[OC] I tracked my exact calories consumed vs my estimated calorie needs from an online calculator to see how accurate it was in predicting my weight loss over time.

Posted by devourke

8 comments

  1. Reposted since the original was removed due to personal data only being allowed on Mondays;

    I technically started dieting a couple of weeks earlier than this around the middle of July so this shouldn’t be substantially affected by water weight. Time frame is a little over 6 weeks or so (~20.2lbs over 48 days), I have no idea what I actually started at in July, my wife thinks I was 230 but I don’t remember.

    The online calculator I used was essentially as accurate as the person using it. I started this test at 5’11” @ 220lbs and based on my fairly sedentary lifestyle it assumed that my TDEE (total baseline calories needed + additional calories for daily activity) would be approximately 2,400. I used to work out a lot 10+ years ago so I’m guessing I may have some excess remnants of muscle as it appears that the calculator was actually underestimating my TDEE and my realistic caloric budget should have been somewhere around the 2,800 mark (what the 2nd chart showing estimated baseline is based on).

    I’ve never really tried conventional dieting before to lose weight, usually I just starve myself and run as far as I can every day which historically has worked fine every time I’ve done it in my 20s. Since I’m in my 30s and should be getting more mature, I decided to try a healthier approach to it but I legitimately hate dieting so tried to figure out what the maximum amount of weight I could safely lose per week would be and back my calorie budget out from there.

    * Losing 1lb of fat uses approximately 3,500 calories.
    * Apparently you’re not supposed to try to lose more than 2lbs per week (1lb/week is recommended but I don’t have the patience for that)
    * I then based my diet over the last 1.5 months at a ~1000 calorie deficit per day based on the original estimated 2,370 cals/day.
    * I’ve consumed an average of 1,276 cals/day and have ended up losing ~3lbs/week
    * I’ve walked an average of 1 mile/day during this timeframe. Prior to that I didn’t really walk or do anything other than wake up, look after newborn, work, look after newborn while eating, put baby to sleep, fall asleep on couch 20 minutes into watching a show I’ve been looking forward to all day.

    This is more than what is recommended but it’s still a lot healthier than what I would usually do so I’m fine with it.

    * Due to my inherent laziness I’ve essentially eaten the exact same meal almost every weekday for the past 1.5 months minus 2 or 3 days where I was pressured into eating a visiting in-laws cooking. I typically only eat dinner (even normally) and eat an ice cream cone after dinner each night. I think eating the exact same thing each day helps avoid water retention issues from day to day but mostly it helps that I don’t have to worry about accurately tracking my calories each day since I’m just copy / pasting.

    * There are a couple of spikes and dips in calorie consumption throughout. The first on 8/22 was from when I ate 3/4 of a bag of salt & vinegar potato chips which definitely seemed to spike my water retention the following days

    * The second “spike” is from when I was given an 8 pack of CostCo chocolate muffins from my wife and she made a sad face when I told her that didn’t fit into my calorie budget. As such, I ate 1 muffin per day (410 calories) for 7 days and the 8th was eaten by a visiting friend.

    * The small dip during the week of 8/27 is from when I didn’t realise we had run out of bacon (usually have 1-2 slices on average per day built into my meal prep where I use the bacon oil to fry mushrooms and help make my bland no milk mashed potatoes taste slightly better)

    Anyway, overall, the 3,500 calories per pound of fat seems to be fairly accurate.

    Data was tracked through MyFitnessPal and Excel.

    Visual created with Excel.

  3. What is Total Calories Estimated Baseline? What does that mean in the graph? How fast the calculator predicted you’d lose weight at what you were eating?

  4. Generally doesn’t work at all. Bodies adapt. They are fully changing systems. Counting calories helps from a general perspective just to know if you’ve ate a lot or to see where behaviours should change. Your body isn’t a perfect mathematical equation.

  5. Nice! These are really great results. The app MacroFactor effectively does this. It’s helpful to refine your program in realtime as your body adjusts to the deficit and increased activity (metabolic adaptation).

    It’s generally safe to lose 1% of your body weight per week. You’re at 1.5%. It’s not horrible but it may increase your diet fatigue depending on how long you maintain it.

    Not sure if you are lifting weights, but studies generally show that in the absence of resistance training, anywhere from 25-30% of weight loss represents muscle so you’ll need to address that at some point.

    At some point you’ll get super hungry and eat 3k calories in the middle of the night bc you can’t sleep – hitting a maintenance phase for 6-12 weeks will pretty much get rid of that. Also I wouldn’t worry about daily fluctuations from water – could be salt, glycogen, or even diarrhea/constipation. You could use an exponentially weighted moving average with a sliding window of your scale weight to make those large daily swings less impactful to your calculation

  6. Counting calories is not the primary underlying mechanism to weight loss. If you did this without maintaining sustained low insulin levels, then you’ve lowered your basal metabolic rate. And you should be very careful about what you do long term, and what you do if you decide to abruptly increase your calorie intake.

    The calories in calories out, eat less exercise more, paradigm is woefully naive.

    If you’re downvoting me, humour me by going and watching a few lectures from an introductory metabolic sciences class.

  7. Seems interesting to me that you didn’t have the patience for only losing 1lb/week while you can also eat the same meals every day

  8. * Losing 1lb of fat uses approximately 3,500 calories. < what does this mean?

Comments are closed.