Posting this cause it helped me and my wife keep motivated to lose the pounds so it might help others.
My wife and I had both let ourselves get out of shape, working long hours, violation drift of what counts as a normal diet. We've recently moved to the states, working life is more chilled, weather is good, so we decided to sort our diet and lifestyle out. We did it simply by calorie counting using myfitnesspal. I really recommend it. It really teaches you what the energy content of your food is and how to make meals that are filling and low calorie. I'm a firm believer that weight is as straight forward as if energy in < energy out then weight reduces.
Anyway, when you first start out it can be difficult. You have to get used to substantially smaller portions and you find yourself hungry a lot of the time. My wife found an absolute killer to her motivation and faith in keeping with the diet was when she'd weigh herself and weigh more than on the previous occasion. Many times I'd reason with her that you have to expect ~4lbs of variation throughout the day in your weight due to a multitude of factors: how hydrated you are, how empty your bladder is, when you last took a dump, for women the variability of total body fluid volume with menstruation, etc. I pointed out that with hardcore dieting you still only lose ~2lbs/week (I know with keto, etc people report much higher rates of loss so I'll put that to a side - I'm referring to calorie counting). The result of this variation is that is perfectly conceivable and occurs frequently that despite running a calorie deficit and losing body fat the scales can tell you you're heavier - cause you are. It's simply the other factors that have changed, not that you've put on fat mysteriously whilst in a calorie deficit. Anyway, to help reassure her and keep her motivated I made this excel spreadsheet.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y4W6SJZqzhQZJRGjNf6bx31Dqh14MBMx2HfreNPjZhk/edit?usp=sharing
It's a very simple concept. You weigh yourself as often as you'd like, the more often the more accurate and reassuring it will be, it graphs your weight over time and produces a trend line showing your rate of weight loss. It's best to weigh at least twice/day and try to avoid gaming it i.e. just reporting lower weights. Each point also has standard error bars which help demonstrate the limits of the variation of a given measurement. Those with a maths grounding will understand but for those who don't you can imagine the bars as showing where your weight might have been had you taken a pee before hand, or if you hadn't just had a glass of water an hour ago, etc. Note that the error bars won't work in the google docs link - if you want them just import into excel. The key though is the trend line, if that's going down, you're losing weight regardless of what the most recent weight is.
As an extra feature I also added columns for daily calorie intake, current calorie goal, deficit below calorie goal, current BMR requirement, deficit below BMR and cumulative deficit below BMR.
In short the deficit below calorie goal column is just positive reinforcement to show that you carry on sticking to what you need to do to lose weight and also a little check on how many days you don't meet your target. More important is the current BMR requirement and current deficit below this. For those who don't know BMR = Basal Metabolic Rate - the amount of calories you use in a day simply by living. The deficit below this is this number + the number of calories you've burnt exercising that day - calories you've eaten. So this column aims to show your energy deficit over the day which will translate to your weight (fat) loss that day. The cumulative column then shows it over the duration of the diet. From this you can work out how much weight you might expect to lose as 1lb of fat equates to ~3500 calories. So you can use it to check how good you are at calorie counting i.e. that you're capturing all the info.
Finally there are columns that calculate your average weekly weight loss (the average of 1 week's weights - the average of the weights the following week and another that projects how much weight loss you might expect based on your calorie deficit.
Hope some find this helpful, it certainly helped us stick at it. To use it just wipe the current data, keep the formulae and input your own BMR. Link to a BMR calculator https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html
Any questions, just shoot.
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