Weight Loss and exercise

If you look up Mrs Smith's apple pie on mfp, a whole pie has 2720 calories, so 1/5 of it would be 544 calories, which is about 75% of 730. So, it's not that much of a stretch.

Still looking iffy about this afternoon's paddle. the organizer said rain or shine but lightning will cancel it (of course).

Watch says 8103 steps but most were paddle strokes. I paddled 4.7 miles and 4.2 of it was non stop at about 3.5 mph, which is paddling hard on a 9'9" inflatable SUP; it's really geared more toward surfing and light recreational paddling than trying to cover distance. It plows through the water and doesn't track well. I paddled about 100 minutes and logged 45. 221 calories is low; probably over 500.

1836 calories. Not the best nutrition; no veggies. I will take salad and a piece of chicken for lunch tomorrow and cook some veggies with dinner tomorrow night.

I will weigh in the morning.

I walked 9,848 steps. I walked 3 3/4 miles burning 389 calories. This together with the MFP value for walking during my daily activities came out to a target of 2736 calories. I consumed 2756 calories meeting my target. My average speed was 3.7 mph, with a maximum heart rate of 160. My average heart rate was low at 138. So I ended up with a moderate cardio workout.

158.6 this morning. I ended up having another piece of fruit last night and logged it for yesterday as being over a little more since I was pretty sure I under reported exercise.

My weight is now 179. Interesting. I do not want to go over 180. Let’s see if I can halt this continued weight gain through exercising every day. I will have to watch my consumption of trail mix. Even though it can be calories rice expensive, it is addicting

I was at 164 earlier this week. Now I’m at 158. Only 8 more pounds until I reach my goal weight.

I’ve taken zero Ativan, melatonin and I cut back on one of meds, and I’ve had no issues with sticking to my 1,280 calories.

11550 steps. Logged less than half and still have 167 calories from it that I didn't (and won't) eat.

1763 calories but there are a couple of estimates in there that might be off - not all of the watermelon and raisins were weighed. I doubt I am far enough off to make much difference. BTW, I got the first really good watermelon of the season today.

MFP calories 1,230. Apple Watch steps 7,886. Water intake 50.7oz

Me and my youngest daughter enjoyed our birthday today. I bought her a Fitbit Charge 2 as her present. We did a lot of walking today.

I am sticking to my plan in eating the target calories provided by MFP. I have taken 11,098 steps. I walked 4.24 miles for exersize. As a consequence, I have burned 471 calories. My average speed and heart rate is not notable. For some reason, I did not perform well today even though I tried. I did manage to get my heart rate up to 158, which is not my goal of above 160. I had to run for a brief period to accomplish this. I am going to have to go back to that hill in order to get good stats. So my target calories turned out to be 2659. I consumed 2,486 calories. So I am 173 calories short. I will eat additinal trail mix to make up the difference before going to bed.

PS On many walks, I try to knock myself out. My fitness score from my watch remained at 28 which is very poor. They use VO2Max which can be reasonably accurate. How depressing. Now for the first time it has moved up to 30! So I am becoming more fit, which I have known for some time now, and the watch is now willing to admit it. I do not know if this is from those walks up that hill, or running for a brief amount of time once for some recent walks. I think it is the hill.

@Tucon - I think the consistency of exercise is the biggest factor.

I am having trouble with my watch and its app with my new phone, which runs a later version of Android than my old phone. It worked for a while, but I have not been able to sync in several days. So I am just trying to make sure I get into the high thousands pretty much every day I can and over 10000 often. So I track my food pretty close (though I do estimate sometimes) and then I use voodoo to figure out the exercise calories. Somehow that is working.

Yes, I agree with you. That makes sense. I am 177 pounds today. This may not mean anything since it is close enough to my previous weight that can be from the normal day-to-day wiggle in weight. Recently, I am going to exersize today by walking fast up a hill that goes over three quarters of a mile. There are two stretches that are of a bit of a downgrade which allow me to recover to some degree. My system, particularly my legs, is not used to this intensive type of exersize from day to day. This is probably why I cannot perform the same as compared to exersizing every other day. But in time this will change. Later in the evening, I will finish up by walking around my townhome complex at a moderate pace, not pushing myself.

I worry about possibly pushing myself too far too fast or just too far in general. I turn 60 later this year. I have bursitis, tendonitis and arthritis and have been prone to flare ups that sideline me; even walked with a cane for a while. That was only when I knew I would be on my feet a while and only until the flare subsided. I am hopeful that the weight was a major factor and that I will be less prone to it. I also hope that building up muscle will reduce the strain that is directly on the joints. Keeping the ball from grinding in the socket in my shoulders, for example. But like losing weight, once I am happy with the shape I am in I think I need to go into more of a maintenance mode to stay in shape and not push too hard. I might make an exception for the occasional long paddle on the SUP though. I am really enjoying that.

