burning fat

AndrewJRenko

fat bloke wrote: »

I'm off and on a myfitnesspal monitored diet now for 3 years or so. Based on my goals I'm allowed about 1750 precious calories. It's ALWAYS hard. It requires constant vigilance, constant discipline, constant denial. I routinely go to bed early just to escape the gnawing temptation of the kitchen.

I can relate to this. If I'm 'good' and avoid late-night snacking, and I'm cycling to work most days, my weight goes in the right direction. If I answer the 9.30pm calls from the bread bin, or I'm not cycling (2 day training course off-site this week), then it goes in the wrong direction.


Do I have to accept that I'm basically going to be hungry each evening now?

magicbastarder

the main issue for me in relation to weight is the spar across the road, specifically the chap there who runs the off licence section; and when he sees me knows that a 'hey, i've a box of beer that's a week out of date, do you want it for a fiver?' offer triggers my inner miser.
i recently picked up four boxes of 12x500ml bottles, 20 quid all in. a friend took two of the boxes, but that still worked out at 24 500ml bottles of nice ale for me for about 40c each.

Paul_Mc1988

magicbastarder wrote:

the main issue for me in relation to weight is the spar across the road, specifically the chap there who runs the off licence section; and when he sees me knows that a 'hey, i've a box of beer that's a week out of date, do you want it for a fiver?' offer triggers my inner miser. i recently picked up four boxes of 12x500ml bottles, 20 quid all in. a friend took two of the boxes, but that still worked out at 24 500ml bottles of nice ale for me for about 40c each.

For me that would be the dream not an issue. Why not get on the turbo and use the ale as your hydrating fluid

veganrun

I used a few of those online calculators and I think it recommends about 1900 cals per day for me to lose weight. I'm 5ft 10 and about 106kg but would be aiming for around 70-72kg.

My big issue is portion sizes even though I have everything I need to weigh/measure stuff correctly. Also I love something sweet with a cup of tea in the evenings, which can unfortunately mean I easily put away 500cals in just sweet stuff. Tbh I'm thinking of just stopping having tea in the evenings after dinner as a way to avoid that.

I remember back in the day losing a load of weight over 6 months. I was really disciplined and went to the gym 3-4 times a week,. Back then in the evenings I'd have a cup of tea and one of those Frusli cereal bars and that was it.

It's funny how dedicated and focused I was then but not now.

Lumen

The trick with sweet stuff is to only keep stuff in the house that's nice enough but not too nice.

Bar of milk chocolate - down the hatch.
Bar of dark chocolate - few squares is enough.

Like stocking methadone rather than heroin.

silverharp

i dont really have a sweet tooth but food like bread is my "Lorelei" so i basically go with a zero tolerance approach especially with high carb food. i generally look for a low carb alternative, so for example there are otheroptions to wheat if you want to have something like a bread. the dark chocolate is great tesco do a 95% cocoa one that is cheap enough and one bar a week is plenty.

mint man

veganrun wrote: »

I used a few of those online calculators and I think it recommends about 1900 cals per day for me to lose weight. I'm 5ft 10 and about 106kg but would be aiming for around 70-72kg.

im using myfitnesspal app lately and find it very helpful to stay on track you can scan the barcode of the food and it inputs the details for you ,it also connects to strava and makes allowances for the extra calories earned .
ive dropped 8 kg since it started a month ago.
evening tea is also my issue !

Macy0161

My recommendation is to use a calculator like "scoobys" or there's one in the sticky on the diet and nutrition forum.

When I was 122kg, my fitness pal gave me a target that I wouldn't even be trying for if I wanted to lose weight now at 70kg. Off the wall stuff.

JMcL

Regarding calorie counts for exercise, does anybody have insights or links to decent studies of accuracy with bike computers? I've decided to get a bit more structured in making the most of my commute and have dug out my HRM strap to try to reverse the effects of a semi-enforced layoff at the start of the year. The Edge 520 reports a much more reasonable looking figure with than without (typically 25-30% lower) and generally reports around 440 calories for 14km with about 120m up ridden in zone 3 and above. Most articles I've read say that the gear is way off the bat, but then again most of them seem to deal with wearables - I've no idea if there's any material difference in Fenix/Vivosmart/Edge/whatever. Myfitnesspal reckons around 600 calories burned for 35 minutes "Bicycling 16-20mph" which seems on the high side to me.

