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Total Setback! Thx FD :(

Old 06-28-2011, 01:09 PM
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Default Total Setback! Thx FD :(

So I've been priding myself on the fact that I've been burning more than 2,500 c a day; actually, I've been pushing myself to 3,000-3,100, and because of this I've been allowing myself to eat about 1500 c a day. Well, the first two weeks were glorious. I've been doing the P90x, an altered form of it so that I could get to a point where I had the definite stamina to do the actual program, and still have energy to work and just exist in general XD. But lo and behold, my progress is getting slower and slower, and it just seemed off if i was REALLY burning as many calories as I thought. So I did some research, and bam! I had my profile at "Seated with some movement", but I logged everything from work (I'm a pharm tech at a very busy retail pharmacy, I put that at about the equivalent of nursing because of how much running around I do, and going back and forth, yada yada) to working out, to "grooming". And sex was listed as "light to moderate calisthenics", because you burn about 500 p/h. whatever, you can see I thought I was doing pretty well. And on the one hand, I am. I went from 161-158 to 151.3-149-6, and I haven't seen the scale under 150 since I started h.s. So I lost 7.4 lbs in a month (1 mo as of today! ), which isn't as much as I wanted but really about 1/3 of my weight goal, and I'm still on target with what fd suggests I weigh....except it's dropped a lot because it turns out fd has been overestimating what I've burned. This is very bittersweet for me, because I was so happy with myself, and I still am, but now I realize I have to tighten the reins further to actually be where I thought I was the whole time! This is very disheartening.
<3
Katie

(btw: 5'9", start 161.5, actually recorded start I was 158, end goal is 133 by 8/30)
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Old 06-28-2011, 01:10 PM
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Cool actually, as of today, I'm no longer on par with the graph. fml.
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Old 06-28-2011, 01:22 PM
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You're right, that is terrible--bad FitDay! You only lost what is generally considred to be the maximum "safe" amount of 2lbs. per week.

Seriously, though, every single human body is different and any calorie burn formula is, at best, an informed guess. What we all have to do is take what the calculation says and tweak it for our own body. Now that you've got a month of data, and know how much your calorie intake was, you can back-track and figure out what your actual average daily calorie burn is. Customize your calorie burn figure to reflect this and you should, henceforth, be able to predict your losses fairly reliably.

Be happy and keep your the good work!

Regards,
Michael
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Old 06-28-2011, 01:31 PM
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Are you 100% sure that the calories that you consume are correct? Do you weight your food, log EVERYTHING you eat? Lastly, FitDay doesn't even have P90X listed as an activity so how can you say the FitDay estimated your burn wrong? Like Michael said, this is no exact science and there can't be. We all burn at different rates just as we all put forth different amounts of effort in what we do.
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Old 06-28-2011, 01:39 PM
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I generally don't eat processed foods; they make me sick. I eat raw foods, which are what they are, or else I customize all the foods. and the P90X is pretty much the same as anything with "situps (which there are) and pullups (which there also are)" I usually tweak it if I feel like I did not work as much as I wanted to. And using multiple, outside resources, I have concluded that yes, fd does actually overestimate the base calories you burn, if you did nothing else all day. Furthermore, burning 3000c a day is apparently excessive, and if it is wrong to begin with, than anything based off of it (activities logged throughout the day) would also be off. And yes, I log EVERYTHING I eat.
Thanks for the support!
<3
Katie
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Old 06-28-2011, 01:48 PM
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There is an option to set a custom metabolism and you can also log sleep. I'm pretty familiar with P90X and like I mentioned everyone puts forth different effort and every BODY reacts differently.

This is just a guide THAT IS ABLE TO BE TWEAKED with a custom metabolism. You've been at this for what... a month? You now know that you don't burn as much as you thought, make the correction... unless you think the "fml" attitude will get you to your goal faster. It isn't the end of the world, get back to it and before you know it you'll be back on target.
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Old 06-28-2011, 03:02 PM
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You should look into getting a hydrostatic body fat test done.
Welcome to Body Fat Test Home
In addition to finding out your bf%, the analysis will also give you your exact Basal Metabolic Rate. Plug that number into the customize metabolism option (located in activities) and it will help fine tune your calorie burn.

The test also has an activity list showing how many calories you'll burn in 30 minutes. I used these numbers to validate my activity burn in FD activities and it was pretty close.

Sounds like you're on the right track, you just gotta tweak the settings a lil bit
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Old 06-28-2011, 11:48 PM
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From your stats I'm guessing that you're female. Me too. I've not had a hydrostatic body fat test done - yet, but I've been tweaking my fitday burn for 15-16 months or so. I feel pretty comfortable in saying that the metabolic rates are probably slightly more accurate for men than women, as we have other issues to deal with. Most of us hold on to a little water weight during that monthly business (during which we're also prone to spontaneous binging), neither of which figure into the basic fitday calculation. As it happens men also tend to burn more calories at rest than women, which is not the least bit fair, but there you go. You also don't say how old you are, but that is a factor as well, unfortunately we burn fewer and fewer calories as we age, again not fair, but that's life.

My life is nuts busy, and I'm on the go most days from 5:00am until I drop into bed at 9:00-10:00pm, but I've put my lifestyle in as "seated", I enter the number of hours I sleep, my exercise and anything I might do while I'm on my feet for a couple of hours, ie gardening, picking fruit, shopping, volunteering while standing etc etc. I find this to be fairly accurate up to a point. I can also tell you that no amount of burn can counteract a day over 2,500 calories. If I hit 2,500 calories or more, I could run a marathon the same day and still be up a pound the next day. Also my life has been nuts for years and years, my body is used to this pace, so probably I don't burn as many calories as someone unused to this lifestyle would in trying to keep up with me. DH has a desk job and over the weekends the kids and I wear him right out and believe me when I say this, we take it easy on him. So even though your life style is busy, your body is used to it and probably functions very efficiently using the least amount of calories necessary to get the job done. Again totally unfair, but that's life for you.

Oh and for the record "sex" is in the database, 3 options: "light", "medium" and "vigorous".
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Old 06-29-2011, 12:33 AM
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sw07, is the baseline metabolism number you put in the RMR number on the printout from the hydrostatic?

I'm hoping...'cause if it is, I've got the opposite issue; I'm actually burning more than FitDay says.

Good luck, Katie. I think others have a good point...it's far from being an exact science. Unless you were losing dead on consistent with the amount of your deficit, it pretty much evens out.
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Old 06-29-2011, 01:52 AM
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"sex" is actually pretty off even at both "settings", which I find amusing. (But I'm just immature like that) I mean, it's a new day, I just woke up, and I feel a lot better. But last night it was kinda like, "really?" and of course my bf doesn't really get it, I swear the guy has like 4% body fat on him (maybe 6 since he stopped working out consistently) and it doesn't matter if he eats hot wings and pizza or strawberries and goat cheese. And my roommate is a type one diabetic, and her eating habits have slipped up a little, but her favorite thing is "hey katie, come try this!" (and yes I record it), but it doesn't help that she's an amazing cook. But I'm going to keep trying, because I do look better in my legs and bum, and my measurements are slightly smaller, and the other day I was roughhousing with someone and they got kicked. And I guess my legs are a force to be reckoned with :P And I know I don't need to lose anything, really, and that my weight was fine before, but I wanted to change my lifestyle because of how sluggish I was, and get myself closer to the middle of the healthy range, so that when my sophomore year of college rolls around in august, I'll have the habits to help me keep myself under control.
Thanks again for all the support! (Much more positive this time! )
<3
Katie
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