How do you manage days where you are more hungry?

AnnPT77 wrote: »

aleena2975 wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

How fast are you trying to lose weight?

Also, do you know your current maintenance calories? That's a good thing to know. Any day you eat fewer than your current maintenance calories, even if it's over your calorie goal, you'd expect to lose weight . . . just a little slower than if you'd been able to stick with goal. But if doing that - eating a bit more - helps you stick with reduced calories longer term, that's a win.

A moderate weight loss rate can get a person to goal weight in less calendar time than an extreme, restrictive diet that causes bouts of deprivation-triggered overeating, excessive fatigue, breaks in the action, or even giving up altogether.

Also, no matter when you log them, your body is counting those 85 calories. But 85 calories can be pretty trivial in the big picture. If your calorie goal is based on trying to lose a pound a week, your calorie goal would be about 500 calories daily under your maintenance calories. The 85 calories would only be a small fraction, not a big deal (IMO).

As far as exercise calories: Under-fueling exercise can rob us of some of the benefits of that exercise. It can also cause some of the problems I mentioned in the paragraph before last.

There are two general ways to go about weight loss via calorie counting:

1. MFP method: Set activity level based on non-exercise life (job, home chores, etc.). When we exercise, we estimate those calories carefully, and eat those calories, too. We would generally eat more calories on exercise days, fewer on non-exercise days. With accurate estimates, this keeps the same weight loss rate we asked MFP for up front.

2. TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) method: We estimate our average daily calorie needs including our exercise plans, usually using a TDEE calculator outside MFP to get that estimate. Then we eat the same number of calories every day, whether we exercise or not.

Either of those methods, properly applied, should have roughly the same result. They both account for all of our activity: Just being alive, job, home chores, hobbies (etc.), and exercise. The difference is just in how we do the accounting. Method #1 handles exercise calories as a separate line item, method #2 averages them over all 7 days in the week.

If a person starts out with an MFP-type estimate, requesting a quite slow weight loss rate (like half a pound a week, say), and does only a minor amount of exercise (couple hundred calories a couple times a week, maybe), it's probably fine to let the exercise increase the calorie deficit (cause faster weight loss).

At the other extreme, if someone goes pedal to the medal in the requested weight loss rate (like 2 pounds a week) then does long, intense exercise nearly daily, and doesn't eat back any exercise calories, they're dramatically increasing risks of health complications, or risks of failure because it shortly becomes just too hard to keep up.

In between those extremes, it's a matter of how much health or failure risk a person is willing to take for possibly faster weight loss.

Personally, I don't love the concept of risking my health. I used the MFP method, estimated my exercise calories carefully, and ate all of them back, through just under a year of weight loss (class 1 obese to healthy weight) and nearly 8 years of maintaining a healthy weight since. It's worked fine for me.

Other people use the TDEE method, average in their exercise plans, and also get results.

One thing I'd say is that eventually, one way or another, a person is going to need to be able to understand how to manage their weight with varying amounts of exercise . . . assuming they want to stay at a healthy weight long term. There will be times of more exercise, and times of less exercise, as life goes on, realistically.

That's a long winded way of saying this: If I were especially hungry but running low on calorie budget, I'd eat something, trying to keep it calorie efficient and nutritious. But mainly, I'd be trying to find an eating/activity routine that didn't repeatedly put me in that bind. That may be slower loss, it may be eating some exercise calories, . . . whatever.

Sustainability of the plan is really, really important. Most of us can't maintain a routine for long if it makes us miserable, requires white-knuckled willpower, etc. I know I can't. But personally, I didn't find it necessary.

Best wishes!

