DevilsFan1 Member

The answers are here. Weigh your food. Every single thing you put in your mouth. I guarantee you will be surprised. Next log everything you eat using MFP. At the end of the day, you'll have a good idea of your calories eaten. Round up to the nearest 100 to be conservative in your estimate. Calculate your average caloric…

Whatever works. I woke up early yesterday intending to lift but was just too sore to get out of bed. By 8:00PM last night, I was fine and got in my workout.

Yes. Bench press in particular responds to increased frequency. I'd aim for one heavy day (e.g. 5x5) and then another lighter day with more volume later in the week (e.g. 5x10 at 60%). Deadlifts are a different story. They're so taxing that one heavy session a week is sufficient. Squats fall somewhere in between.…

When I was bulking last year, I hit 115x4 on OHP. Since then, I've been maintaining or cutting and I've never hit that number again. Upper-body lifts really respond to frequency and adding bulk.

OHP seems to never progress for me, especially as I'm about eight weeks into a cut right now. Good luck!

Short-term goal: Get to 170 lbs (Was 190 on 12/17/17. Currently at 181). Should hit this in April at my current pace. Year-end goal: Snatch my body weight. Need to get my weight down and my lifts up. Not sure if it's doable yet but working towards it!

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OP, what is your height and weight?

I don't log exercise calories. All of those trackers are inaccurate to some extent. I use the scale to tell me how many calories I've burned or expended each week. Use your diet to manage your calories. Use exercise to maintain a healthy body

Your estimated TDEE is just that, an estimate. Here's what you need to do. Get a food scale and weigh every single item you eat. That includes things like dropping a potato chip and eating it without logging it or licking the peanut butter knife after you spread some across a piece of bread. Weigh everything. Next, weigh…

You weigh over 400 pounds. You've been dieting for three weeks. You need to step back and look at the big picture. It took you years to get that heavy. Years of overeating and not exercising. You cannot undo that in a few weeks or months. Keep eating at a deficit and check back in three months. If you still haven't lost a…

Forget about exercise for the time being. At over 500 pounds your sole goal should be to stop eating so much and get your diet in check. Exercise can help a bit with weight loss but diet is the primary way you lose weight. At your weight, your goal should be to lose four pounds a week. This will probably be very easy for…

There is no such thing as starvation mode. You can lose weight if you eat less.

What is your primary goal, cardiovascular fitness or strength? Do the more important one first. Personally, I'd do strength training first if you're doing heavy work. The risk of injury lifting weights is greater if you're fatigued. If you're doing light work (like light dumbbells or kettlebells) it doesn't really matter.

Get a food scale. Measure everything you put in your mouth by weight not by volume. Stop eating back your exercise calories. Do exercise for the health benefits it provides you, not for calorie burn. The amount you are exercising is not enough to worry about. 30 minutes on an elliptical is probably burning less than 150…

That went up easy. Great job!

Yes. OP said he was morbidly obese to start. A 280 lb guy has a lot of muscle hidden under a lot of fat. He started at those weights, realized they were far to low and rapidly jumped to more reasonable weights for his size.

I got it. The same things I said about SL apply to SS as well. It's a beginner program; it's not a program designed for a person who wants to compete as a powerlifter. Good luck!

The initial estimate is exactly that, an estimate. The spreadsheet dynamically adjusts your TDEE based upon your daily weight (averaged to a single weight for the week) and the number of calories you input for your daily caloric intake. It is absolutely foolproof. You don't need to worry about calories burned during…

Fair enough. The original poster was complaining about the accuracy of his Fitbit. I'm of the opinion that tracking exercise calories is fairly pointless and a recipe for people to cheat their diet. The spreadsheet I linked is foolproof because it eliminates the need to track exercise calories. But to each his own.

Forget tracking exercise calories. Use the following TDEE spreadsheet to track your weight loss and energy expenditure. You enter your weight each morning and your calories each night. The spreadsheet will continuously update how much you should be eating in order to attain your weight loss goal in the time you want to…

SL is way too squat-focused. That's fine for beginners, but for someone who wants to compete, it is lacking big time in bench and deadlift. No competitive power lifter is only going to deadlift five reps a week.

I wonder if fitness machines suffer from "vanity calories" the same way that a lot of clothing these days suffers from "vanity sizing". Let's tell the customer what they want to hear rather than what is true so they keep spending their money.

SS is one thing, but SL is another. SL doesn't really allow the lifter to jump up 50 pounds in weight unless they just make the decision to do so. It's geared at complete beginners. If OP wants to be a competitive powerlifter, SL is a bad program. My point was not that linear programming is bad or doesn't work. It's that…

Be very careful upping mileage too quickly. I did the same thing a few years ago and ended up with a left femoral-neck stress fracture. Just because your heart can handle the rapid increase doesn't mean the rest of your body can. I'd ease off until the pain goes away completely.

SL 5x5 is a fine program for beginners, but given OP's current lifts it's clear he/she is better off moving to something better. There's no need to fiddle around with light weights if they're too easy.

What the hell? You've never lifted before and you're hitting these numbers in a month? I feel like a weakling now. Anyway, great progress!

Don't eat back your calories. You are almost certainly overestimating calorie burn from walking. A decent rule of thumb for calories burned during walking is (0.3)*(body weight in pounds)*(miles walked). I weigh 188 pounds. If I walked 5.7 miles (about 10,000 steps for me), that works out to 320 calories. Walking doesn't…

The problem is that people almost always underestimate the amount of calories they are ingesting and overestimate the number of calories they are burning when exercising, And then they wonder why they can't lose weight. For 95% of the people out there, it's best just to not eat calories back because they likely aren't…

Unless you are exercising strenuously (15 mile runs, 75 mile bike rides, etc.), you're better off not worrying about about calories burned while exercising. Treat exercise as something you do to keep your body in shape, not as a way of losing weight. Weight loss begins and ends in the kitchen. For example, a 200 lb man…