lost weight after for example a single week 🙂2 -
The original starting calorie deficit being 1300 is supposed to have me losing 1kg per week, according to the calculation, then I'm estimating burning around 550-600 calories plus during weight training and cardio. Most days I struggle to consume the burnt calories back, but either way it puts me back to the 1300, if that makes sense? I've been told on training days I should be eating around 2000 calories, but there's no way I can eat that much, lol. I keep my protein intake up, eat lots of greens, veg, whole grains, steak/chicken ect, also I rarely eat breakfast, usually start eating around brunch. I avoid processed food, opt for fresh where possible, and mostly drink only water. Seriously I feel I'm doing everything right, but it just doesn't seem to be working. I have gained some muscle mass in the last 6 months, perhaps that's accounting for some of the weight?2
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Also I reckon I need to buy some scales
See if that can make things easier.7 -
Do you mind making your food diary public? There is something very wrong here, and I still suspect it's in your food logging (as well as over estimating exercise cals). If you open your diary, we can take a look and see if there's anywhere obvious that you're going wrong. To do that, go to settings, then diary settings, scroll down and choose public for diary display.
How tall are you?
Women gain muscle very slowly, even under optimum conditions, and that would still suggest you're eating at maintenance (muscle doesn't weigh more than fat, it's just denser).8 -
DonnaMiles1966 wrote: »Also I reckon I need to buy some scales
See if that can make things easier.
It will certainly make things more accurate. Aside from packaged foods (the weight of which can be off by quite a bit, btw, something like 20% either way), how are you measuring things?3 -
I have made my diary public 0
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Thanks
Okay, I see loads of room for underestimating cals there - things like medium banana (highly subjective), the fried rice, is that a recipe you made and entered yourself, or did you just pick a fried rice entry from the database? Same for any other recipe type things. Small chicken thighs, again very subjective. Bread slices within a pack can be really variable in weight, not a big deal if you're the only one eating that loaf (evens out over time), but if you're sharing you may be eating an extra 50 cals without knowing it, for example. Same again with other pre-sliced items. You say you're eating lots of veg and greens, but I'm not seeing that, are you not logging your veg? That adds up.
Food scale is your friend. I think you will find you are eating a lot more than you think you are.12 -
Found your veg!
One more - Sundays are quite often not logged. What's happening there, and might you be undoing your deficit on those days?9 -
You could try logging 250 calories for your workout sessions. The stair climber thing really doesn't burn 100 calories per 10 minutes. If you went mountain hiking then that would come down to 600 calories for an hour. Hardly any exercise burns so many calories. For running you can use distance(miles) * weight (lbs) * 0.67. However threadmils are generally poorly calibrated and might not give the actual distance. But this might give you an idea for calorie burns for an exercise that is not walking and that involves jumping. Exercises where one feet stays on the ground tend to burn a lot less. For walking, the multiplier is 0.3 instead of 0.674
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I use barcodes on any packed foods, scanning them into my food diary.
Barcode scanning is simply a different way to get to a database entry and is no guarantee that entry is accurate.
As you do a significant amount of exercise (well done!) it would be foolish not to take your exercise into account but the flip side is that inaccuracies will be more significant to you than a low volume exerciser. Here's my opinions and suggestions....
I spoke to a trainer who says estimates burning approx 300 plus calories burnt during my weight training per the hour.
Unlikely. A problem with using your weight in part of the calculation (as MyFitnessPal does) is that unless your strength and therefore the amount of weight lifted is in proportion to your weight it's likely to badly over-estimate.
10 minutes on stair treadmill I burn approx 100 calories, as per the computer on the machines
Unlikely to be accurate.
A rate of 600 net cals / per hour would be possible by someone with an unusually high fitness level and pushing hard.
Are there any power meter equipped exercise bikes in your gym? If there are then pedal at 167 watts and that level is 601 net cals per hour. If you manage to sustain that power output then Bravo! :flowerforyou: - you have a remarkably good fitness level for your gender, weight and age.