So I posted here before asking about my exercise calories, but I've heard you can never truly estimate your exercise calories that well. Today I did an intense workout with lots of jumping and stress on the legs, not to mention I didn't sleep well, etc, and I was a bit ravenous which is not the case for most days. If I eat chicken in the morning around breakfast time, I'm usually okay throughout the day. Today I didn't do that and ended up so hungry. I ate toast with butter along with an iced collagen latte before my workout, then an egg salad sandwhich with yogurt instead of mayo with one slice of bread, then from there snacks, like black coffee with collagen, protein bar, and apple. I could not wait for dinner and had protein pasta and chicken breast meatballs, along with a peach 150 cal yogurt, and now I will have tea.

Anyways.. so from what my trainer told me and other people here on community, they said NOT to add exercise calories into your deficit. Are you saying that's okay? Do you use your watch to measure? While I've been at my HIIT gym, I've not lost a single pound and only gained

I'm saying that we burn calories in a variety of ways:

* Just being alive (breathing, heartbeat, etc. - the stuff in our basal metabolic rate that would happen if we were unmoving, in a coma)
* Daily life stuff, home chores like washing dishes, folding laundry
* Hobbies, volunteer work, whatever else is in our routine day
* Intentional exercise

To lose weight, we need to eat fewer calories than the total calories burned doing all of the above things. In one sense, exercise calories aren't special. If someone told us we should not eat the calories we burn at our job, but should eat the calories we burn doing home chores, we'd probably look at them like they have two heads.

Exercise calories are part of the total calories we burn. Some calorie-counting methods are designed to average them in to a daily calorie goal (TDEE method). Other calorie counting methods add them on separately (MFP method).

Any logical method accounts for exercise calories somehow, because our bodies absolutely do count them. Even the method where we don't eat the exercise calories and don't average them into calorie goal is accounting for the exercise calories: It's letting them make us lose weight faster.

I'm saying losing weight faster - arbitrarily faster - really isn't necessarily a good idea. I lost too fast by accident when I first joined MFP (because MFP significantly underestimates my calorie needs). I felt great, not hungry, energetic . . . until I suddenly hit a wall. I was weak and fatigued. Even though I corrected as soon as I realized, it took multiple weeks to recover. No one needs that. I was lucky that nothing worse happened. I maybe had a little hair thinning a few weeks down the road, but other things are possible when losing too fast (muscle loss, immune system suppression, gallbladder problems, and more).

If your trainer gave you a calorie goal that recognizes the amount of exercise you do as part of the equation, then you shouldn't eat those exercise calories back, because they're already accounted for. Eating them in that scenario would double count them.

My argument is that we need to account for them somehow, because our body is counting them.

I don't think exercise calories are necessarily all that much harder to count than any other part of the calories. All of that stuff is estimates. MFP or a TDEE calculator start with an estimate of basal metabolic rate (BMR) or resting metabolic rate (RMR, which is close to BMR). Then they multiply BMR by a simple numeric factor that varies based on how active we said we are.

This calculator makes that all visible and explicit, and even compares multiple different research based formulas.

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

That said, exercise alone doesn't inherently make a person lose weight. I was very active for a dozen years, training pretty hard 6 days most weeks, even competing as an athlete (not always unsuccessfully, in age-group competitions). I stayed obese.

That's not because my exercise didn't burn calories, it was because I was eating enough extra total calories to make up for the exercise I did. In a world where a couple of hundred calories daily is only a small serving of peanut butter or a good-sized dollop of ranch dressing, it's super simple to eat back exercise calories when not calorie counting the food.

Some people estimate exercise using the MFP exercise database, and do fine. Some of the people using that method eat 100% of the calories, other eat 50%, etc. Other people use a fitness tracker, and do fine.

Personally, I tried to learn about various ways of estimating exercise calories (because this is all a fun science fair experiment to me, TBH). I use the estimating method for each exercise type that I think is most likely to give me a reasonable estimate without going wildly over.

I think that for many people, a good brand/model of fitness tracker, worn 24x7 except when charging, synced to MFP, with negative adjustments turned on in MFP, is a good way to start. (Even fitness trackers estimate calories; they don't measure them. But it's a more nuanced estimate than most methods.)

