Struggling to reach weight loss calorie budget?

[Havtorn]

Heyo.

I'm really struggling to reach (and afford!) the amount of calories that the Fitbit app suggest that I take in every day. I kind of wanted to check: Am I getting the wrong numbers? 

I've fed my stats* into and I have the app set to it's highest deficit settings (-1000 kcal per day). Exercise-wise I average around 8200 steps per day. And the app is telling me to eat, like, 4-4500 calories per day! After deducting the 1000.

The actual meal plan I have adds up to around 1400-2000 kcal per day. Mostly high-protein low carb food plus some vitamins, and as long as I remember to actually eat regularly (which historically is a problem for me) I have no trouble sticking to it and feel reasonably sated. But according to the app that would mean I'm at a daily 3-4000 calorie deficit. Which seems wrong but has me really worried since that sounds like it would be potentially dangerous if true.

Is my intuition that the app is incorrect reasonable? Or should I really be eating like I'm some sort of pro wrestler even though I'm trying to lose weight?

*)My stats: I'm a guy at 135 kg, 180 cm, aged 36 with a body fat percentage somewhere in the 40s. Down 36 kg from about a year ago.

[JohnnyRow]

Something is definitely wrong there.  I haven't used the Fitbit weight plan so can't begin to suggest where that is off, but if you just look at your daily calorie burn and see it at less than 4000 calories a day, there's no way you could lost weight eating 4000 calories.

[Havtorn]

Thank you for the quick reply. Glad to see I'm not the only one who thought this seemed a bit much.

Maybe the calorie burn is what's wrong? On days I know I haven't worn the watch it's still giving me 2440 kcal burned.

Here's a screencap Aug 8 until today:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bhE76PRkVVpbpfJDmTJrYbuiZrX_nqo1/preview
If all the weight plan does is take that number and deduct 1000, then I can see why it would get to somewhere in the range of 3000-4400 (I guess I was being accidentally hyperbolic: I was mostly basing the number in the original post on the last couple of days where it has seemed pretty extreme.)

Still, that seems really high. I'm not running any marathons or anything, I just take a daily walk of a few kilometers and mostly stay seated for the rest.

[JohnnyRow]

First, congrats on your weight loss in the past year.  Just keeping that off is a big accomplishment.

After looking more closely at your numbers, I'm more on the fence now.  The 2440 daily when not wearing would be your BMR (basal metabolic rate) calorie burn - what you are burning just to stay alive.  That is credited even when not wearing the watch.   You can check the number fitbit is using by looking at your daily calorie burn chart overnight where it is lowest and get the calorie burn number per 15 minutes, and multiply times 4 times 24 and should get about 2440.  And that matches pretty closely to an outside BMR calculator your could find by a google search.  Different methods give somewhat different results but all fairly close.  And 8200 steps per day would burn quite a few additional calories.  I didn't expect you were burning as many calories as you are.

That 4,000-4,500 calories to eat might work the last few days when you were burning the most calories, but not on most days.  I don't know enough about how that works.  If it recommends about the same each day, it still seems off, but if it varies day-to-day based on your calorie burn, it could be right.  But not if it has been 4000-4500 calories every day for past couple of weeks.

One thing I notice about your calorie burn graph is that it is mostly constant burn levels, maybe meaning that are you manually logging your activities after-the-fact rather than letting fitbit record them as the are happening.  If so, and if you have a fitbit model with heart rate recording, you will get more accurate results if you will use the Exercise App on your wrist to record your exercise sessions rather than log the sessions after-the-fact.  When you log them afterwards, fitbit ignores all the data, heart rate etc that it actually recorded, and just goes by whatever parameters you input for the workout.

See How do I track my workouts with my Fitbit device? 

[Havtorn]

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@JohnnyRow wrote:

First, congrats on your weight loss in the past year.  Just keeping that off is a big accomplishment.

Thank you!. It was a bit more a few months back but I backslid a few kilos which is why I started using the app meal thingy. 🙂 But two steps forward and one step back is still progress. 😄

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@JohnnyRow wrote:

After looking more closely at your numbers, I'm more on the fence now.  The 2440 daily when not wearing would be your BMR (basal metabolic rate) calorie burn - what you are burning just to stay alive.  That is credited even when not wearing the watch.   You can check the number fitbit is using by looking at your daily calorie burn chart overnight where it is lowest and get the calorie burn number per 15 minutes, and multiply times 4 times 24 and should get about 2440.  And that matches pretty closely to an outside BMR calculator your could find by a google search.  Different methods give somewhat different results but all fairly close.  And 8200 steps per day would burn quite a few additional calories.  I didn't expect you were burning as many calories as you are.