If your rowing machine is a Concept2 then you can use their online calorie calculator in conjunction with your rower's readout.
https://www.concept2.com/indoor-rowers/training/calculators/calorie-calculator
For running and walking this is a pretty good caculator (use the net option) -https://exrx.net/Calculators/WalkRunMETs
MFP tends to add the burnt calories automatically when putting in excersise performed, and as a rule I change it to lower numbers as it tends to show higher numbers. Hope that makes sense.
It does make sense (especially as they are gross and not net calories). Taking off a 24th of your daily BMR per hour of exercise may well be sensible to get you closer to reality. Be wary of vague descriptions of intensity like moderate or intense as they are very subjective and calories don't have feelings.
I would emphasise though that the majority of the apparent discrepancy between your results and weight loss expectations are likely to be related to food logging rather than exercise logging issues.
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The stair climber shows 100 cal burnt in 10 minutes maybe because I have the pace/level set toggling between 5 and 8, but like go hard most of the time on there with a slow to 5 until I catch my breath, lol. Sundays I generally don't log anything, as is my main day off, but continue to stay around the 1300 deficit. As for the bread, I don't share my loaf, my son hates it. He's a naughty white bread lad. Looks like I'm going to have to invest in some scales and eat less, which doesn't really leave me much for fuel in the gym. It's awfully complicated this dieting stuff, haha.1
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You think you're doing the right thing, but not much in the way of results sadly. It's got to come together eventually and all just "click I didn't excersise for over a year and strangely enough lost weight, down to 71kgs, then 6 months ago I started training again and it's working the opposite. I dunno what's going on, UGH!!! Think my system is in need of an overhaul. If I don't eat sufficient calories I can feel it while working out, I don't have the stamina at all. I tried eating less and that was the result. No up and go. Maybe I'm exercising too much? Too little? *sigh* You guys have been amazing and I appreciate all the input xx3
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Oh, and yes the Rowing machine is a Concept2 👍0
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Exercise for health. Exercise machines are often high estimates.
Eating less calories than your body burns is the way weight is lost. ALWAYS.
Many people lose weight with no additional exercise. I lost 90 pounds before I began to even walk more.3 -
DonnaMiles1966 wrote: »The stair climber shows 100 cal burnt in 10 minutes maybe because I have the pace/level set toggling between 5 and 8, but like go hard most of the time on there with a slow to 5 until I catch my breath, lol.
Interval training feels hard but usually results in a lower calorie burn than pushing at a hard but sustainable level as the recovery intervals drag down your average. Going at "7" for the whole time might require more work in the physics sense than toggling between higher and lower.
As examples two indoor bike training sessions this week:
Really hard and exhausting intervals that left me pretty wiped out and needing recovery, that really was enough for one day - 611 net cals
Steady state and sustainable decently brisk effort but left me feeling fine afterwards and could have continued - 676 net cals
(Different training modalities for different fitness benefits which is what exercise should mostly be about though.)
I would trust the Concept2 calculation so you could try to see what effort you can sustain for 10 mins and compare that to your Stair Climber - although a far from perfect comparison it could provide some insight into your capabilities.4 -
DonnaMiles1966 wrote: »You think you're doing the right thing, but not much in the way of results sadly. It's got to come together eventually and all just "click I didn't excersise for over a year and strangely enough lost weight, down to 71kgs, then 6 months ago I started training again and it's working the opposite. I dunno what's going on, UGH!!! Think my system is in need of an overhaul. If I don't eat sufficient calories I can feel it while working out, I don't have the stamina at all. I tried eating less and that was the result. No up and go. Maybe I'm exercising too much? Too little? *sigh* You guys have been amazing and I appreciate all the input xx
I'm sorry your struggling! Just to give you some perspective... I spent my 30s trying to lose 20 lbs by doing every diet I could. I felt like I was eating next to nothing and was staying active and nothing worked. Assumed there was something wrong with me.