No matter what approach a person uses, they should do that 4-6 week (whole menstrual cycles) reality test, and adjust based on results. That shifts from a generic statistical estimate of the average person, to a more personalized evidence-based estimate.

For most people, the starting estimates will be close. For a few people, they'll be noticeable off, high or low. For a very rare few people, they'll be surprisingly far off. That's the nature of statistical estimates.

I'm mainly saying 3 things:

* I think it's important to account for exercise calories somehow, if only by noticing actual weight loss rate and not letting that get riskily fast or annoyingly slow. Exercise burns calories.
* If there's an unusually hungry day, it makes sense to me to eat a little more rather than suffering. If total calories are still under the total burned for the day, we'll still lose fat, just lose it a little slower. To me, that's a fair trade-off.
* If being hungry gets routine, then it would make sense to change something about the overall plan, so as not to be miserable (and not to fail because it just gets too hard). Exactly what to change varies based on details of the situation.

AnnPT77 wrote: »

aleena2975 wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

aleena2975 wrote: »

AnnPT77 wrote: »

How fast are you trying to lose weight?

Also, do you know your current maintenance calories? That's a good thing to know. Any day you eat fewer than your current maintenance calories, even if it's over your calorie goal, you'd expect to lose weight . . . just a little slower than if you'd been able to stick with goal. But if doing that - eating a bit more - helps you stick with reduced calories longer term, that's a win.

A moderate weight loss rate can get a person to goal weight in less calendar time than an extreme, restrictive diet that causes bouts of deprivation-triggered overeating, excessive fatigue, breaks in the action, or even giving up altogether.

Also, no matter when you log them, your body is counting those 85 calories. But 85 calories can be pretty trivial in the big picture. If your calorie goal is based on trying to lose a pound a week, your calorie goal would be about 500 calories daily under your maintenance calories. The 85 calories would only be a small fraction, not a big deal (IMO).

As far as exercise calories: Under-fueling exercise can rob us of some of the benefits of that exercise. It can also cause some of the problems I mentioned in the paragraph before last.

There are two general ways to go about weight loss via calorie counting:

1. MFP method: Set activity level based on non-exercise life (job, home chores, etc.). When we exercise, we estimate those calories carefully, and eat those calories, too. We would generally eat more calories on exercise days, fewer on non-exercise days. With accurate estimates, this keeps the same weight loss rate we asked MFP for up front.

2. TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) method: We estimate our average daily calorie needs including our exercise plans, usually using a TDEE calculator outside MFP to get that estimate. Then we eat the same number of calories every day, whether we exercise or not.

Either of those methods, properly applied, should have roughly the same result. They both account for all of our activity: Just being alive, job, home chores, hobbies (etc.), and exercise. The difference is just in how we do the accounting. Method #1 handles exercise calories as a separate line item, method #2 averages them over all 7 days in the week.

If a person starts out with an MFP-type estimate, requesting a quite slow weight loss rate (like half a pound a week, say), and does only a minor amount of exercise (couple hundred calories a couple times a week, maybe), it's probably fine to let the exercise increase the calorie deficit (cause faster weight loss).

At the other extreme, if someone goes pedal to the medal in the requested weight loss rate (like 2 pounds a week) then does long, intense exercise nearly daily, and doesn't eat back any exercise calories, they're dramatically increasing risks of health complications, or risks of failure because it shortly becomes just too hard to keep up.

In between those extremes, it's a matter of how much health or failure risk a person is willing to take for possibly faster weight loss.

Personally, I don't love the concept of risking my health. I used the MFP method, estimated my exercise calories carefully, and ate all of them back, through just under a year of weight loss (class 1 obese to healthy weight) and nearly 8 years of maintaining a healthy weight since. It's worked fine for me.

Other people use the TDEE method, average in their exercise plans, and also get results.