That 4,000-4,500 calories to eat might work the last few days when you were burning the most calories, but not on most days.  I don't know enough about how that works.  If it recommends about the same each day, it still seems off, but if it varies day-to-day based on your calorie burn, it could be right.  But not if it has been 4000-4500 calories every day for past couple of weeks.

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Thank you so much for taking the time to help me make sense of this, you're a godsend.

The recommendation in the app seems to be dynamic, so my recommendation for today was about 1000 kcal lower than yesterday since I only had time for half my route today. It being dynamic is probably a great feature really, but as I plan my meals weekly for budget reasons I don't really have a ton of flexibility there.

If these do seem like numbers that could be reasonable I should probably re-do my meal plan a bit because then I've been severely undereating and presumably lost a fair bit muscle and not just fat. Maybe I'll go over the last month's numbers to figure out my median and plan for that instead of static numbers I got from the internet somewhere. And perhaps invest in like a reserve of cheap oatmeal or something to avoid extreme deficits on more intense days.

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@JohnnyRow wrote:

One thing I notice about your calorie burn graph is that it is mostly constant burn levels, maybe meaning that are you manually logging your activities after-the-fact rather than letting fitbit record them as the are happening.  If so, and if you have a fitbit model with heart rate recording, you will get more accurate results if you will use the Exercise App on your wrist to record your exercise sessions rather than log the sessions after-the-fact.  When you log them afterwards, fitbit ignores all the data, heart rate etc that it actually recorded, and just goes by whatever parameters you input for the workout.

See How do I track my workouts with my Fitbit device? 

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The graph looks like that because it's cut off, when I took the screengrab I wanted to make sure I got the numbers for the last two weeks so the burn graph didn't fit on the screen. 😀 In full it's very 'spikey'.
I didn't even know I could log activities directly 😄 I use the heck out of the food and weight logging tools in the app but apart from that the only thing I really do with my Charge 4 is check my steps and heart rate. Clearly I need to do some reading, thank you for the link.

And thanks again for all your help!

[JohnnyRow]

Sounds like you are recording workouts right then so don't worry about it.

And it still seems to me that it's just recommending to stay the same, not the 1000 calorie deficit you wanted, so I really don't have the answer.

Hopefully someone who uses the calorie planning will take a look at the thread and give more insight.  I'll remove the "best answer" designation, so people don't just skip over the thread, as I think there's still at least the 1000 daily calorie issue.

[SillyMoth]

Firt, you lost 36 Kg. which is AMAZING.  To be honest, though, you are a big guy still. So it is working off the fact that it takes 4,200 calories a day to maintain your 135 Kg. Which you obviously don't want to do. 1400 calories a day, though is more like what I need (57Kg woman) than what you need.

Also, I don't trust the calorie burn factor. Do you have access to the NYT? Read this article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/well/move/weight-loss-exercise-calories.html

[Havtorn]

That's an interesting article, thank you. That kind of seems in line with me being told by some further googling that I should probably think in terms of average activity level over a longer period rather than try to eat exactly X below my calorie expenditure every day. Which has the added benefit of being a lot easier to plan for too since it's not a moving target. But it is kind of counter to the fitbit feature. 🙂

Going by this calculator I should probably be at 2400-ish. That'd keep me within their recommended range even on a week of "moderate exercise" but I would still be in weight loss territory on a "sedentary" week. That still seems like it would be a lot to me. But maybe that's just me not knowing what healthy amounts of food look like.

[Gr4ndp4]

Hi, @Havtorn, these are interesting questions. My Stats are 71.5kG, I swim 3000 meters a day in about 90 minutes burning 700 calories with a total calorie budget of about 3,000 calories which does not include any further scheduled exercise.

I hope this helps.

Cheers

[rthomas268]

Amount of food might be expensive. Check out some Weight Gain products like HI Calorie Boost drink - 530 calorie drinks. They might help get your calories up easier than purchasing food items and eating all day.