Can you provide the food diary as well? Much of this conversation is around food quality so the specifics of what you ate and why you think it was those calories is necessary context
If possible, weigh things for the diary as it really helps dial things in
Your 1836 BMR and/or that 1482 cals are incorrect and or overlapping, so you don’t have the 788 calorie deficit you think you do. Your post says you know that 2000-2500 calories per day is your maintenance (that’s a lb a week range you know?). Reduce your 2000-2500 calorie per day by 500 calories, and fuel your rides right and you should lose a lb a week.
I’ll let you have this first office visit for free.
Assuming amputation is off the table, it’s the only option you’ve got.
Your numbers are off. Either the in or the out, or both. These arent things you can measure accurately short of a lab, and even then I dont think it’s absolute. You have to find the right numbers through trial and error. But if you’re not losing weight, the out is not greater than the in.
Unless you’ve learned photosynthesis. I probably shouldnt talk in absolutes…there’s always exceptions I guess. It would be a first though.
Edit: I just noticed your workday exercise shows essentiall 100calories/KM walked. I assume it’s walking. I an quite confident that number is off. It’s probably closer to half that.
Well…I mean there’s your problem…
Also…how are you burning 8000 calories a day? Building pyramids in Egypt?
Still seems like a big overshoot.
Ok. So you’ve learned a way to avoid the laws of thermodynamics I guess. Your nobel prize is in the mail.
Or your internet calorie numbers are off 15%. I’ll let you decide which is more probable…
I’d be genuinely shocked if it was more than 4000 plus your BMR. What’s your FTP?
Ok yea so your ftp is right in line with mine. I know for a fact I couldnt do 10 hrs straight of solid, mid zone 2 with no breaks to get 6000 calories burned.
Without even talking about all the low quality foods you’ve shown above, I’d definitely suggest working with a professional to calculate what your BMR is. Then, weigh every piece of food and log it. Whether it’s healthy food or not. Every single gram.
Without knowing what you’re taking in and and what you’re putting out with a much higher degree of certainty, you just can’t come close to knowing what you need to adjust.
You’re either grossly overestimating your output or underestimating your input (or both).
Once you have a realistic picture, you can keep following whatever works, until it stops working, and then start logging again until you have it back under control. It’s an ongoing adjustment process.
Dude, all I’m going to say is that you have a lot of room for improvement. I don’t see hardly any fruits or vegetables listed. I see frequent fast food, high calorie nuts and popcorn.
If you embrace unprocessed whole foods and religiously count calories I bet you’ll make progress.
On way to think about food as an athlete is:
Lean proteins for building and maintaining muscle mass
Healthy carbohydrates for energy (calories you burn based on activity level which can be tracked)
A small amount of healthy fats are all that are needed. (A 500 calorie bag of roasted and salted nuts is basically a zero for your energy or muscles. It will go straight to fat stores.)
I know a woman who was previously 350-something pounds. She got down to normal weight (-200 pounds) with a 12 step group and weighing and tracking all her food. Years after losing the weight she still weighs and tracks everything because it’s the only way she’ll be accountable to herself. Miracles can happen.
Can’t help you with the mood LOL but don’t discount anything when it comes to losing weight. I’m not one of those smart people saying anything for 50 years. My motto for losing weight is “more in and more out” and totally serious. This year I started feeding calories and activity (via Apple Watch) into an app called Lose It. Mostly because I wanted to lose some weight while making 110% certain I was fueling my ~8 hours/week on the bike, and hitting protein and carb targets. I eat about 5 times a day, sometimes 6 times a day. Workouts are usually around 2 hours and 1200-1600kJ work (about same calories, give or take), really trying to keep average at 8 hours/week but a little behind (4 hours) for the year. The Apple Watch increased what I thought my daily minimum calorie burn was, just went with it. Seriously Lose It is showing a lot of days where I eat 2800-3500 calories at 212lbs and 6 inches taller than you. Step on the scale every morning when I get out of bed. After 2 months I’ve recalibrated my brain on portion sizes. Lost 8 pounds over March and April. While this month of May I’ve decided to take a break and turn it into a long “recovery week” with stable weight. I might start pushing down again next week. Also, we eat farm to fork. Fast food maybe once or twice a month. Thats my story. You might try the same and gain weight, don’t blame me, you gotta experiment and find what works for you. Best wishes!
@FatBoySlim Please understand I say this to he helpful…I’m not trying to attack.
On the assumption you want to improve your body composition/health(I say assume because there’s LOTS of fat and happy people that dont care, god bless them), you need to stop looking for ways to disprove the known things that impact health. You cant do it. It’s like trying to prove the earth is flat in an effort to justify your current position, and ineffectiveness in attaining your goals.
It’s nothing to be ashamed about…this shit ain’t easy. But if you refuse to acknowledge the facts about your current situation, I dont see how you’d find a way to overcome them.
The best thing you could have eaten to get on the bike and get to your destination was the bun!
Bingo. There are no factors that override this, period.
You kind of sound like a person that is telling me they’re draining a bathtub. Is the water going down? No, but I’m draining it. Huh??
If your calories out were greater than your calories in, you’d be losing weight. You arent losing weight, so your calories in are the same or greater than calories out. End of story.
