Question about Recomp and Diet

AnnPT77 wrote: »

If you need to lose a significant amount of fat to be in the healthy range, recomp isn't the ideal route, IMO. If you're in a healthy weight range, recomp is one reasonable option, but results are going to be quite gradual (read: slow. Months. Years.).

I'm not sure where the advice for a 20% cut off TDEE to recomp came from. For most people, that's about the maximum deduction you'd want from maintenance calories to prioritize fat loss (unless severely obese). Prioritizing fat loss inherently de-prioritizes muscle mass gain. (It doesn't necessarily mean zero muscle gain, but it's very situational; 20% below TDEE certainly isn't most favorable for muscle mass gain.)

There's a good thread here on recomp, with advice that seems more appropriate than that:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10177803/recomposition-maintaining-weight-while-losing-fat/p1

Your lifting program and overall good nutrition also matter.

As far as exercise calories:

If you use MFP to get your calorie estimate, it intends for you to set your activity level based on your pre-exercise life, then log exercise when you do it, and eat those calories to keep the same weight-management goal. This teaches the useful lesson that when we're more active, we can (and need to) eat more; and that when we're inactive, we should eat less for the same bodyweight result. That's why MFP adds to your goal when you log exercise.

If you use an outside TDEE calculator to get your calorie estimate, you would average in your exercise by picking an activity level in that calculator that considers both daily life and exercise activity. You'd then set your calorie goal manually in MFP (not via guided set-up). This gives you a consistent calorie goal every day, which some people like. But it does mean you need to actually do the exercise you told the calculator you'd planned, or weight results will differ. In this case, either don't log your exercise, or change the calories to zero when you log it, or don't eat the calories from the logged exercise.

If you sync a fitness tracker to MFP, there can be some brand-specific wrinkles. As a generality, the fitness tracker and MFP will compare how many calories MFP thinks you'd burn, and how many calories the tracker thinks you actually did burn, and they figure out an adjustment between them. Again, generalizing, it should be OK to eat those adjustment calories, but you'd want to enable negative adjustments in MFP so it can decrease as well as increase your goal (in case you're less active per your tracker than MFP expects). Again, different trackers can differ in details, so this general explanation may break down.

These are two different methods/approaches for weight management. Know which one works for you, and use it according to its own internal logic. Either one can work.

In either case, though, recognize that MFP or any outside calculator/method are just giving you a starting estimate that's the number of calories for the average person who's similar to you with respect to those few variables you tell the calculator, even if you enter exactly correct values. You're not an average, you're an individual. Your actual needs are likely to be close to average (because statistics, basically), but can be a bit higher or lower, and in rare cases significantly higher or lower.

Follow your starting estimate for 4-6 weeks (whole menstrual cycles for adult women not in menopause), look at your average bodyweight results, and adjust your calorie goal if necessary going forward.

ETA: If you're using one of those X times goal weight estimates for calories (where X is 12 or 15 or 18 or whatever), don't. They're way-stupid overgeneralized. Any decent research-based calculator is a better start. MFP is research based. For TDEE estimates, I like this one:

https://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/

The user interface looks scary-complicated at first glance, but it has more (well-described) activity levels than most others, plus lets you compare multiple different research-based calorie estimates.

Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »

5mpkfg676d wrote: »

I’m currently 81kg / 176cm. I don’t really have a lot of fat to lose, just stubborn belly and a double chin. Problem is when I diet and lose weight I go as thin as a rake and I hate how I look. But if I go hard at the gym while bulking I can gain some good size but my belly and double chin get huge and I hate it. That’s why body recomp sounded like the ideal solution.

I hear you! As one dude to another: if you do just weights don't control your eating, you'll get heavy and strong. It's not all bad, people will give you more space.

If you eat a good diet at about maintenance, do weights, and some cardio. Bam! Good things start to happen. You may not see it in the mirror (at first), but if you watch your progress, you'll see it there.

Now, what's meant by "maintenance." It means eating what you burn, including workouts. Workouts with weights don't burn that many calories, so be careful with that. But, if you do significant cardo, you should definitely eat something to counterbalance it (or you'll lose some weight, not horrible).