This is ringing a bell… from Gary himself it sounds like it was an absolute mess and 60M down the drain. I think with sick obese individuals its a really hard road back. So many other factors could be causing their issues.
Have you played around with any CGMs? I find the data on myself to be fascinating. You learn all the things that affect your blood glucose (surrogate insulin). You see how different foods affect YOU individually, along with stress, sleep, training. Gamechanger for me. To me this helps to clarify that we are all so different and why the whole world of nutrition and rules around it is a hard one to win. What only matters is what works for you.
Supersapiens looks like the best option for US customers and they have gone around the restrictions and focus on athletes. I’d start there if I were you.
Had a read around your blog, just want to say thanks for pointing out the individual differences in reaction to diet. Considering the differences in diet across cultures and individual people, it always strikes me as odd that there is supposed to be on optimal way in feeding yourself.
Also you probably know this already, but a lot of the links, for example the one to part 1 of that post, are broken. I think you might have moved domains and the links have not got updated?
For sure. This is because everybody — all of us — are experts in nutrition. We all partake. So we all come in with our own biases. We all have an inkling of what works for us, and others we hang out with, so it makes it hard to go into our slow thinking brain and consider this individualness.
Thanks for the note on the links too. Old site. Not sure if there’s an easy fix you are aware of?
I’m trying to follow this and I’m not sure I understand. So lets say I do a BMR calculator and I see my BMR is 1800. If I do a workout and burn 700 calories, then should the total amount I’m aiming to replace be just 2500 calories?
I use the Lose It app and based on what I plugged in it says I should eat around 2600, then if I do a workout, I see it adds calories on top of that. So in that case it’d be the 2600+700 for 3400 total.
That’s a 900 calorie difference between these two. Which is the right way to think about this?
Should I just set Lose It’s daily calorie goal to my BMR so when it adds the calories burned cycling, it’ll give me the actual number of calories I need to eat?
This is what I’ve been trying to do and it has been working as long as I don’t blow it up on the weekends when I’m hanging out with my kids or friends.
I use Lose it to track everything and I settled on 2100 as my goal with the idea that my actual BMR is close to 2600. I will generally eat back about half of the calories from my 5-6 rides with the thought that approximately half of the calories are from my fat stores and don’t need to be replaced.
The more whole foods I eat the easier it is to keep the deficit without being hungry, I also try to get at least 100g of protein and I’m about 87kg at the moment.
I am down a little over 15lbs since I started in January and I feel good during my workouts for the most part so other than my inconsistency it has been working.
In general the calculation is based on your body weight x 10 for your BMR. This is dependant on your lean body mass, but to keep it simple that is the starting point. For example - I’m 160-165, I’m a male and an athletic build so I’ll start at 1600 calories and that’s roughly what I need just to exist and not lose or gain weight. Then I need to add an activity factor - so If I was a mail man and walked everyday for 6-8 hours or if I worked a physical job I can add an activity factor of 7-8. If I’m mostly sedentary and just sat at a desk then my activity factor might be 1, 2 or 3. I work at a desk, but I’m on my feet and I have a toddler that I play with so I go with an activity factor of 4. So, 1.4 times 1600 calories is 2240. So you need your BMR plus your activity level to get to your total amount. Then, the work you do on the bike is in addition to that amount. If I do a trainer workout that is 760, then my total for the day is 3,000 for that day. Does that make sense?
Yes, you can - that would include your calories burned on the bike in addition to your other calories spent during the day. TDEE will be the sum total, then you can subtract whatever deficit you want if you are looking to lose body fat.
The problem with TDEE is that most of us don’t do the same activity every day so the calories burned during your workout aren’t going to be the same everyday. That would be great if you walk 1 hour every evening with the Mrs. The calculators I’ve used have it so that you can add a workout(s) each day, so they are working from a concept that your daily is the BMR plus your daily activity level factor (think desk job vs. construction worker) as your daily budget, and then you add your workout for that day (1 hour bike ride at 18 mph) to the daily budget for your total caloric expenditure for the day.
So my daily budget is 1803 cal (which has 500 cals deducted so I lose a lb a week) and I add a bike ride workout of enough minutes to add 600 cal (for my 1 hour z2 ride at 170 watts) so my daily expenditure is 2403 calories.
In actuality I’d usually only add as many workout minutes as needed to get half the z2 calories (so 300 cal in this example) which will help me lose another 1/2 lb that week, and I can do that because z2 is going to be burning mostly fat calories, which I don’t need to refuel for because I have plenty stored in my torso.
I’m using Lose-it now. When you start setting up your plan/goals it should ask you age, weight, normal activity level and then calculate your BMR + activity factor calories (that you’d burn on a normal day), and it will ask you how much you want to lose (total or per week) and when you want to lose it by and use that info to calculate how much deficit you need per day to lose that much weight, and it will subtract those deficit calories from the BMR+activity calories to give you your daily “budget” of calories you can eat.
Pretty sure you can manually adjust any of those numbers if you decide they need to be tweaked after a couple weeks, or whatever.
One recent realization is that your cycling efficiency changes through the year (consistent with Ponzer research). So it’s better to run your calculations as a 63d moving average, or whatever your preferred lag is.