So far, so good as I'm also trying to keep an eye on portion size a bit more which has always been my Achilles heel. I've dropped around 2.5-3kg in the last month which is about the rate I want to go at. Aim is to get to 90kg over the next couple of months, so might start calories in tracking which I've never really bothered with before. I've been there before when I had more flexibility in the amount of riding I could do (i.e. less small person logistics), and ultimately I want to head for 85kg but first things first!

ED E

Ignore the calories burned on your cycle computer. Count the calories in. FAR better use of your time.

Macy0161

Well I work to the estimates on my Garmin. With hrm it's about as good as you'll get, but it does rely on semi accurate zones/ max heart rate (i.e. not 220-age), and also keeping your weight up to date.

I'd concur with the 30% (or more) when just using the Garmin without heart rate.

Indoors, I just use power output, but I'm less convinced by that outside, as more variables that would effect efficiency. imo.

dahat

Macy0161 wrote: »

My recommendation is to use a calculator like "scoobys" or there's one in the sticky on the diet and nutrition forum.

When I was 122kg, my fitness pal gave me a target that I wouldn't even be trying for if I wanted to lose weight now at 70kg. Off the wall stuff.

Scooby's calculator gives me a daily allowance of 2298 with exercise included, seems pretty high, no? Currently sat at 102kgs.

Macy0161

dahat wrote: »

Scooby's calculator gives me a daily allowance of 2298 with exercise included, seems pretty high, no? Currently sat at 102kgs.

I'd say try it for a week and see how you get on? I prefered to do the calculation based on no exercise and then fuel some of that for the exercise/ recovery rather than try and spread it out. Like after a weekend spin I believe I need more food to recover then, not spread out. That's just my own experience.

I recalculated weekly based on my loss - if required. In weeks a recalc wasn't required were normally down to me not the target.

Lumen wrote: »

The trick with sweet stuff is to only keep stuff in the house that's nice enough but not too nice.

Bar of milk chocolate - down the hatch.
Bar of dark chocolate - few squares is enough.

Like stocking methadone rather than heroin.

Doesn't work long term. It used to work for me, but now I'd pick a 80% plus dark bar over a cadbury's dairy milk!

silverharp

If you were trying to lose weight I would treat exercise as “I hope it helps” or as a motivation to keep on track so you don’t have to lug unnecessary kgs on the bike. Maybe if your main cycle is the weekend you can build in some cheats or eat extra as I think people are inclined to anyway at the weekend so you might as well roll with it. I commute 25KM per day on a bike and while I don’t calorie count most of the time I don’t link the exercise to allowing extra food, there is a 100 thousand calories of condensed food just under my skin:D

Macy0161

Each to their own - I can only say what worked for me. My aim was a 500 calorie deficit from food, and a 500 calorie deficit from exercise. So if I ate some of the exercise "earned" calories, I always left 500. At the very least, this gave a bit of wriggle room if the calories burned was off. Which it can be even with HRM and good equation, as other variables can effect heart rate.

Now in maintenance I just work to a 500 deficit from the exercise 4 days, and then that gives me the room to not sweat it too much over the weekend (I still track but don't necessarily let it influence choices too much). Obviously that's not necessarily best for training or recovery (particularly the beers), but purely in weight terms, I'm holding steady.

JMcL

Macy0161 wrote: »

Doesn't work long term. It used to work for me, but now I'd pick a 80% plus dark bar over a cadbury's dairy milk!

I'm sort of half cursed - I don't like sugar in and of itself all that much, never have. However add a heap of butter to it and turn it into caramel (preferably with some nice sea salt) and all bets are off!

CramCycle

Me after eating a pancake:

silverharp

Macy0161 wrote: »

Each to their own - I can only say what worked for me. My aim was a 500 calorie deficit from food, and a 500 calorie deficit from exercise. So if I ate some of the exercise "earned" calories, I always left 500. At the very least, this gave a bit of wriggle room if the calories burned was off. Which it can be even with HRM and good equation, as other variables can effect heart rate.

