Does eating more to weight less work for everyone?

I just bought a Fitbit and found out I was way off on my TDEE.
Online calculators gave me appx 2100-2300 avg daily burn.
Fitbit over the past week and a half has given me 2700-3200 daily burn.
I've been cutting 20% off that and still losing.
I ate half a pint of Ben and Jerry's last night and woke up 3lbs lighter today.
This **** works!
You just have to believe in it!

Not all of us can eat half a pint of ice cream and lose three pounds. To assume so would be ridiculous.

I just bought a Fitbit and found out I was way off on my TDEE.
Online calculators gave me appx 2100-2300 avg daily burn.
Fitbit over the past week and a half has given me 2700-3200 daily burn.
I've been cutting 20% off that and still losing.
I ate half a pint of Ben and Jerry's last night and woke up 3lbs lighter today.
This **** works!
You just have to believe in it!

Not all of us can eat half a pint of ice cream and lose three pounds. To assume so would be ridiculous.

IIFYM.

This is so simple, but everyone over complicates it. If you simply take a scientific approach to t, you'll find out what works and what doesn't.

My suggestion, is go to fitnessfrog.com or fat2fitradio.com and calculate your TDEE. then cut 15% from that number. Eat that amount of calories for 6 weeks. If you do not lose AFTER 6 WEEKS (I say that because you might temporarily gain), then drop 100 calories for 1 week. Continue to drop 100 cals per week until you start seeing results. At some point, you'll find that place where you lose weight and are eating right. That's the point where you'll know where to be. When you plateau again, and you will, recalc and do it all over again, and find your new point. It's not hard. It's very scientific and easy, it's just a very slow process. Eventually, you get to know your body really well and you'll get to understand what it needs.

Whereas the engineering approach is to start at that point, figure out your rate of loss, and reverse engineer your actual real TDEE, not one that some formula estimates for you. Once you are armed with this info, you can move yoru calorie setpoint around at will and lose or gain precisely what you expect to lose or gain, within a loss band of about 2 lb loss to 0.5 lb loss per week if you have a lot to lose. A bigger deficit than that will cause stalls and whatnot, and act wonky, your deficit is too big, that number decreases as you get closer to your goal weight, a deficit smaller than 0.5 lb/wk your body has a good chance of modulating your metabolism to match.

If you weigh in every day, and calculate a moving average of your weight, this rate can be compared to calorie in/out data and your true TDEE calculated (or sedentary TDEE, that is Total expenditure - exercise).

Here are my charts for example:
Weight:

This chart is pretty self explanatory, you see my loss, a period of maintenece, and bulking. I weigh in every single day. When you do this there is no need to freak out about results. Everything went entirely as predicted, with average loss/gain rates exactly what I expected them to be.

Sedentary TDEE:

A little tougher to decipher, the red line is my 2wk avg sedentary TDEE. The gray line is the same thing (over 1 week) with protein calories removed and lean mass gain removed, the purple line is a formula that uses lean mass to predict the gray line, the blue dots are the daily readings for the gray line with protein included. Everything but the red line on this chart is used to check protein utilization to guage muscle growth and figure out how much I protein to eat a day. The red line though is what my MFP calorie set point if based on. You can see that it is about 2750 cal/day before exercise.

Diet:

Here is my diet the whole time. The blue line is the red line in the graph above, 2 week sedentary TDEE. The red dots are my daily food intake for the day, the green line the moving average of those dots. The orange line is the moving average for daily exercise, the black line the moving average for net calorie intake. There is a crush of information on this chart, but the difference between the black and the blue line is my calorie deficit/surplus, you can see how this relates to the weight chart.

You can see though that I kept eating more and more and more over time, despite not following the exact methods of the Eat More group here. You can aslo see that twice when my weight stopped moving for more than a week, I increased my calorie intake to get it moving again, as the problem was obviously too much deficit, not too little.

When you do it like this you don't have to wonder if you are doing it wrong, of if the formulas are right for you. Heck you don't even have to worry about calorie counting errors, in food or exercise, as long as you always do it the same way the error totally cancels out.

I just bought a Fitbit and found out I was way off on my TDEE.
Online calculators gave me appx 2100-2300 avg daily burn.
Fitbit over the past week and a half has given me 2700-3200 daily burn.
I've been cutting 20% off that and still losing.
I ate half a pint of Ben and Jerry's last night and woke up 3lbs lighter today.
This **** works!
You just have to believe in it!

Not all of us can eat half a pint of ice cream and lose three pounds. To assume so would be ridiculous.

Scientific studies show that people who diet for long periods of time have the best losses AFTER a binge.
This can be explained with raised leptin levels and reduced cortisol.
Its not about calories in vs calories out but hormones up and hormones down.

I'm only 5'6" at 37 years old.
On paper I should be eating 2200-2500 a day.
Just learn how your body uses food and you can manipulate it to work for you.
Oh!
And you need to believe it will work.
Self induced stress due to worrying about weight loss will sabotage your plan.

Case and point, look at all the 1200 calorie fail posts on this forum.
So many people eating so few calories and losing so few inches.
While the others are eating 1600-2500 cals and losing.

Easy decision.

The '1200 calorie fail posts' all seem to have the same common denominator-- they started a new exercise program that is also aggressive. The people are losing fat, it's just not showing up on the scale due to water issues. 1200 is not the problem. Patience and scale reliance is.