I can understand what you have said. When I purchased my watch, I began to become a maniac, always pushing myself. If I cannot walk a mile in around 15 minutes, I was not doing good enough. If I cannot average in the 140s heart rate on a walk, I feel I need to do better next time. Also I would like to see my heart rate above 160 for at least a brief amount of time. As my body is becoming conditioned to exersize, the above is becoming more difficult to do. This is why I am happy I found that long hill. I want to be able to walk very fast up that hill one of these days. At 59, I am getting old. What I find interesting is that online I found this 70 year old who not walks but runs 15 to 20 miles a week. Probably ten minute miles. Amazing.

MFP calories 1,178. Apple Watch steps 4,236.
Water intake 67.6oz

I have walked 9,153 steps so far. I exersized twice today. On one I walked 2.5 miles going up a bunch of hills. I burned 287 calories. I also walking 1.5 miles around my townhome complex. I burned 166 calories doing this. My run stats are below my average but the hills were not easy. Some of them were kind of steep. I think I am finding out that my cardio fitness is getting ahead of the fitness of my legs. I did not need to push myself allot to end up with tiring legs. That is why my heart rate only averaged 133 bpm which is a mild cardio exersize.

This together with an adjustment by MFP gave me a calorie target of 2600 calories. I ate 2477 calories. This includes that apple pie with an obnoxious amount of calories. This makes it 123 calories short for me. So I will have to figure out how to close this gap before the end of the day. I will come close. Perhaps a half a cup more of trail mix will do the job.

PS I see that MFP provided a negative adjustment despite the significant amount of steps made beyond my exersize. IMO this is unusual. I may be not understanding something here.

I have 12372 steps. Most of it was a 91 minute walk for 6.7 miles. Strava gave me fantasy calories of 1084 for that walk.

I ate 2241, which is 443 less than the total with the walk in it using Strava'a numbers, which I let auto post. I feel like it was too much. I am hoping to get in a couple of hours of paddling tomorrow afternoon.

I will weigh in the morning. I feel like I ate too much today and expect it to be above 160, but not much.

1084 calories? I do not think so! Depending on how much effort I put into my walks, I average 115 calories per mile. But you are in better shape than I am. Maybe you burn off less than 100 calories a mile? So this makes for at most 670 calories, and probably less. So I think your conservative 443 calories that you pegged for the exercise is more accurate than the 1084 calories. I have a similar problem with my watch which overstates the calories for normal daily activity. MFP adjusts it down for me in a significant way which is what it should do.

I am anxious to find out how my weight will change now that I am following MFPs daily goal for calories. This should prove to be interesting. If I continue to gain weight, then I will start taking a percentage off of what MFP states as my calorie goal. I can start by dropping calories stated for normal daily activity. My maintenance calories without exercise calculates to be about 2090 which should include a good part of this.

Actually, I left 443 as still available, so I used 641, which is close to what you computed. I think yesterday was largely a wash, but that Wednesday "caught up" with me. Wednesday I logged 45 minutes of paddling for 221 calories and then went 55 over, so really 276. I actually paddled 90 minutes and 65 of them were nearly non stop and high effort. I probably burned 600+ in actuality. So, what do I mean by "caught up"? I was expecting 160 or more this morning because I felt like I ate too much yesterday. I weigh 157.8, the lowest reading I have seen so far.

Your percentage idea is interesting. I enter my own base calories because the estimate is too high. I shave exercise calories because the estimate is too high. I am not just kidding myself; I have stayed around 160 several weeks so I am eating maintenance or nearly so until recently when I dropped my base by 100 and now may be seeing a slow creep down. Had I used mfp's setting of 1910 and accepted the full 1084 calories from Strava, that would be roughly 3000 calories and I think ~2100 would have been more accurate, which is 70% of what mfp calculates. That's a pretty big fudge factor (mmm - fudge!) but I think Strava was off way more than mfp. Maybe I should switch walks back to MMW. I like Strava more for paddling.

I weigh 179 now. One more weigh in like this and I will start to adjust my calories burned for every day. Like I mentioned before, I will start by including only calories burned from exersize. Maybe I should start doing this now? So let’s see how much I weigh tomorrow.

I will exersize today, but for today I will skip the hill and walk along the main roads to a restaurant two miles away. I do not think this will be as much as a workout, so I may run for brief periods of time. I have been walking when it is 100 degrees out. For some reason, this does not bother me much. I just do not like the days where the sun is more intense than this. I end up getting a sun burn, but it is not too bad.