We can talk about insulin and specific food and hormones and krypton and whatever else you want, but none of thst changes the fact you’re not in a calorie deficit, and therefore cannot drop weight.
If water isnt going down in a bathtub…a plumber doesnt say gravity doesnt work for every house. They find the clog.
Find your clog. From what I’ve seen…you’ve likely got a few.
For years, I tried to do everything but calories in, calories out. My weight basically never budged, unless it went up. I was convinced that CICO wasn’t the solution, it was all insulin and hormones. After all, I was riding an hour a day most days, so there was no way I wasn’t in a deficit. Plus, I had already lost 75 pounds on keto just a few years earlier. So it must be the insulin, right?
(Even I was ignoring the fact that many years before, I had lost 20-30 pounds eating two to three meals of white rice every day, until I gained half of it back from drinking too many sodas, unaware of their calories).
Then just a few months ago, I started weighing everything by the gram, and counting every calorie consumed and burned. I lost about 16 pounds in two or three months. It IS the calories.
That said, the idea that all calories are exactly equivalent is prima facia silly. Calories are a measure of heat released from literally burning a material with a flame. A pound of wood has something like 1,500 calories. None of them will be absorbed by the body. Sugar alcohols like xylitol have seven calories per gram, but they aren’t absorbed by the body, so they are effectively calorie free.
Even actual dietary calories aren’t equivalent. Fat has a thermic effect of something like 95%, while protein has a thermic effect of 75-80%. So a 100 calories of olive oil is basically 100 calories, but 100 calories of skinless chicken breast is really only 80 calories.
Carbs and alcohol (technically a carb, but it has more calories per gram) have thermic effects a bit lower than fat, hence why they both have a bigger effect on weight than protein.
So calories in isn’t really about calories consumed, it’s dietary calories absorbed.
Ultimately, the quality of a food boils down to its satiety per calorie. 500 calories of birthday cake makes you want another 500 calories of birthday cake. 500 calories of broccoli will make you never want to eat broccoli again.
Humans basically eat until they get a certain amount of protein, micronutrients, weight, and volume. If you pick foods with low calorie density, high protein, high fiber, high water, and high in micronutrients, you will be more satiated even with less calories. This is how body builders get to insanely low body fat percentages.
As for RMR, the effect of dieting on RMR for a few months is so small that it’s basically within the margin of error if you are sufficiently active and have a sufficient average calorie deficit. RMR is mostly a matter of lean body mass. Your RMR mostly goes down if you lose weight because you are a smaller, more efficient version of yourself.
Thank you for coming to my TED(X) talk.
Except it’s even simpler than that. Thermic effect is just calories out. It’s exercise for your gut.
But agreed…this is why it’s almost counterproductive to even worry about this stuff. If the weight isnt going down, you’re not in a deficit. The only things you can do are eat less or move more. Make it easier on yourself by eating a ton of protein and veggies instead of cheesecake and beer.
Right. The more empty calories (“empty” in that they leave you feeling empty!) you have per day, the harder it becomes to have even a small calorie deficit, even if you are doing cardio.
One of the weird things about biology is that you can go to bed hungry despite overeating, and you can go to bed feeling fine despite having a calorie deficit.
One more thing I feel I should mention is that the average calorie deficit I thought I was running (based on rather exact food tracking and my Garmin calorie count) correlated very, very strongly with the amount of weight I was losing on average. It was an R that would give a statistician a hardon.
I mean Inhave my problem mapped out to the calorie lol. I average maybe 800 calories a day cycling. That’s 2 beers and a bowl of ice cream at night for me…which is why my weight stays the same, not goes down, even though my diet is near perfect other than that.
Your entire post is really good, but this part is worth highlighting. I’ve never known anyone who went down the path of weighing/tracking their food that didn’t come out the other side in a better place. I’m talking really taking the time to track/weight everything, not half assed. Seeing how calorie dense some of these bad food choices are is really eye opening. That said, it takes an extraordinary level of discipline to do it on an ongoing basis. But the benefits of even doing it for a short time or periodically are huge. I can do it for a couple weeks at a time a few times a year to help reinforce things, but that’s about the best I can do.
At times before this, I had tried tracking half-assedly, which didn’t work, so I was convinced that CICO was a dead end. Basically I was being a good boy during the day, overconsuming at night, and then pedaling for hours a week to simply maintain my weight. It was maddening.
After a few weeks, obsessive tracking simply becomes habitual, and eventually you get good enough to estimate calories for certain foods within a respectable margin of error. It doesn’t matter if you’re off by 100-200 calories per day if you’re doing a sufficient deficit for a weight loss phase (e.g. 500+).
I don’t use an app, since IMO it’s faster to just swipe-type the food into Notes and do the math in Calculator. I would even round to the nearest five so I could do the totals in my head.
Other tips I have include chugging cold water (especially soda with lemon) before meals and front-loading foods that are high in protein, water, or fiber. Carbs come last, and should be less refined (e.g. sweet potatoes and brown rice).
Avoiding excessive caffeine consumption during the day and unnecessary hunger and thirst during “drinking hours” seem to also help with alcohol consumption.
There are a million other things, but…