Weight Loss and exercise

I'd like to join this thread. I want to lose 20 lbs. I weigh 170 right now. Since going on lexapro last year, I have gained 15 lbs...

Right now I'm eating carrots and dip. I honestly do not have much motivation to lose weight. I would rather: strive for 5, and exercise for my mental health consistently. Perhaps I can even shed some lbs that way.

I lost my mind again today. Even accepting "fantasy calories" from MMW and mfp's entry for swimming, I am 700 over. It's like I am determined not to go under 155. It is becoming really obvious to me that I will not be able to stop logging everyday and weighing often for a long time if ever. I lost the weight and did the exercise and I am in great shape but seem determined to wreck it. I will not let it happen. Time to tighten down the screws yet again.

My weight is fine right now; it's the habits that borders on binge behavior that I worry about. I ate about 1000 more calories than I planned today. Weather forecast looks good for Wednesday and I will probably put in another long paddle to bail me out but I have to stop doing this.

I swam 40 minutes. I planned to swim 2 hours but a nearby storm was close enough to hear the thunder and they closed the pool for a while. It never actually rained here but the storm stayed nearby where you could hear the rolling thunder a while. So I walked a couple of miles. Planned to walk more but just took too much time for dinner and other things around the house. I accepted 453 calories for the swimming and walking which is probably high. Hard to say with swimming; that was 40 minutes of continuous swimming, never stopping.

Consumed 2766 calories and will likely have another peach before bed. Then the plan is to eat light tomorrow then weigh Wednesday morning. If the weather is good, Wednesday afternoon I will paddle 10 or 12 miles and get away with more ridiculous behavior.

mfp on the web is finally working again...

I think I am losing my mind but in other ways. I will not go there right now. No exercise and very low step count, so my target is 2300 calories. I have consumed 2,197 calories. Perhaps I will finish off a couple of cinnamon graham crackers. That will be about 130 calories.

Update:

When I tried out my new and probably more accurate heart rate chest strap, I had a surprise. I did very short running intervals for a half a mile. The watch registered sixty calories. Extrapolated to one mile, adjusting for BMR, this comes out to 105 calories a mile. I am sure this will go up more if I would have continued this way for miles becoming more tired.

This is the closest to reality this watch has ever been. Actually since I was doing running intervals, this calorie figure may be pretty close to being accurate. Actually, the figure I had before accounting for BMR may be close to being accurate, which is 125 calories. I will have to check this out. I am looking forward to what tomorrow will bring. Validating which one is correct may require just using each value over a period of a week or two to see what stabilizes my weight.

@UpDownAround: Which figure do you think is closer to being accurate for me? 105 or 125 calories per mile? I was running 25% of the time which can dramatically increase the calories burned for that portion of the exercise. I went up and down hills to end at the same altitude. As far as fitness goes, running in very brief intervals and walking very fast the rest of the time really tires me out by the end of each mile.

@Tucson, Pretty sure we looked at these charts in an earlier discussion:
How Many Calories Are Burned Walking per Mile?

Here is an article with a good calculator for running:
Calorie Burn Calculator | Calories Burned Running

Walking 4 mph would be about 95 calories per mile for your weight and running at 6 mph would be 140. It would be easier if you thought about % in distance rather than time.

In 45 minutes of walking at 4 mph, you would walk 3 miles and burn 285 calories.
in 15 minutes of running 6 mph, you would run 1.5 miles and burn 210.
So 495 for 4.5 miles = 110 calories per mile.

That's if you believe the articles I linked are valid and if those are your speeds. For different speeds, plug in different numbers and do the same calculation.

I weigh 171 pounds now. I will exercise before it gets too hot outside, maybe anywhere from two to four miles doing my run intervals.
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My concern is IMO heart rate definitely needs to be considered. Fitness level is important too. Of course both can loosely correlate. This would also handle that case where you are tired but still pushing yourself to go further. This is where calories burned per mile increases. The question in my case is how much of a difference will this make?

According to your references, I would be burning 110 calories per mile, which on the surface sounds “reasonable”. Keep in mind a person of your fitness level will be noticeably less as I have seen by how you adjust calories down very significantly. Perhaps the calorie estimates you have been getting would still be high for you even not considering your fitness level? So if this 110 is valid, I think it would be reasonable to assume that in my case I am burning more calories per mile.

