Getting nowhere except frustrated

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  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,874 Member
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    A 34 mile bike ride is going to cause water retention, even in someone who is well trained and in good shape...it's still a lot of work and you're still breaking down muscle which needs to be repaired which causes inflammation and water retention.
    doutri2 wrote: »
    Hey, callsitlikeIseeit! That was a really informative post. I do have a food scale, but I have rarely used it for my own food intake. I do cook for a living, so I've used it for that mostly. I will be referring back to the flowchart you shared. Helpful. Though I will be honest that I've never understood the "eating back the calories you burned part" of the weightloss program. So, I eat more, but it doesn't seem to work that way in the formula on the Diary page. For example, on Sunday when I biked almost 34 miles for 4 hours, MFP said that I burned 1,024 calories. I still stuck to a mostly protein, veggie, fruit diet, but felt that I earned my gluten free cupcake with frosting. However, when I logged everything, it only gave me 155 "points" towards my exercise and then I was over though I didn't overeat after my bike ride. I just don't get it.

    I'm assuming you have a device linked to MFP? If that is the case, your adjustment is only a reconciliation between what you set as your activity level on MFP to what your estimated actual activity level is per your device. IE, if you are set to active on MFP, you're likely to get only very small adjustments because that generous amount of activity has already been accounted for in your activity level.

    Synced devices do not send over calories for a specific exercise or workout...they only send over an adjustment to reconcile MFP and your device.
  • Jthanmyfitnesspal
    Jthanmyfitnesspal Posts: 3,521 Member
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    doutri2 wrote: »
    Lots of truth in this. During the bike ride, it was sips of water here and there. Barely ate. Made sure I took an Imodium before biking so I wouldn't have to poop in that 4 hour window. It gets so frustrating bc we talk about calories in vs calories out and I definitely had almost a day's worth of calories out. And, same for the a few days prior to that, but the scale barely moves. I don't expect to lose 5 lbs, but I was really hoping to keep off the 2-3 pounds I had lost, but instead it came right back on the day after my ride. I feel like I'm doing it all wrong.

    When you have a very active day it sometimes seems like you should be able to eat almost anything. You can definitely eat more, but you really have to log carefully or it's easy to go over. And, a 1000-calorie bike ride can make you hungry!

    Also, imodium makes you retain water, so you might get a little weight bump from that. (Which should go away in the next day or two.)
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,170 Member
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    @doutri2, if you haven't already read this article, I think it might be informative:

    https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations

    It links to some other material that's good, too, and that may be applicable to your situation.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,170 Member
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    gceinca wrote: »
    I would definitely recommend NOT eating your exercise calories. Exercise, but don't log it in your diary. Then, you won't be as tempted to eat them. Besides, as someone mentioned, I am certain that MFP overestimates calories burned in exercise. If I had logged and eaten my exercise calories, I am certain I would have gained weight while staying with the recommended calories to lose a pound a week.

    Zero is definitely an incorrect exercise calorie estimate, if a person does exercise on top of a calorie goal that wasn't predicated on that exercise (which would be true of an MFP calorie goal, if one follows the instructions).

    Eating too little is not a path to thriving, and since bodies are dynamic systems, eating too little can sometimes backfire, by creating a subtle fatigue that reduces calorie expenditure in daily life.

    I estimated exercise carefully while losing, then ate every delicious exercise calorie, and lost weight fine. Figuring out how to account for exercise calories is a useful thing to do before reaching goal weight, too, IMO, unless a person plans to stop exercising at that point. For me, it makes maintenance easier to understand that, because I can easily maintain weight in periods of quite high exercise, or very little/none.

    I think it's good advice to run a patient experiment of a month or more, estimating exercise with a consistent method along the way, then adjust calories as needed based on one's own multi-week results data. MFP's onr any other calculator's estimates are not gospel, they're a hypothesis that needs to be tested. Not everyone is average. (Turns out that had I not eating back exercise calories, I would've lost weight way, way too fast. Others' experiences may differ, and do.) Even fitness trackers can get all-day calorie estimates wrong, if a person turns out to be very non-average.
  • doutri2
    doutri2 Posts: 186 Member
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    Thanks for everyone taking the time to chime in. I really appreciate it. If no one had said anything, I would have even been more frustrated and just threw in the towel. This gives me more inspiration to stay on track.

    If one thing to remember is to look at the long tern and not just day to day losses and gains.

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