Banks...question

Not banks, but just did some quick math. I took off the 10% that someone in the other thread said that their trainer said to subtract from what the machines say, and then took the average of your net cals over 7 days and you had 1125 cals average per day. I think that might be too low.

I tend to be on the low side too, and had hit a bit of a standstill, but for the past two weeks I have been eating about 200 or 300 more cals a day and I started dropping again. I find that if I listen to my body it tells me when I need to eat something.

That is the way I understand it. It is scary, but in theory it makes sense. These past two weeks I've felt like I was eating WAY too much, but for me it worked. I think your motabolism gets reved up when it sees your body getting good food often during the day.

There is a good post, I think it was yesterday about speeding up your motabolism. I'll try and find it....

Hi Tam,

so this is what I got for you:

You're calories for Maintenance right now should be somewhere between 2000 and 2100 calories for a relatively active lifestyle.

On days you don't work out it looks like you are consuming the right amount of calories (you could even go down 100 or so if you like).
On days you do work out it looks like you are consuming too few calories.

Since you work out more days then you don't work out that's probably tipping the scales for you in a negative sense. On days that you work out I would consider upping your calories by (and this depends on your workout) say 400 calories. That would bring you up to a total of around 2000 calories on days that you work out. The reason I say this is because on days that you work out it looks like you are burning somewhere in the neighborhood of 2700 to 2800 calories. An 800 calorie deficit should be enough to keep your body out of starvation mode. This will facilitate about 1.5 lbs per week.

The reason why I don't say go higher is this:
For most people with a BMI over 30, they have not started exercising or are exercising very lightly, which means while they have a lot of fat, they probably have a much lower ratio of muscle then someone who (you for example) has been working out vigorously for at least 3 months. Now that you have a higher muscle ratio, in order to feed those muscle properly you do need to intake calories. There will still be plenty of fat burn going on, but there is also new muscle growth, also, I would experiment with changing up your exercise types. Even if you do intervals with your eliptical, it's still the same body motion, and your muscles are probably getting VERY efficient at this motion, and that means they aren't working as hard as they could. Give the step machine a try, or try doing some swimming if you can (just once a week should do it). I imagine the muscles in your upper body are still relatively unused (I'm assuming that you pretty much use the eliptical exclusively). Changing up your routine even just once a week can have a large impact on your caloric burn.

I hope this helps.

SIDE note: Remember folks, I'm not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV. So take what I am giving for what it's worth. It's just an opinion, granted, I'm a big mouth and I do a lot of research, but I'm still just a layman. So take what I say, think about it, and if you find me in error, please, say it (nicely I hope :flowerforyou: ). I'm not above a little constructive critisism here and there.

Thanks Banks! I appreciate it!

My pleasure. Let us know how it goes for you. :happy: