How do you eat enough?

[MarkJR84]

Hey guys,

I am wanting to lose weight for my brother's wedding in August. 

I have my plan intensity set on fitbit as "Hard" so it works out a calorie deficit of -1000 off my daily intake, which I'm fine with.

In order to help me get more active and aid weight loss I have, of course, bought my fitbit blaze and I love it. Buying it has resulted in me changing my lifestyle with regard to my fitness, for example, I now walk to work/Sainsbury's/town and go to the gym more often/move more at work etc. I'm finding it interesting to try and beat my calorie burn and step goals. Recently I have started keeping an eye on the amounts of minutes I am in peak and cardio HR ranges per week and I'm motivated to improve on these figures!

What I have found though is, obviously the more active I am the more calories I burn. On a normal day I burn between 3500-4000 calories. On a more active day, including gym, I find myself burning up to 5100 calories according to my fitbit.

Now, the amount of calories I burn in a day directly influences the amount of calories I should be eating - in my case: Total out, minus deficit (1000) = total needed in.

FitBit is correctly asking me to consume these calories in order to safely lose weight and then be able to keep it off, this is fine and I have no problem with it as I want to do it properly, but I'm unsure how, especially when on my more active days when Fitbit is asking me to consume 4100 calories! I'm struggling to know what to eat in order to get my consumption up, as well as find the time to actually eat it and keep it affordable!

I should mention, my BMR is 2050.

A normal weekday calorie intake for me would be around the same as my BMR if not a little less.

Bearing in mind my goal is weght loss, I'd like to ask other members of the community how you do it/have done it with regard to eating enough to losing weight steadily and healthily?

Any tips and advice would be greatly appreciated 🙂

[urbanbalanced]

Please remember what Fitbit is; it is tool that is programmed and sold to cater to millions. Because of that fact, you need to remind yourself that the numbers Fitbit provides are averages and statistics they are an approximation of what your body needs to have/not have to achieve your goals. Fitbit does a decent job at that and the numbers it provides are good indicators. They are just that indicators, they are not a gospel of any god unto you.

Fitbit is only one tool to help you manage to get to the goals you want to go. Another instrument of feedback, one that is 100% reliable, is your body. If your body tells you it had enougb food and you needn't stuff more into it, than don't force it. It won't do you any good. If the body tells you through hunger, real hunger, that it needs more than for the love of all that is good eat something. Real hunger is a signal you shouldn't ignore. It is even detrimental to long term weight loss.

Does that mean you cannot do anything to help the body besides listening to it? Of course not! If you really want to go into the nitty-gritty you can go over what your diet is like: Is it balanced or are you consuming something too much or too little. Perhaps your diet holds too much carbohydrates and you consume too little protein for your dream muscles.

Hope this feedback helps!

[A_Lurker]

@MarkJR84- I started out easily burning lots of calories each day.  I actually found that I lost weight better on the weeks that I ate a little bit more.  After almost 100 pounds down I have to work a lot harder than I used to in order to burn the same number of calories.  Oddly enough I actually think I'm eating more calories than when I first started.  I mean think about that, I've lost a lot of weight but I'm eating more...  You do need to take the calories burned with a grain of salt, but not ignore it all together.  What I did for quite a while is stop at 2500 calories even if I went over 3500.  Recently I've been averaging over 4000 calories each day and I've increased my stopping point to 2750 calories.

I'm assuming from your burn that you could be a big guy with a fair bit of weight to lose.  Me, I'm a woman who even though I'm down so much still has another 100 lbs to lose.  At some point I will cut my calories, but I'm trying to keep them as high as possible.  Mainly because in the past going too low in calories for too long has led to illness.  This is not necessarily the same for everyone.  However, if you cut your calories too drastically you risk your body deciding that's the new normal and it will learn to run on less.

That's a long way to go, but I'd suggest picking a maximum limit (any will do) and following the -1000 deficit to that point for a couple of weeks.  After say 3 or 4 look at your progress and adjust.  The hardest thing to do is slow down weight loss.  We all want to lose it as quickly as possible.  My GP just recently suggested that I should lose the next amount of weight over 3 years (I suspect to try and bring my more naturally to where I should be).  I suspect I'll have issues with it, but we'll see.

So, you burn between 3500-4000 on a slower day, 5100 on a high one.  Why not pick 3000 at your stopping point.  On a 3500 calorie day though, you only eat 2500.  3900 day, only 2900.  Once you hit 4000 calories burned just ignore the calories left the eatand stop at 3000.