Now in maintenance I just work to a 500 deficit from the exercise 4 days, and then that gives me the room to not sweat it too much over the weekend (I still track but don't necessarily let it influence choices too much). Obviously that's not necessarily best for training or recovery (particularly the beers), but purely in weight terms, I'm holding steady.

So long as you achieve your goals whatever works, I just get the impression not everyone gets linear results from exercise, which party maybe down to lack of understanding about what they eat or overestimating what they do or simply that the body is a complicated machine and knowing inputs isn’t a guarantee of outputs.

Macy0161

silverharp wrote: »

So long as you achieve your goals whatever works, I just get the impression not everyone gets linear results from exercise, which party maybe down to lack of understanding about what they eat or overestimating what they do or simply that the body is a complicated machine and knowing inputs isn’t a guarantee of outputs.

And the Apps, particularly for stuff like walking. Myfitnesspal will give 3x what I'd get on a walk compared to what I get with hrm. That could be deficit gone, particularly as a lot of people who nominally track calories in, don't do so that accurately.

doozerie

I've been using MyFitnessPal for a few years now, I started to use it not to track calories but to track carb intake once I switched to a low carb diet (I switched to low carb not to lose weight, which I didn't need to do, but to see whether it would address other issues).

In that time, my experiences/observations have been:

* I consider the "burn more calories than you eat" guide to losing weight as too simplistic and unreliable. Maybe at the extreme ends of the scale it starts to make sense but I imagine most people fall within the middle range of calorie consumption. I suspect it varies from person to person but certainly for me I routinely consume more calories (probably between 500 and 1,500 most often) than MyFitnessPal suggests I need yet I don't put on weight. It could be that MyFitnessPal overestimates what I'm eating and/or underestimates what I've burned through exercise - I suspect both of those are true sometimes, but I still think that's only part of the reason, that basically weight loss/gain is about a lot more than just calories alone.

* I've read before that exercise suppresses your appetite and my experiences are in line with that. During the summer I do fasted rides of 2 or 3 hours and when I get home I rarely feel hungry. During the winter I sometimes do longer rides fasted with the same result. By complete contrast, I work from home one day each week so I don't get my 30 to 40 minutes of commute cycling done. Within an hour of my breakfast, having expended no more energy than sitting at a table requires, I usually start to feel peckish and an hour later I'm sometimes feeling hungry.

* Drinking water when you feel hungry eases the hunger pangs. On the bike I find that a sip of water kills any hunger pang for ages.

* One thing that helped me to avoid sugary foods was to remind myself that I was succumbing only to my tastebuds usually, it was rare that I ate such "snacks" because I was actually "properly" hungry. It seems ridiculous to say it, but it was a bit of a revelation to me to realise that I was eating stuff for no good reason whatsoever. In other areas of life I typically throw myself wholeheartedly into things no matter how challenging or uncomfortable, yet when it came to resisting the craving to snack on the likes of a biscuit I caved immediately. Once I framed it in my own head as being a balance of my general well-being versus pandering to my tastebuds, I found it easier to choose not to eat things so casually and so pointlessly. Could just be me of course, I may be weird.

* Once I got out of the habit of snacking on food between meals, it got easier and easier to resist the urge. That's not to say I don't snack at all, I still do occasionally, but it's no longer a regular part of my diet. One reason for that is that I don't have the energy crashes that I was concerned about (afraid of, in fact) in the past, whether on the bike or off it, it's amazing what you can convince yourself to eat/not eat when you have the inkling of an excuse and those energy crashes were a great excuse to justify all sorts of things.

* Mucking about with my diet has left me questioning many of the things that I accepted unquestioningly since forever, mostly to do with dietary advice around exercise. Going low carb largely flew in the face of such advice anyway of course, but focusing so much on what I was consuming, and the effects I could discern from that, has left me with a very different angle on diet and nutrition compared to before. I may well be making bad (long term health) choices still, only time will tell, but I'm putting real thought into those choices now and I think thats got to be a good thing.

* A common piece of advice I've come across is to not eat anything after 22h00 each day. It's not just advice for people looking to lose weight, it's also cited as a way to avoid disrupting the ability of your body to sleep and recover. I think it's advice that has a lot of merit.

* Getting your recovery/sleep "right" is vital to everything, I certainly find that when I'm running on insufficient sleep for a few days I find myself eating more as if trying (but mostly failing) to keep my flagging body fuelled.

