Corporation said:
Yep, I try to stay under 1500 calories most days. I know a lot of people have success eating 2500 calories and then burning 1000 through exercise but for me it just doesn't work as well. In this next phase, I will be adding more cardio to what I'm doing, so I will have to increase my intake some, but probably not more than 1750 initially to see how my body does with it. For my body, it's hard to out-exercise a bad diet.
It's possible but there's a pretty simple formula for CICO.
Your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) is probably around 2000 calories, maybe a little higher since you're over 200 lbs.
Add in the food you eat and subtract out any calories you burn through activity, and every 3500 excess calories you burn is one pound lost.
Two people can have a pretty different TDEE because of age, gender, etc. And you can increase your TDEE by building muscle (especially in the large muscle groups that a lot of people ignore in their legs).
It seems like the more common culprit isn't a low TDEE, but that you're over counting your exercise calories. You could be under counting food, too, but your results the last month suggest that you're doing fine with that. It could be, though, that you're not counting little things youneat throughout the day, like a gatorade while you run or a couple nuggets your child didn't finish.
You mentioned burning 1000 calories with exercise. To burn 1000 calories, you need to do a LOT of exercise. Running 6 miles burns a shade over 1000 calories. Depending on your speed that might take an hour or so - 60 minutes at 6mph burns about 20 more calories than 51 minutes at 7mph and covers the same 6 miles. That's about the fastest way to get there. You could also do about 3 hours of walking 3 mph, or do 4 hours of yoga, or 90 minutes of rowing at a moderate intensity.
Those numbers come from myfitnesspal, but they aren't perfect. They vary depending on age, weight, fitness level, etc. When i started out running at my peak weight I was almost certainly burning more calories doing less exercise than I do now, because I was carrying a lot of extra weight and my heart was pumping so much harder to support it. So they're just estimates, just like your TDEE.
The other way people seem to overcalculate their calories out is by saying they are "active", then counting the calories they burn doing the exercise that makes them "active". Like if you walk around non stop 8 hours a day at work, you're active, but if you then add in your 12,000 steps that your fitbit says you burned, you're double counting. I exercise almost every day, but I still hace myfitnesspal set as totally inactive sloth. When I log the exercise I do, I know I'm not double counting or overestimating. That's a lot more difficult for people who say they're "active". What do you do on a Saturday where you're not walking around at work and you go for a 90 minute hike? Is that just being "active" or do you log some walking calories?
I'm not going to argue with your results because you are killing it, and you should do what works for you, but for me, I know i made mistakes early on because I didn't understand how all this stuff works and I have seen other people here make the same mistakes and learn from it. I think you're taking a sensible approach here by changing gradually. Good work.
.... Trying not to deprive this time and just make slow changes
Terrible compared to what I was doing before the kidney stone, but now is time to go for it since I feel 98% better.