On average, how much have you had to adjust those calorie estimates down for yourself? I have seen you halve them. There are times you take what appears to be significant exercise and not log them at all. This still worked for you, but you were trying to lose weight at the time. You are now using 50 calories per mile for walking. Your calculations based on that calorie calculator in that article results in over 90 calories per mile burned while walking. I do not think your excellent fitness level can explain all of this difference. Using you as an example, just allowing for differences in fitness level, I still could be burning much less than 100 calories per mile.

@Tucson,

Even though I log everything, there are times I get sloppy about measuring and estimate or may forget something on these crazy days where I am eating lots of smallish things. When I was maintaining a pretty big deficit for losing, this mattered less and I was less prone to being sloppy. I don't think that accounts for all that much though; I am mostly still weighing things and maintaining some accuracy.

It's usually only a couple of hundred I shave and not every day. I think I am still trending down despite my crazy binge days. If I get down into the 150-155 range I will need to stop that trend.

BTW, I have avoided snacking on anything except kale this morning and with lunch finished, I am at 599 calories. We are planning grilled halibut and asparagus for dinner. I might have a little watermelon after that. Hoping to finish out the day ~1000 calories.

I have just exercised, but this time, for a shorter two mile distance. Yesterday’s previous value of 125 calories per mile was when I went only a half a mile at an average heart rate of 133. Keep in mind the net calorie burn may actually be 105. Anyway, I was not putting myself out too much here. So I did not burn up that many calories. This time today I really pushed myself. I was exhausted at the end of each mile. My pace averaged a record 14 minutes per mile. My heart rate averaged about 150, and toward the end with excursions above 170 bpm. Not a good idea. My watch tells me I burned 140 calories a mile. This difference makes sense, but the actual values may be off. So I will be using the values from the watch as gross calories burned.

My watch tells me that I have burned 258 calories on my running intervals. So this means that when considering BMR, the net calories burned comes out to 221 calories for 1.87 miles. This comes out 118 calories per mile. I do not think this figure is too far off. This compares to yesterday’s value of 105 calories per mile.

I find my watch is designed to be accurate for only the more intensive exercises. I guess marathon runners do not give themselves points for walking. I walked an additional 0.37 miles at 3.4 mph. I did not record all of my walking. Still, this is not worth considering. Now if I need to consider my walking today, I need something to go by which is better than nothing, like using MET values. There are problems with using MET values such as it does not consider a way from this to consider ones resting metabolism, or estimate basically the actual physical exertion involved for a specific individual doing a specific exercise.

I looked up the recent documentation from the organization that establishes a reference of MET values for each activity. MET values used to calculate calories burned can underestimate by 25% or much more just on differences in ones BMR alone. One scientific study supports this and more. I have calculated an estimate of the conversion factor in order for me to calculate a more accurate MET for myself. This turns out to be 1.23, which makes for a 23% difference or even more, depending how you calculate BMR. Now this makes more sense to me. Keep in mind using this conservative 23% difference applied to let’s say 400 calories of exercise would still make for a difference of at least 92 calories. This is another example of calculations given online working better for fitter individuals. This and the BMR calculators themselves.

Note that BMR is Basal Metabolic Rate. There are calculators for this on the Net. The calculation for the correction factor for MET values using BMR is given on that orginization’s website found below. There you will also find MET values for thousands of activities.

https://sites.google.com/site/compen...corrected-mets

I swam an hour today. mfp say 428 and I edited down to 350. I went back to yesterday and edited exercise calories down to more believable numbers and moved a bunch of food forward to today.

I ended up with 1943 for yesterday with a goal of 1945. Exercise was edited back to 345. The log is attached. With the food moved forward to today and with the swimming, I have 288 calories left. I will likely go over that with dinner but only have a small amount to roll to tomorrow. I might have a little watermelon or unsweetened applesauce later, though. Weighing in the morning might not be awful.

Yesterday (adjusted with a lot of food rolled forward):

163 today. I know I got down to 153, at this point I just want to get back to 158.

Today wasn’t too bad. About 1,200 calories.

Exercise - Logged 350 for swimming an hour.

Food - Logged 1945 of a 1950 goal as today. Lots rolled forward from yesterday. Doing that can make some entries look odd. I didn't really eat 6 small peaches today. Ended up rolling forward 250. One of my kids baked some cookies that just smelled too good.