Then I did two things that changed everything - I started using a food scale and a step tracker. I discovered that I was eating several hundred cals more than I thought, and was only getting 4-5000 steps per day! So why was I hungry and unsatisfied? Because I was eating foods I didn't like and didn't fill me up, just because I was told they were "healthy diet friendly foods". Then I'd occasionally have one day where I ate far more than I thought I did because "I deserved it" for eating all that "healthy" food.
Once I was weighing and logging food accurately every day, I could eat foods I liked, but in a moderated amount. I started to learn which foods filled me up and which were a waste if precious cals. I kept having a weighed out serving of ice cream after dinner because it satisfied me, but had to ditch those advertised lower cal chips and crackers because I had to over eat them to feel like I'd eaten anything. I was able to use my food log history to play around with my macros. And I didn't need a break from it because it was food I liked. Plus as I focused on increasing my step count, it slowly increased my calorie needs.
The diet industry really gets so many of us running around in circles focused on unimportant stuff without any actual data. And it's so easy to feel like you're not eating anything but not noticing all the calories you waste. Starting with a dead accurate food log made it easier for me to figure out what food and calorie level worked for me personally. I bet focusing on recording some really accurate data in your food log for a few weeks will answer some questions for you. Good luck!20 -
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I, too, am suspicious that that treadmill is overestimating, and I say that as someone who used to be about the same size you are now (my starting weight was mid-180s pounds, around 83kg).
FWIW:
This is imprecise (for various technical reasons), but at your current 87kg weight, 600 calories per hour on the Concept 2 Rower is going to happen somewhere around 570 calories per hour on the C2 display. (The machine shows calories for a 175 pound (about 75kg) person. The weight adjustment calculator sijomial linked will give more calories to a person heavier than that, fewer to someone lighter than that.)
That calorie level expenditure level ought to happen around something in the vicinity of 2:45 per 500m average (exactly where depends on some other stuff I'm not going to go into here, but in that neighborhood). So, you can pretty easily hop on the rower, set the monitor on calories (a thing I would *never* usually recommend! 😆), shoot for that calorie number, and see how hard 10 calories per minute feels. (It will differ a bit between exercise types, but it's a ballpark concept.)
I don't usually row for a solid hour continuously, but I'm quite sure I could hold the 2:45 for a solid hour. But I've been rowing for 17+ years, with good coaching and some competitive experience in those years, and a decent fitness level at this point, so I don't know how well that generalizes, especially since I'm older as well (65).
Looking at it another way, that's not a super-fast split ("split" is what rowers usually call the time/500m) in the Concept 2 rankings for women in the 50-59 heavyweight women group (where OP would fall) rowing a full hour. People usually rank their best times, when they're trying very hard, and those ranking would probably be women of all experience levels and fitness levels (fit enough to row for a solid hour, of course). 86 of the 97 women who ranked full-hour rows went faster than that. (Of course, likely the very fastest ones are very, very fit.)
All of that with the usual caveat: . . . if I did the math right, which sometimes I don't. 😉3 -
This has been my favorite eye-opening example that happened to me personally... a poor sliced loaf of gluten free bread, shared with two other members of my family (so not as much of an opportunity for things to “even out”).Nony_Mouse wrote: »Thanks
Okay, I see loads of room for underestimating cals there - things like medium banana (highly subjective), the fried rice, is that a recipe you made and entered yourself, or did you just pick a fried rice entry from the database? Same for any other recipe type things. Small chicken thighs, again very subjective. Bread slices within a pack can be really variable in weight, not a big deal if you're the only one eating that loaf (evens out over time), but if you're sharing you may be eating an extra 50 cals without knowing it, for example. Same again with other pre-sliced items. You say you're eating lots of veg and greens, but I'm not seeing that, are you not logging your veg? That adds up.
Food scale is your friend. I think you will find you are eating a lot more than you think you are.
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