When it gets over 100 degrees, I will have to walk earlier in the morning. It gets 105 to 110 degrees out during the summer, with a year every now and then up to 115. Some say it is a “dry” heat, but when it gets really hot, like not much over 100 degrees, this “dry” heat makes no difference at all. It is simply really hot outside.

A percentage off from what is stated by MFP will only work if my watch is consistent. So if I walk an extra mile, it still will be strictly the same percentage off. If this turns out not to be the case where I have to vary the percentage I take off, then I will have to find some other way. My watch uses heart rate as part of the calculation for my calories burned, besides VOmax, which is how fit I am. Of course distance is an impAs I become healthier, the heart rate for the same exersize will go down. The indicator for my health will go up having a simular effect to the lower heart rate. I will have to adjust accordingly, or just do something different to keep my heart rate up there. That would help keepng the calculation the same for a much longer period of time since the watch is very stingy about how it evaluates my fitness.

PS I think you are essentially using two percentages depending on how strenuous the exersize is, like the difference between walking and paddling. You appear to be doing this effectively. Good job!

Paddling is hard to get right because there is a wide range of calories burned. You can't even base it on speed; I have a 9'6" inflatable board shaped more for surfing than touring. The 4 guys I paddled with last Thursday were on 14' racing hardboards. They had less resistance per stroke, more acceleration per stroke, more glide (less deceleration) between strokes and tracked better. They went faster with less effort. Look at the ranges within each type of SUP paddling and the range across types:

(click on picture if it is too small for you to read)


There is no way an app can get that right for every situation.

Yes, I agree. This is why I am going to use my watch only for for walking, running, and hiking. They are all basically the same except for hiking in the mountains where there can be quick changes in elevation. I do not know if my app is intelligent enough to take this into account. I would like to see. I enjoy hiking once I am in enough shape for it. The watch is actually programmed for over a dozen type of activities. However, I do not think it can be made to be accurate enough for all the different types of exersize. Garmin is known for their running watches, so I would think they would get this part right. Oh yes, I will add in walking/running on an indoor treadmill.

Well, the total steps for today is 10,444. I walked 4.5 miles burning 473 calories. My average heart rate was only in the 130s, so it was a mild cardio workout, except when I ran for a brief period of time three times on my walk. This allowed me for the first two miles to do about 15 minute miles. I did manage to get my heart rate up to 161 for a brief amount of time. These specific stats are good. The calories burned by exersize alng with the adjustment made by MFP places my target at 2,628 calories. By he end of the day, I will have consumed 2,550 calories. This includes a nice slice of apple pie with a scoop of ice cream. I do not have any longer my trail mix to make up for the difference. Tomorrow I will take a break from intensive exersize by just walking around my townhome complex at a brisk pace for four miles. No big deal. I can do it in two parts.

I had over 10000 "steps" yesterday but did not log them because that would have been a double entry. they were mostly paddle strokes. I paddled 5.7 miles.

I had 2395 calories yesterday and for once a high total like that did not seem like too much. The paddling was serious hard work. I almost left it 200 lower, but my protein number was low so I picked up a Greek yogurt and a little pack of wafer sliced turkey when I was at the grocery store. I probably didn't really need to since I spiked protein so high the day before pigging out on shrimp.

I weigh 178 but I am a tenth of a pound from 179. I will take a break from my regular exersize by walking around my townhome complex, two miles this morning, and two miles this evening. If I weigh well into 179 pounds tomorrow, I will start to reduce the calorie figure that MFP provides me. I first will only count the calories that are involved with exersize, and not from daily activity.

I may eat one of those meals for dinner that I purchased from TJs. Many of their meals are very expensive, and at the same time provide a small amount of food. I can eat two of them for dinner. So next time I will be more selective. I am finding that my grocery store has some interesting stuff at a cheaper price, like very tasty meals from PF Changs. I still do like TJs Italian meatballs.

Update: I see my resting heart rate is declining. This is another indication of my improving health. Some fit people have RHR well into the 50s. Mine has been 67 for weeks until recently.

Took a long walk this morning; only logged part of it. I turned MMW on and off during the walk. I mowed the lawn and logged part of it. I am already over 15k and logging has given me 521 calories. Between the walking and mowing, it was about 2 hours. 45 minutes of it (mowing) was strenuous; I live on a hill and the self propelled mower doesn't help as much as it used to. I think part of the problem is I go faster than it does. Anyway, calories for the burn seem about right.