ISO Someone to Confirm my Math and Assumptions

All the tracking and worrying about the math does very little good (especially in the long run). Track for a week, maybe a month, to get an idea about food portions, calories, and macros. Beyond that, you are doing extra work and math for no reason. All of your questions were about numbers, and none of this math is needed to lose weight.

I have been at this a long time. I have watched and talked with many others trying this over the years. Almost everyone that tries to solve a behavioral issue (eating too much) by looking at math will either not lose the weight in the first place or, even worse, lose the weight and regain it (since they never addressed the real issues).

Make small changes over time that are sustainable. Along the way, maybe try to figure out why you eat too much. *kitten* all the calculations. Those are just distractions. Good luck.

jbs116 wrote: »

All the tracking and worrying about the math does very little good (especially in the long run). Track for a week, maybe a month, to get an idea about food portions, calories, and macros. Beyond that, you are doing extra work and math for no reason. All of your questions were about numbers, and none of this math is needed to lose weight.

I have been at this a long time. I have watched and talked with many others trying this over the years. Almost everyone that tries to solve a behavioral issue (eating too much) by looking at math will either not lose the weight in the first place or, even worse, lose the weight and regain it (since they never addressed the real issues).

Make small changes over time that are sustainable. Along the way, maybe try to figure out why you eat too much. *kitten* all the calculations. Those are just distractions. Good luck.

I can't disagree with your individual perception and I quite agree, if they are viewed as part of a more complete answer, with two sentences in your last paragraph: "Make small changes over time that are sustainable. Along the way, maybe try to figure out why you eat too much"

See I've done the two sentences.

And yet I still count both my calories in and calories out with probably more accuracy than many who are just starting out. Going on 10 years.

The math is not NEEDED to lose weight, but the math has helped me learn myself and validated/confirmed good and bad decisions.

It has helped me manage my weight more granularly and with less negative side effects, and has failed me no more than any other management method to date.

Is there some work involved? Why yes, there is.

Are the work and mind space involved worth it to me?

🐈🐈*kittens*🐈🐈 YES!!!

@Tango_Bravado, it sounds like you're getting pretty well settled into a good routine.

Tom made a perfect observation up top about running your own personal 4-6 week experiment to validate your initial estimates. You can then use your own average weekly weight change over that whole period (and the assumption that 500 calories a day is roughly a pound of body fat change per week, on average) to dial in an accurate weight loss rate for your body's specific calorie needs.

Yes, that's still an estimate (given the variations in food and packaging regs), but it's the best possible estimate you can get, because it takes into account your own body, plus your own eating/activity/logging patterns (which are likely to tend toward a stable pattern of statistical error over time).

I have just a couple of comments on specific points in your OP, things I didn't see mentioned in a skim-through of the thread. (I snipped from your OP to focus just on the parts I wanted to reply to.)

Concern 1: From using different calculators on the internet and my scale, I have had a range of 2000 at a min to 2800 cal as my BMR. Can someone help me zone in on this?

The 4-6 week experiment will answer the underlying question.

But just a quibble about terminology: That may be part of the calculator confusion. For weight loss, conceptually we want an estimate of our maintenance calories, then we cut some from that (the deficit) to trigger weight loss.

I had to guess at your age, but the calculator I usually turn to for rough guesses** suggests your BMR would be maybe 2000-2100ish. BMR (basal metabolic rate) is the amount you'd burn flat on your back in bed in a coma, pretty much - not moving at all.

(** https://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/ , which I like because it lets a person compare multiple research-based estimating formulas, and has more activity levels (with better descriptions) than most other such calculators.)

For weight management, we want a starting estimate of TDEE, total daily calorie expenditure - the number of calories to maintain our current weight; OR we want an estimate of calorie needs before intentional exercise with the expectation we'll log exercise separately as in MFP.

TDEE is BMR + NEAT + TEF + EAT, where NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) is the calories burned doing daily life stuff like job, home chores, etc.; TEF is thermic effect of food, the number of calories we burn digesting and metabolizing food; and EAT is exercise activity thermogenesis, the calories burned via intentional exercise.

If we use a TDEE-based estimate, we'd average in our exercise plans. If we use the MFP-like method, we'd account for our exercise when we actually do it. Either way, we're fueling the exercise. For anyone who does a material amount of exercise, not accounting for it somewhere runs the risk of undereating. That would be an especially bad plan for anyone whose goals include muscle retention or even gain.