One thing I'd say is that eventually, one way or another, a person is going to need to be able to understand how to manage their weight with varying amounts of exercise . . . assuming they want to stay at a healthy weight long term. There will be times of more exercise, and times of less exercise, as life goes on, realistically.

That's a long winded way of saying this: If I were especially hungry but running low on calorie budget, I'd eat something, trying to keep it calorie efficient and nutritious. But mainly, I'd be trying to find an eating/activity routine that didn't repeatedly put me in that bind. That may be slower loss, it may be eating some exercise calories, . . . whatever.

Sustainability of the plan is really, really important. Most of us can't maintain a routine for long if it makes us miserable, requires white-knuckled willpower, etc. I know I can't. But personally, I didn't find it necessary.

Best wishes!

So I posted here before asking about my exercise calories, but I've heard you can never truly estimate your exercise calories that well. Today I did an intense workout with lots of jumping and stress on the legs, not to mention I didn't sleep well, etc, and I was a bit ravenous which is not the case for most days. If I eat chicken in the morning around breakfast time, I'm usually okay throughout the day. Today I didn't do that and ended up so hungry. I ate toast with butter along with an iced collagen latte before my workout, then an egg salad sandwhich with yogurt instead of mayo with one slice of bread, then from there snacks, like black coffee with collagen, protein bar, and apple. I could not wait for dinner and had protein pasta and chicken breast meatballs, along with a peach 150 cal yogurt, and now I will have tea.

Anyways.. so from what my trainer told me and other people here on community, they said NOT to add exercise calories into your deficit. Are you saying that's okay? Do you use your watch to measure? While I've been at my HIIT gym, I've not lost a single pound and only gained

I'm saying that we burn calories in a variety of ways:

* Just being alive (breathing, heartbeat, etc. - the stuff in our basal metabolic rate that would happen if we were unmoving, in a coma)
* Daily life stuff, home chores like washing dishes, folding laundry
* Hobbies, volunteer work, whatever else is in our routine day
* Intentional exercise

To lose weight, we need to eat fewer calories than the total calories burned doing all of the above things. In one sense, exercise calories aren't special. If someone told us we should not eat the calories we burn at our job, but should eat the calories we burn doing home chores, we'd probably look at them like they have two heads.

Exercise calories are part of the total calories we burn. Some calorie-counting methods are designed to average them in to a daily calorie goal (TDEE method). Other calorie counting methods add them on separately (MFP method).

Any logical method accounts for exercise calories somehow, because our bodies absolutely do count them. Even the method where we don't eat the exercise calories and don't average them into calorie goal is accounting for the exercise calories: It's letting them make us lose weight faster.

I'm saying losing weight faster - arbitrarily faster - really isn't necessarily a good idea. I lost too fast by accident when I first joined MFP (because MFP significantly underestimates my calorie needs). I felt great, not hungry, energetic . . . until I suddenly hit a wall. I was weak and fatigued. Even though I corrected as soon as I realized, it took multiple weeks to recover. No one needs that. I was lucky that nothing worse happened. I maybe had a little hair thinning a few weeks down the road, but other things are possible when losing too fast (muscle loss, immune system suppression, gallbladder problems, and more).

If your trainer gave you a calorie goal that recognizes the amount of exercise you do as part of the equation, then you shouldn't eat those exercise calories back, because they're already accounted for. Eating them in that scenario would double count them.

My argument is that we need to account for them somehow, because our body is counting them.

I don't think exercise calories are necessarily all that much harder to count than any other part of the calories. All of that stuff is estimates. MFP or a TDEE calculator start with an estimate of basal metabolic rate (BMR) or resting metabolic rate (RMR, which is close to BMR). Then they multiply BMR by a simple numeric factor that varies based on how active we said we are.

This calculator makes that all visible and explicit, and even compares multiple different research based formulas.

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

That said, exercise alone doesn't inherently make a person lose weight. I was very active for a dozen years, training pretty hard 6 days most weeks, even competing as an athlete (not always unsuccessfully, in age-group competitions). I stayed obese.