I wouldn't take any hormone advice from anyone who's not an endocrinologist. We KNOW weight loss is calories in vs. calories out. The studies into leptin and ghrelin are inconclusive so far.

What Waldo said about 'reverse engineering your own TDEE'.

The people posting the Fail threads are trying to do too much with very little energy.
I'm simply trying to make life easier for them!
And while i'm not an endochrinologist I do know a bit about how this stuff works and i'll continue to push this info to the new dieters to make their lives easier.
I've done it for 100s so far and i'll continue to build that list.

Read my Road Map so you can see where i'm coming from.
That way we wont have to butt heads so much.

I do like Waldos charts but the average dieter probably wants a very simple way of setting up and using this tool.
I simply give them the steps to do exactly that.


Simply eat below TDEE and above BMR.
Best results have been seen with a 20% cut to TDEE and moderate exercise.
Period.
You dont have to worry about "eating back calories" because youve already made sure that happens.

I just bought a Fitbit and found out I was way off on my TDEE.
Online calculators gave me appx 2100-2300 avg daily burn.
Fitbit over the past week and a half has given me 2700-3200 daily burn.
I've been cutting 20% off that and still losing.
I ate half a pint of Ben and Jerry's last night and woke up 3lbs lighter today.
This **** works!
You just have to believe in it!

Not all of us can eat half a pint of ice cream and lose three pounds. To assume so would be ridiculous.

I just want to mention that Ive had frequent scale weight drops after eating pizza the night before....
No pigging out or whatever, its all about fitting it into your macros.

I am 5' 4" and eat around 2000 calories every day. I eat every single calorie I burn and NEVER net below my BMR (1450 NET). I never eat below 1800 either, even on rest days. I have been doing this since Feb, am almost 30 pounds down and am almost to my goal weight. I work out a fair amount and LOVE to eat. Why not eat more if you can? I have suffered on 1200 calorie diets in the past and gained some, if not all, of the weight BACK. I swore this time would NOT be a diet and it hasnt been. I feel healthy eating enough to fuel my body and confident that I am setting a good example for my daughter. I never want her to think she has to be hungry to be healthy, it is quite the opposite! I couldnt say the same on any "diet" I did in the past.

Oh, I forgot to mention I just increased my calories (again!) to 2100 to break a plateau. The human body is amazing if we treat it right!

I lost 20 pounds from November to March due to radical diet change for health reasons and moderate exercise. No alcohol, no beef, and other dietary changes. March 1, I weighed 170. Did P90X2 exercise with same diet for three months. I still weighed 170.

Got my calories to the 1200 per day area for about a month. P90x2 exercise. You guessed it-170.

Listened to Helloitsdan, raised my calories to 1900-2100 per day. moderate exercise. 4 pound loss. 166.

Couldn't believe the scale but there it is so far.

I am 5' 10" tall. 17% bf and 60 years of age, but this seems to be working for me.

I am trying to get down below 160 lbs and a bit less bf%. We shall see!

And yo can eat up to about 2800cals 3x a week and still lose.
Hormones!
I dont care what you have to say about cals in/cals out.
Regulating hormones works!

I started trying to lose weight at 230lbs. I am 5'6". I started eating 1200 calories because that's what MFP assigned to me. I was hungry, irritable, and had no energy. So, on the advice of some MFP friends I upped my levels to 1400, then 1500 (they advised me to go higher, but I didn't believe it would work). Then, I tried spiking (eating double my BMR once a week). It worked for awhile, but then my hair started falling out because I wasn't regularly getting enough calories.
I did my research, read a lot of info from helloitsdan, psulemon, and some other MFP members. I read up on the fat2fitradio.com website. Everything I learned pointed me towards eating a 20% cut from my TDEE.

I now aim for about 2100 calories a day - whether it's a rest day or an exercise day. I've noticed that I have a lot more energy, my fitness and exercise ability are improving, and my hair is growing back.

I should mention that I've been losing weight the whole time - even on the lower calorie plans. But the other physical side effects were a problem. Why not eat more, still lose weight (at the same level as I was before) and not have the problems with energy, hair loss, etc?

I'm a proponent of eating more....but anyone considering it should definitely do their research and learn their numbers. It will only work if you put in the time and gain the knowledge.

I just bought a Fitbit and found out I was way off on my TDEE.
Online calculators gave me appx 2100-2300 avg daily burn.
Fitbit over the past week and a half has given me 2700-3200 daily burn.
I've been cutting 20% off that and still losing.
I ate half a pint of Ben and Jerry's last night and woke up 3lbs lighter today.
This **** works!
You just have to believe in it!

Not all of us can eat half a pint of ice cream and lose three pounds. To assume so would be ridiculous.

Agreed

I just bought a Fitbit and found out I was way off on my TDEE.
Online calculators gave me appx 2100-2300 avg daily burn.
Fitbit over the past week and a half has given me 2700-3200 daily burn.
I've been cutting 20% off that and still losing.
I ate half a pint of Ben and Jerry's last night and woke up 3lbs lighter today.
This **** works!
You just have to believe in it!

Not all of us can eat half a pint of ice cream and lose three pounds. To assume so would be ridiculous.

Agreed

IIFYM it does.