Calorie Question
Anyway, these days on a very bad day I eat 1500 calories, but more often less than 1000. Most often I do not count calories, since as long as I am losing 3 lbs / week I am happy. If I stall, which happened early on, I up the exercise and play around with my caloric intake and that does the trick.
Some take into account lean body mass but then forget to take into account fat mass, which while less important is still part of the equation, especially for extremely overweight people.
Muscle burns 30-50 calories a pound, fat burns about 3 calories a pound. Without separating those you can't even get close to a decent estimate.
Beyond that you have differences in absorption, even without surgery doctors have found overweight people often have longer intestines and are capable of absorbing more energy from a given meal than your average joe.
And then there is the fact that your body adjusts your metabolism to maintain a target weight. That's where these online calculators go furthest off the rails. They make the assumption that if you need 2500 calories a day to maintain that by dropping to 250 calories a day you would lose half a pound a week, or by adding 250 calories a day you would gain half a pound a week. The problem is studies have show that for the normal person at a healthy weight, if they add or subtract up to 10% of their normal calories there body will actually burn extra calories (doing nothing at all, just sitting on the couch) or run more efficiently to not burn the calories to stay at at a steady state. So it's more accurate to say if you cut to 2000 calories a day you would lose half a pound a week, not a pound a week due to your body compensating. NOBODY seems to factor that one in.
That's why the cutting back just a little is so futile for most people.
And as much as people would love to think it's muscle when they are stalling, when you're taking in 1000-1500 calories a day and not doing resistance training you are not packing on muscle. I'm two weeks out, have been the same weight for 8 days at 800 calories a day. I would love to think I'm just losing fat and packing on muscle but it just ain't so.
"Let's get small." - Steve Martin
Since 10 lbs of muscle burns 300-500 calories a day, those guys really do burn some serious calories every day.
Here is a link to some different forumulas, the ones using lean body mass are more accurate. Or you can go to a hospital and have them measure your oxygen usage over time to get a really accurate number
http://www.building-muscle101.com/calorie-calculator.html
You are dead nuts on with your analysis of calorie estimators, Crashing. Unless you know your body fat % vs. lean body mass, the results are at best a total swag. Since most of us don't know this information, relying on an estimator to tell us how many calories to take in daily is worthless. The best guide is to rely on the info provided here on the board from personal experiences and from your nuts recommendations. Also, I agree with your comment as to not being deceived by the "I'm packing on more muscle thus no weight loss" theory. Although it's true, I feel most of us aren't gaining that much muscle to really be the reason for a stall. The real culprit for a stall is usually one of two things imo: 1) It's the body temporarily adjusting for "starvation mode." 2) We're not sticking with the diet and exercise program by either not limiting our calories or by not burning them up with exercise. Stick with the program and it'll work out over the long haul. Simple as that imho. Boner
