Kumochi

I find there are some activities that loggin them helps me get motivated to get them done, such as cleaning. I should log my sleeping as I may be over-estimating my calorie consumption. I may try logging every thing for a week to see if it is close. It sounds like the estimates were reasonable for those who did that.

Mary

mecompco

A good idea, I think, Mary.

This whole process is just an informed guess. Calorie intake can't be exact, and calorie burn can't either. So, we need to take our best guess and adjust the numbers to match reality.

Personally, I want enough of a buffer in my calculations that I'll always see a loss--it may vary from week to week, heck it may even stall for a week or two, but a downward trend is what we're looking for.

FitDay says I burn 2900 to 3100 cals a day, depending upon my activities. I keep my calorie intake to around 1500. Sometimes it gets close to 1600; on my one monthly planned (and I hate the word) "cheat" day, it may hit 3000 or more.

By keeping my goal as a 1500 calorie deficeit, on average (and the average is what we're interested in) I've sustained a pretty decent rate of loss. Granted, it's less now than when I was bigger with a 4000 cal a day burn, but a loss nonetheless.

I think this is where some folks get into trouble. If you try to maintain, say, a 500 cal deficeit, and have erred in either/or your cal intake/cal burn one could easily end up with a very small or even no deficeit at all. Better to err on the bigger deficeit side, IMHO.

Regards,
Michael

Kumochi

Thanks Michael

I was wondering -- does fitday adjust your calorie requirement as you lose and enter your new weight? I've been trying for a 1000 calorie defecit and losing. However I think it has been overestimating my calorie requirement when I just log in the "good" activities. Mary

mecompco

Yes. My calorie burn has decreased a full 1000 cals since I started. You should see it go down as you enter your new weight. Look at your calories eaten vs. burned graph and eventually you'll see the yellow bars get shorter.

Regards,
Michael

lnbrock

I like to log shopping mall time, just because it helps justify the shopaholic in me! :S Other than that, I've only been logging deliberate exercise time, or really long bouts of housework (like 2 or 3 hour cleaning sessions before we have guests staying with us, etc.)