Macy0161

Can appreciate most of the post, but losing weight is as simple as calories in v calories out.
I would say the rest of this point is to do with the outputs of the app, and what the user inputs, rather than calories in v calories out being wrong.
Calorie tracking requires accuracy and honesty in my opinion, as its very easy to go a little bit over all the time. A bit over the morning porridge, not going to count that single biscuit, a spoonful extra mash, guestimate way under the butter on the spuds, sure I might as well finish what the kids left etc.... That's quite easily a deficit gone, but people don't like to admit user error.

doozerie

Macy0161 wrote: »

Can appreciate most of the post, but losing weight is as simple as calories in v calories out.
I would say the rest of this point is to do with the outputs of the app, and what the user inputs, rather than calories in v calories out being wrong.
Calorie tracking requires accuracy and honesty in my opinion, as its very easy to go a little bit over all the time. A bit over the morning porridge, not going to count that single biscuit, a spoonful extra mash, guestimate way under the butter on the spuds, sure I might as well finish what the kids left etc.... That's quite easily a deficit gone, but people don't like to admit user error.

I have no hesitation about accurately adding what I eat to MyFitnessPal. I'm not trying to lose weight so I don't have any motivation to under-record my intake of food.

I've had a look back through the last couple of weeks of what I recorded and most days I consumed approx 1,000 calories more than I needed, according to MyFitnessPal. In the early days of using MyFitnessPal I carefully checked the accuracy of the foods I was using from their database against the labels on the food itself, and defined foods myself where their figures were wrong. I've been using that same pool of foods since then so I'm confident that they are fairly accurate.

There is some estimation in the quantities I consume, but I weigh most stuff (sad, I know) so any inaccuracies there are minimal. All in all, my actual calorie intake is consistently pretty close to what MyFitnessPal tells me, and any disparity certainly wouldn't make a dent in a disparity of 1,000 calories.

Of course that disparity assumes that its estimation of my calories expended isn't significantly out, but again it would have to be consistently out by some huge factor in order to support the idea that calories in vs calories out is at the heart of weight gain/loss. Personally, I just don't accept that at all, I think it's a lot more complicated.

Paul_Mc1988

doozerie wrote:

I have no hesitation about accurately adding what I eat to MyFitnessPal. I'm not trying to lose weight so I don't have any motivation to under-record my intake of food.

One question of of curiosity! Why spend so much time counting weighing etc? If not trying to lose weight

doozerie wrote:

Of course that disparity assumes that its estimation of my calories expended isn't significantly out, but again it would have to be consistently out by some huge factor in order to support the idea that calories in vs calories out is at the heart of weight gain/loss. Personally, I just don't accept that at all, I think it's a lot more complicated.

Bodies are like engines some are more efficient than others but the margin of difference between efficiencies is very small. Basic science proves calories in vs calories out. It's not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact.

silverharp

Paul_Mc1988 wrote: »

Bodies are like engines some are more efficient than others but the margin of difference between efficiencies is very small. Basic science proves calories in vs calories out. It's not a matter of opinion but a matter of fact.

its more useful to think of the body as a hormonal system and not an engine. calories matter for sure but you can only control the inputs not what your body does with them. if someone started injecting you with insulin you would start putting on weight, that's a hormonal response not a calorie response.

what people following low carb or keto find is that hey can trust their bodies because they simply dont need to snack often, overeat or comfort eat because the food they eat triggers the normal satiating mechanisms. On the other hand processed food is often designed to be hyper palatable and overrides these mechanisms.

Macy0161

doozerie wrote: »

I've had a look back through the last couple of weeks of what I recorded and most days I consumed approx 1,000 calories more than I needed, according to MyFitnessPal. In the early days of using MyFitnessPal I carefully checked the accuracy of the foods I was using from their database against the labels on the food itself, and defined foods myself where their figures were wrong. I've been using that same pool of foods since then so I'm confident that they are fairly accurate.

....

Of course that disparity assumes that its estimation of my calories expended isn't significantly out, but again it would have to be consistently out by some huge factor in order to support the idea that calories in vs calories out is at the heart of weight gain/loss. Personally, I just don't accept that at all, I think it's a lot more complicated.