That's not because my exercise didn't burn calories, it was because I was eating enough extra total calories to make up for the exercise I did. In a world where a couple of hundred calories daily is only a small serving of peanut butter or a good-sized dollop of ranch dressing, it's super simple to eat back exercise calories when not calorie counting the food.

Some people estimate exercise using the MFP exercise database, and do fine. Some of the people using that method eat 100% of the calories, other eat 50%, etc. Other people use a fitness tracker, and do fine.

Personally, I tried to learn about various ways of estimating exercise calories (because this is all a fun science fair experiment to me, TBH). I use the estimating method for each exercise type that I think is most likely to give me a reasonable estimate without going wildly over.

I think that for many people, a good brand/model of fitness tracker, worn 24x7 except when charging, synced to MFP, with negative adjustments turned on in MFP, is a good way to start. (Even fitness trackers estimate calories; they don't measure them. But it's a more nuanced estimate than most methods.)

No matter what approach a person uses, they should do that 4-6 week (whole menstrual cycles) reality test, and adjust based on results. That shifts from a generic statistical estimate of the average person, to a more personalized evidence-based estimate.

For most people, the starting estimates will be close. For a few people, they'll be noticeable off, high or low. For a very rare few people, they'll be surprisingly far off. That's the nature of statistical estimates.

I'm mainly saying 3 things:

* I think it's important to account for exercise calories somehow, if only by noticing actual weight loss rate and not letting that get riskily fast or annoyingly slow. Exercise burns calories.
* If there's an unusually hungry day, it makes sense to me to eat a little more rather than suffering. If total calories are still under the total burned for the day, we'll still lose fat, just lose it a little slower. To me, that's a fair trade-off.
* If being hungry gets routine, then it would make sense to change something about the overall plan, so as not to be miserable (and not to fail because it just gets too hard). Exactly what to change varies based on details of the situation.

Oh yeah, I agree with you my goal is not to lose quickly. Just to eat enough, and healthily, and not too much. Over 6 months I've gained 11 pounds so my general trend is upward which I don't like. I'll try adding back in exercise calories. My trainer (not a nutrionist) just said we can't tell how much we burn so don't add it in, but I think that's a little ridiculous considering today's workout being so hard and heavy. Yesterday I was able to meet my 1600 cal goal no problem. I didn't feel extra hungry at all. Just a little bearable amount of hunger. Mind you, we did only lift arms yesterday so maybe that's why I was not ravenous.

I have severely cut calories in the past but this is my first time doing it properly and accounting for macros and my overall in take. In the past I would just cut out sugar, have salad for lunch, and limit my carbs to one piece of toast with eggs in the morning and half a cup of rice with meat in for dinner

Were you calorie counting carefully and logging 1600 calories (or close) daily for those 6 months? If you were, eating more calories is unlikely to cause more weight loss, whether the more calories are labeled as exercise calories or something else.

Gaining 11 pounds in 6 months would imply that you were eating on average roughly 213 calories daily above the number of calories you were burning (in all ways, not just exercise). That's a couple of generous tablespoons of mayo, around half of a Starbucks blended caramel frappucchino, about 15-16 walnut halves . . . not all of those things, just one of them. And it could be eating that kind of small bit extra most days, or maybe just having one rich meal on the weekend. It doesn't take much, unfortunately.

Another thing about exercise: Exercise that's very intense (compared to our current fitness level) can in fact be counterproductive. If we get overly fatigued from our exercise, we tend to drag through the rest of the day, do less, rest more in a variety of small ways, maybe even go to bed earlier and for longer. If that happens, we effectively wipe out some of the exercise calories by burning fewer calories in daily life.

A manageable challenge from exercise is a good thing, but ideally one wants to feel energized, not exhausted, for the rest of the day (other than maybe a few minutes of "whew" right after the workout).