Hopefully, I will paddle tomorrow. I will try not to overdo it during the day in case storms roll in and the paddle gets cancelled.

I weigh in the morning.

@UpDownAround: You must live very close to water. This is nice! I wish this would be the case for me. I used to live in Michigan. This is a state of a “thousand” inland lakes, besides the Great Lakes themselves. I miss those times on the water. Living on the ocean would be even better.

So since I have burned 221 calories today exercising, this gives me a target of 2521 calories. I will have consumed 2,612 calories by the end of the day. So this is an overage of only about 90 calories. Not too bad. This is due to my dessert of rich vanilla icecream with blueberry compote topped by homemade whipped cream. This is my reward for exercise. I do enjoy my exercise!

@Tucson - The closest lake of much size is about 15 miles from my house. there is a bigger one about 25 miles away, a river about 20 miles away. a different big lake about 10 miles from my office, a creek that can be paddled upstream of a dam about 2 miles from my office, a couple of sounds are about 2 hours away and the beach is 2.5 to 3 hours away. So I have a few choices.

This morning was a shocker. I weighed several times and my scale was being oddly inconsistent. But the range it kept bouncing between was 153.4 to 154.4.

My weight is 172 pounds. I will not exercise today. I am still very tired and a bit sore. This is the first time I felt this way. I must of knocked out a good exercise yesterday despite it being only about 2 miles. This evening I may walk a mile around my complex at only a moderate pace. I will see about this.

I really hope i have a good long paddle tonight. i am down to 225 calories left for today - I will eat a protein bar out on the lake that is 200. Of course, if I am out on the lake eating the protein bar, that means I am paddling. If I am not paddling, I will eat a light dinner and roll some calories to tomorrow or just write them off.

I went early and paddled 5 miles and then the weather interfered with the group paddle, but 5 miles was enough for me to make today work with nothing rolled over into tomorrow. Logged 600 calories burned.

2204 calories consumed, just 4 over the 2200 goal with the exercise.

Next weigh in on Friday morning.

Swam for 68 minutes non stop. Accepted the 479 calories for "leisurely swimming". I do swim slow.

2077 calories; pretty much right at goal.

I will weigh in the morning. Lots of sodium tonight so it will probably be higher than yesterday's 154 (which I forgot to mention is a new low).

My running monologue continues (where are you @Tucson?)...

Another surprise - I weigh 153.6 this morning; another new low. I am not sure if I am catching a couple of low spikes or if I have actually made it below 155. 150-155 is a good range for me. I might lose down to 149 as a stunt - just to take a picture of the scale and then bulk up a little to get back to 153. But I am getting ahead of myself. First I need to see if I am really trending lower or if this is just low spikes.

@UpDownAround: I am here now. I am a bit concerned about your weight loss. What is your BMI right now?

I ate over at my ex’s yesterday, so I do not have an idea of how many calories I ate. I still weigh 172. I hope my weight has stabilized. Then I can intelligently and slowly put on more weight. I want my watch to work for me in this regard. But if does not, that will be OK too. My watch would just make it easier for me. I did walk almost a mile completely uphill with my stepson. Since I have not exercised in several days, I noticed that I can not perform as well. But this will change.

I have not been going to McDonalds anymore. I have to watch my money situation. From time to time, I do go to Denny’s for their $2 pancake meal. I use butter which helps boost the calories. I picked up three prepared meals this time. Two of them are PF Chang meals, and one was Quiche Lorraine . I do like quiche. All of this is good stuff!

As the Japanese would say, “sayonara” (さよなら) for now. I will be back later today.

162 today. I’m hoping to be at 159 on Tuesday.

I have lost 8 pounds of water weight in a week before. I was feeling sick though. So maybe I was legitimately sick that time.

Today it was around 1,200.

@Tucson - BMI is 23.8 if I really am 154 (not convinced yet; only 2 weigh ins have been that low). I am really 5'7.5" even though I calculated my original goal at 5'8" which made 164 the point at which I went under 25. So anywhere in the 150s is very healthy for me.

Took my daughter to college today. Dorm move in was mid-day and ended up missing lunch and doing a fair amount of walking; about 3 miles, which I logged as 127 calories.

Consumed 1719 calories and over half of it was fish and chips for dinner at TGI Fridays. They have very few choices below 750 calories, though I could have gotten a turkey burger at about 550. Lots of breading and oil in the fish and chips.

I will weigh on Sunday.