How do I determine my budget?? I'm technically in maintaince so I work based on that. This month though I'm trying to get a bit more toned and less bloated so I'm trying to eat at a very slight deficit on some days and also pushing myself a lot harder with my workouts. I am def seeing a change for the better in my body and for the first time hve taken my measurements so will be interesting to see the results. I also try my absolute hardest not to eat back my exercise calories altho I do eat some of my exercise calories on the odd occasion.

9th December 2021
* 12.95km run & stretch
*Meditation and journaling
* just over by like 20 so used a tad of my exercise calories.
* Tracked blt
* Monitored sugars but over
Xoxo

✅❌❌

I let MFP designate my budget based on a desire to lose. It is 1780. It is difficult to meet this and sometimes I use my exercise calories. I have been maintaining for a while, while breaking the budget. Ha.

Like yesterday no exercise so pass day #2.
Logged everything and was way under on calories.

Currently I'm setting my calories at 1300 (set as sedentary) and add any active calories from exercise as per Apple Health app. I don't try to eat them back but it gives me a little leeway if I'm just over the 1300. When I first started reducing in October 2020 I was set at 1200 and followed the same principals otherwise. Now that I wrote this I've just pointed out something to myself that I don't think I had realized. When I was doing treadmill plus EPIC and throwing in a little pool time my calories were about the same but I only ever added the treadmill active calories. I was always close to the max calories and also hungry sometimes. Now that I cut my exercise down a bit and am eating at a lower calorie amount I don't feel hungry. The whole time where I only did treadmill and lighter upper body dumbbells I wasn't feeling the hunger so much. So for the first time the higher level of exercise did make me hungrier.

Unfortunately, this all pretty much keeps me in a maintenance range. So the conclusion is that if I want to lose weight I either have to exercise even more or eat under 1200 calories per day which is allegedly unhealthy. Which is sort of what I'm doing right now because even though I'm allowed 1300+ I haven't hit that at all this month. I'm barely averaging 1200. I'm eating pretty low carb right now with a fare amount of vegetables and lean meat (poultry and fish primarily) which isn't quite what I usually do. Normally I eat more red meat and small amounts of whole grains.

Oh and why do I pick such low numbers? My BMR is about 1175. TDEE w/little or no exercise is supposedly 1400 but I will not lose weight with that.

Did I exercise for at least 20 minutes? 40 minutes on the Peloton, 47 minutes walking
Did I stay within my calorie budget for the day? Yes
Did I keep track of everything I ate and drank? Yes

When I first set my calorie goal, I let MFP do it. I was in the 290's, had a goal to lose 125 pounds, and I have a sedentary desk job. I entered that with the goal to lose 2 lbs/week and when I exercised, I added those calorie burns in and ate the exercise calories back.

What I found is that I was consistently losing over 2 lbs/week, so I knew their average assumptions about someone with my stats were not accurate for me. I am very careful to track every gram and to over-estimate if anything, and to ensure I am lower on my calorie burn estimates that I'm going to eat back.

So, in hopes of dialing things in, about 5 months ago I started recording my net calories in a spreadsheet (total consumed - intentional exercise calories). Each week, I take my average past 7 weeks of maintenance calories, take my desired deficit off that, and then eat to that plus exercise calories.

This has allowed me to exercise as much or as little as I want and to maintain consistent results. As I do work a desk job, most of my movement is intentional when I do it (and I've built up to doing a fair bit), so eating for that movement works well for me.

I'm now in the high 180's, and just over 20 pounds to hitting that 125 pound goal. I do take pre-planned days at maintenance and do not consider that a pass as long as it was intentional. I am so excited to see what 2022 will bring!

GREAT question @WhatMeRunning and always something people are passionate about.