TDEE is everything

i think the way MFP sets up weight loss for the beginner is atrocious. Eating back poorly estimated exercise calories and setting most peoples daily calorie goal below BMR is terrible. No wonder 1/3 posts on this site is about stalling out. People leave themselves no where to go. Most of them exercise 5 times a week so its tough to add another day of exercise, and you sure as hell can reduce their calories anymore.

Yess! This is exactly what is happening to me! I started out at 1200, working out 5-6 days a week and its slowed wayyyy down. I have started doing more strength training and the inches are coming off a bit but Im still at least 20 lbs away from a healthy weight. I recently calculated my BMR at 1417 and TDEE at 1296 but im not sure where to go from there!

i think the way MFP sets up weight loss for the beginner is atrocious. Eating back poorly estimated exercise calories and setting most peoples daily calorie goal below BMR is terrible. No wonder 1/3 posts on this site is about stalling out. People leave themselves no where to go. Most of them exercise 5 times a week so its tough to add another day of exercise, and you sure as hell can reduce their calories anymore.

Yess! This is exactly what is happening to me! I started out at 1200, working out 5-6 days a week and its slowed wayyyy down. I have started doing more strength training and the inches are coming off a bit but Im still at least 20 lbs away from a healthy weight. I recently calculated my BMR at 1417 and TDEE at 1296 but im not sure where to go from there!

If your BMRis 1417 your TDEE will be much much higher than 1296 (it cannot be below BMR as TDEE is calculated using BMR and multiplying it by a factor depending on how much you workout)

If you workout 5-6 days/week that multiplier should be in the rang of 1.55 or higher. At 1.55 that would give you 2196 (most likely that is what you meant to put in but reversed the 1 and 2) so depending on how much you have to lose and your BF% you should eat anywhere from 80-90% of TDEE (the less you have to lose the more of your TDEE you want to eat).

For you this would be 1757 to 1976 calories to lose weight. If you set your goal up like this you eat this amount everyday, and don't eat exercise calories back. what MFP does is give you less cals on days you don't workout and more on days you do, but for the week your net cals would be about the same give or take a couple hundred.

When dieting and either trying to lose weight or even gain weight if you are bulking, the most important aspect of your plan is knowing your TDEE. You cannot proceed forward and make progress for the long term without knowing what this is, how to obtain it, and what to do with it.

TDEE = Total Daily Energy Expedenture

TDEE is basically how many calories you burn in a 24 hour period. This is all of your activity including exercises, eating, sleeping, driving a car and yelling at stupid drivers on the highway...whatever it is. If you're doing something, you're burning calories. In all actuality even if you're just sitting down at a desk you're still burning, just not as much.

In order to avoid making this thread a TL;DR thread, I'll be quick and simple. (no snide comments please and you know who you are)

Example to lose weight:

Take a weekly average of your TDEE. Let's pretend you use a Bodymedia FIT and you burn 3000 calories on your workout days (5 days a week), and 2500 calories on your rest days (2 days a week). This would be a weekly average of 20,000 calories for the week.

For the mathematically challenged that's: 3000x5 = 15,000 and 2500x2 = 5000 which equals 20,000. (Yes I really had to break this down for some people)

Moving on....

You are burning 20,000 calories per week. This is your WEEKLY TDEE. Let's pretend you want to lose 1lb a week. Since 1lb is 3,500 calories then you do the math (again):

20,000 - 3,500 = 16,500

This means that you need to eat 16,500 calories PER WEEK in order to lose 1lb for that week. If you are really bored and just don't care, you could technically eat 16,500 calories in ONE DAY and not eat anything the rest of the week and still lose 1lb although you will be completely miserable and you'd probably end up extremely sick if not comatose...but anyways.

Normal people will break this down to eating roughly 2350 calories per day and they will still lose 1lb a week. In order to minimize muscle loss you will need to eat approximately 1g of protein per lb of lean body mass, or if you don't know what that is, you can just use bodyweight. Also, you need to do some sort of resistance weight training and lift heavy to minimize muscle loss as well.

As I typed this, I realized it's not as "short" as I wanted it to be, but I figured I'm making a comeback on the forums so .....

Anyways, take this explanation for what it's worth and above all, you don't need any "diet pills" to lose weight.

Stay disciplined, stick to your plan, make sure you document your food and the weight will come off.

Peace.

http://www.1percentedge.com/ifcalc/

Or what I suggest is everyone out there educate themselves on how to calculate your TDEE and Macronutrients the manual way. This is the best write up I've seen on how to do it.

http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=121703981

I love that tool - http://www.1percentedge.com/ifcalc/