(BTW, that idea of 10-12 calories per pound of goal weight is much less nuanced an estimate than Sailrabbit, MFP, or other online (so-called) calculators you may've consulted. It treats someone with an active job who trains hard for fun the same as someone with a sedentary job whose hobby is watching movies on TV. Even without an active job, I'd lose much faster than any sane person should on 10 calories per pound of goal weight: That's about half my maintenance calories at goal weight, like 1250 when maintenance calories are in the low/mid 2000s. I.e., I'd expect to lose at least two pounds a week at calories 10 times goal weight, a terrible plan at 131 pounds. Even 12 calories per pound would make me lose much faster than sensible for my size - that's true even now, just a few pounds up from goal post holidays, let alone some years back when I had a material amount of weight to lose. I admit I'm a weird outlier in calorie needs: I'm losing weight very slowly now at 1850 + all carefully estimated exercise calories, at 5'5", 131 pounds this morning, female, age 68.)

u 2:[] MFP calculates my weight lifting sessions between 400 and 500 calories burned. Does this seem accurate/too high/too low? On average my daily lift moves 22,000 lbs of volume if that helps.

I use that same "Strength training (weight lifting, weight training)" entry in the MFP exercise database's cardiovascular section that someone else mentioned, but I don't do much strength training (to my own detriment).

If you like digging into this stuff, this is one of the more nuanced things I've read on the subject of calories burned lifting:

https://www.strongerbyscience.com/research-spotlight-expenditure-resistance/

That's just Nuckols' analysis and summary of a study (or two), but he links the studies.

Concern 3: For tracking, I chose 1800 to aim for with the idea that I am probably underestimating and realistically (hopefully) am sitting between that and 2000 daily. I have a scale for measuring things like potatoes, but I don't measure things that come in cups or scoops, like a 3/4 cup yogurt or a scoop of protein. I have weighed a bunch of scoops of protein and I am always within two or three grams. I read that nutrition labels have a 20% accuracy differential. I have read a lot on the forums to measure EVERYTHING, but given the 20% from the labels and the fact that when I do measure the difference is negligible, how important is measuring for me? Am I probably screwing up somehow, or should I stick to my semi-proven system?

For myself, during that experimental phase, I didn't think I was doing myself any favors by making inaccurate experimental data even more inaccurate. I tried to measure as accurately as I could without obsession, to reduce the sources of variability.

However, approximation can work well enough in practice, if that "science fair" approach isn't appealing.

I'd point out that one of the sources of labeling variation is variations in weight of per piece, per package, or similar. I don't weigh everything that's single-serve pieces or packages, but I weighed calorie-dense items like that at first, enough times to know which varied materially in per-piece/package weights. If there was a lot of variability, enough to be arithmetically significant to me, I kept weighing that item.

Maybe I'm reading incorrectly between the lines, but I'm wondering if you've figured out any of the scale-use shortcuts. For example, I'd always dish up from a multi-serve package using a scale, because it's easier than scoops/cups/spoons as well as more accurate. Put the jar of peanut butter (or whatever) on the scale, zero the display, take out a blob, and note/log the negative number on the scale (it's the amount you took out). Quick, accurate, no extra dishes to wash. There are other similar efficiency tricks.

Like I said, it sounds like you're on a good track. You'll do fine if you stick with it, and adjust as needed based on your real-world results to achieve the slow fat loss rate that would best support your goals.

Best wishes!

@Tango_Bravado, I was saying that I weighed a lot of things at first, including some whose packaging I now take at face value because I found the weight from one package to the next to be very consistent. (That could be weight per piece or contents of a whole single-serve package.) However, some vary, and if the difference was significant calories, I kept weighing those foods.

It's hard to think of specific examples. One that occurs to me is that recently I've been on a kick for soft pretzel sticks from a local artisan baker. I found that they vary from 75 grams to 100, and that the visual appearance isn't (for me) a good gauge, so I always weigh those. I don't eat them that often, but I always weigh chips, because they vary in . . . granularity? Jeez, to read this paragraph, you'd think I only ate snack-y foods. It ain't so! They're just understandable examples.

I still use a scale for many things because it's the quickest, easiest way for me, with the scale tricks in the picture. I'm not saying everyone needs to do that, just saying that's what's my choice, best for me.

It's - I think - a personality/outlook thing, but I don't assume a margin of error into my calorie goal, I personally prefer to be more precise with the logged estimates, if it isn't much work and doesn't feel like a compulsion. At this point, even on a high effort day, I'm not spending more than maybe 10 minutes on the whole food logging process, which seems like a small price to pay for staying at a healthy weight for around 8 years now, after decades of overweight/obesity.