But again, I'd point out you're using the target that myfitnesspal is giving you. How accurate is that? All of the calculations of daily calorie requirements are just estimates. To do it accurately is a labatory job. We know their estimates on exercise are way out (my experience has been they've got further out the fitter I've become).

Whatever method people want to use to lose weight (or whatever their goals are) I'm not going to argue. People have to find what works and is sustainable for them.

But I will argue that it is as simple as calories in v calories out, as that is scientifically supported!

plodder

JMcL wrote: »

I'm sort of half cursed - I don't like sugar in and of itself all that much, never have. However add a heap of butter to it and turn it into caramel (preferably with some nice sea salt) and all bets are off!

That's a known phenomenon. Fat and sugar together creates greater cravings and consequent weight gain than either on their own. That's why so many snack bars/foods are so enticing (and bad) because they have plenty of both.

silverharp

Macy0161 wrote: »

But I will argue that it is as simple as calories in v calories out, as that is scientifically supported!

that's not in question but you don't fully control the "calories out" part, ive heard examples of people who got fed up with standard low fat calorie controlled diet because they felt bad on it and weren't losing weight. Their metabolisms were slowing down so essentially they had cut what they eat by a quarter but their energy output clearly slowed down by a quarter too , they felt cold had low energy etc.
While people can miscount etc. people not losing weight isn’t necessarily down to them being too thick which is the subtext of “calories in calories out”

Macy0161

silverharp wrote: »

While people can miscount etc. people not losing weight isn’t necessarily down to them being too thick which is the subtext of “calories in calories out”

I'm not saying it's that their thick, they just don't count everything. Not necessarily because they're not being honest, they just don't think. For example, i'd easily go through 250 calories (half the deficit I was working to) just on milk in tea through the day - it took me a while to cop just how much I was adding that way.

The other reason people fail with calorie counting is just like the example you used, they go too extreme and it isn't sustainable. I wouldn't recommend dropping a quarter of TDEE. The general recommendation is 15%, even though I went to 500 calories. My fitness pal targets would be at the extreme end in my experience - I always overwrote them with what I worked out separately.

What I see on my office floor of circa 50 people, is people going too extreme and then (obviously) not sustaining it, and also succumbing to the sweet/ cake/ donut pushers that every office has! The blight that is donuts especially - there's someones even conservative deficit gone in 2 minutes.

plodder

silverharp wrote: »

that's not in question but you don't fully control the "calories out" part, ive heard examples of people who got fed up with standard low fat calorie controlled diet because they felt bad on it and weren't losing weight. Their metabolisms were slowing down so essentially they had cut what they eat by a quarter but their energy output clearly slowed down by a quarter too , they felt cold had low energy etc.
While people can miscount etc. people not losing weight isn’t necessarily down to them being too thick which is the subtext of “calories in calories out”

I'd be sceptical of those "slowing metabolism" claims. Energy usage and output is directly related to activity levels. Someone could be basically addicted to sugar, and suffering withdrawal symptoms from it, which might lead to reduced activity, feeling cold etc. It's not about being thick either. It's a hard problem to fix.

JMcL

plodder wrote: »

I'd be sceptical of those "slowing metabolism" claims. Energy usage and output is directly related to activity levels. Someone could be basically addicted to sugar, and suffering withdrawal symptoms from it, which might lead to reduced activity, feeling cold etc. It's not about being thick either. It's a hard problem to fix.

magicbastarder linked to a study of exactly that here a few weeks ago (see post #138). TLDR; Contestants on Americas equivalent of Operation Transformation regained some/all of the weight lost in the following years despite eating at/below the calorie level required to maintain weigh. Their metabolisms were found to have slowed dramatically as their bodies thought they'd gone into a period of starvation (which relatively speaking, they had)

In my own case a few years back I was diagnosed with underactive thyroid. One of the symptoms is weight gain due to the metabolism not firing as a result of low levels of the thyroid horomones. At the time I was pushing 110kg and couldn't shift it despite diet and ramping up in excercise (I'd been back seriously on the bike about 2 years at this stage). Having diagnosed and treated it I shed about 20kg in the next year or so keeping all else more or less equal (I was curious to see what the effect would be and was eating an ok diet at the time anyway so made no change there).