I don’t appreciate your reductive comment.
“If it were true you could predict weight gain and loss accurately, but you can’t” - Dr Kyle Pfaffenbach
Take it up with him and podcast 463, I don’t want to derail the thread focussing on the calculator so I’m out.
At the risk of going off further topic, this reminds me of one of my endocrinology professors from medical school. He loved to say, “calories in, calories out is a basic fact of life. Calculating calories in, calories out is why I still have a job.”
Back to the thread, I feel like the daily calories it’s giving me is way too high. It has me at over 5,000 calories on workout days. And I know I’m usually only burning around 1,500 from those workouts. My BMR is nowhere near that high to close the gap.
How does it not relate? Efficiency must vary between people and even in the same person at different ages, right? And you can get 50 calories from gel easier than from broccoli, can’t you? So wouldn’t all of that make a difference? Why do we hear of people eating more and losing weight once in awhile? (I know this is a lot, just trying to understand)
Joe
I would gain weight so fast if I followed these recommendations. Might be more accurate for men, but as a woman I would easily be gaining over a pound a week under the “maintain” option. Slower but still noticeable weight gain would happen under the other options.
Would love to see an update to this. I am very curious as to why/how these numbers are off for most people?
Tim Podlogar went over this in more detail on the podcast but essentially said that estimating energy expenditure is just guessing.
You can use a calculator to get a very very rough ballpark guess then monitor expenditure and intake closely.
See if weight changes and adjust the intake to modify accordingly.
Outstanding. Supports what I have already been working towards, however I will tweak my macro’s to suit these new calculations. Great tool, thanks for developing it.
They are nice graphs, but I’m afraid it appears to be overestimating me as well. I’m ~188 lbs (85.2kg), and I input 4 workouts for 5.25 hours/week training. Per MacroFactor, I’ve been eating about 2200 per day for weeks, and my weight has been steady. Combining MF and Garmin data, I estimate my RMR around 1900/day.
The macros of protein and fat seem to roughly match Dr. Kyle’s numbers, but the carbs seem way out of whack for me (possibly for the ‘time crunched’?) For example, for 1h15m of ‘hard’ on a given Friday, it’s suggesting I eat 445 grams of carbs in the day, for a total of 3248 calories, and an average of 2900 calories/day across the week. Sorry, but my spare tire is not going to disappear if I increase by that much…
My spare tyre wasn’t getting smaller in the first place!
So far this week I’ve really struggled to eat so much, I don’t feel hungry at all. But, neither am I ballooning up in weight as lots of people are saying despite a big increase in consumption.
The 560-660g carb targets seem impossible now, I’m going to have to introduce cake or something. I ate 1050g of sausage pasta bake (!!) on Tuesday night but that only gave me 155g carbs (according to MFP) plus a rough, sleepless night!
I appreciate your willingness to try it out- pasta bakes and all. 
I suppose I should look at the studies they linked in the calculator itself, to see if participants experienced weight gain. I peaked at 220 lbs about 15 years ago, so am frankly scared of giving back that hard-earned loss that I’ve managed to maintain, more or less, for so long.
I appreciate the calculator and the attention it is putting on energy availability. I have been trying the generated plan since the calculator was released, and I do feel better. I had previously been focused on replacing calories, but not tracking macros (except carbs during workouts.) Following the plan this week has meant more carbs than I am comfortable with, but I feel better overall.
For people hesitant to try the recommended values, I would read the NIH study on RED-S, almost every endurance athlete in the study was underfueled.
For TR, can we have this feature integrated in the app? TR should know our weights, training load, FTP, etc - so it should be able to generate us a plan for each week of training. Maybe just a “nutrition” tab under career, calendar.
Agree, it is annoying to have to enter your email every time you want to run the calculator.
600g is easy! Yesterday I had sourdough toast and jam (100g carbs) before my ride, 270g on the bike plus a 50g drink after, then oatmeal, berries, a banana, and honey (150g). That’s 570 grams of carbs before 9:30 am.
IMO, based on your body weight, 2200 kcal seems very low. I’m 150 and I won’t go below 2,000 on a rest day. I ride more than you do, but still, being 38 lbs heavier you must have a higher BMR than me.
One thing that I’ve noticed as I’ve been tracking macros for the better part of a decade is that when the calories get too low, I move a lot less, feel cold, lose libido, don’t sleep as well and become food focused. I bet if you were to slowly increase you baseline calories two or three hundred calories gradually over the course of a couple of weeks you might not gain any substantial body fat. Water weight yes. Anyhow, just an observation that I’ve made that may be applicable to your situation.
Thanks for the support/suggestion. I never thought of 2200 as low before (I’m 5’11”, 27% bf if it matters- and what I put into the calculator.) A long time ago, I did a baseline BMR (and vo2max) test at Lifetime Fitness (with a mask-gas-cart-thingy,) and it had me at 1500 calories, so I guess that always stuck with me, and figured the 2000-2200 range was my typical daily burn. Maybe worth experimenting with for a couple weeks as you suggest.
95% of people are in agreement that it seems the calories suggested are too high. It seems like it works on most browsers. Until @jonathan or someone else explains the basis for how TR are calculating the calories needed, we’re all just talking into the ether.
The papers are cited and the target EA daily needs are listed in the input page. You may or may not agree with those values. I find the 45kcal/FFM/day maintenance recommendation high for me but that really depends on activity level (non exercise). The training calorie needs seem in line with a 0.8IF for “hard” days and 0.65IF for “endurance” days.
This is a good start but I would rely on actual workout kJ estimates, if available, and monitoring the scale which never lies.
@Jonathan - is there any plan for you to respond to the feedback? Your original post was more than a week ago.
Edit - someone else mentioned Jonathan may be on vacation
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Yeah that makes sense. I’m not entirely sure it matters (in a “what do we feed this person” way) if you say “a calorie is not a calorie” vs. “we can’t accurately calculate how many calories you are burning in a day” but it’s hard to argue that a calorie isn’t a defined physical constant. And if we’re gonna say it, might as well say it right. CICO is dead. Long live CICO.
Joe
I think a lot of the problem is that you have a physics equation on one side and a human being on the other side. Physics is pretty absolute. The biology of human beings is anything but. So I think the problem with CICO is that it’s applying a rigid concept to a very dynamic subject. Sure, you can calculate and define what a calorie is in a lab. And yes you can’t just create mass or energy. But human bodies are so incredibly complex that it’s a fool’s errand trying to accurately calculate energy intake and burn. So while I would say from a physics standpoint, CICO is true and correct, but the use of it in humans is suboptimal.