Not losing the amount you want despite counting?

Hello loseit folks! I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this community and the help and motivation it provides for myself and others. I wanted to share my own thoughts and tips regarding one possible cause of lack of weight loss despite counting calories.

Especially for folks with low TDEEs, there is a low margin of error for weight loss. We all know how to lose weight here. Calorie deficit. But I’ve noticed many posts here get too caught up in the first part (calorie deficit) while forgetting the second most important thing. Calorie deficit over a consistent and long period of time. You can starve yourself 4 days a week and feel miserable doing it, but if you are overeating the rest of the week you may not lose weight. For many here, I wonder if a weekly calorie goal would allow more flexibility and better results than just a daily calorie goal.

For example, let’s say you have a TDEE of 1700. You aim for an average of 1200 calories a day for a weekly calorie deficit of 3500 calories, providing one pound lost each week. Let’s say this individual is meticulously weighing every morsel and logging accurately, no secret eating, binging, etc.

Now, it is very common for calorie counts on foods to be somewhat inaccurate. The calories listed for a food exists with a margin of error. So that piece of bread that says 90 calories could actually being somewhere in the neighborhood of 90-110 calories. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3605747/. The FDA allows up to a 20 percent discrepancy on calorie counts.

Let’s keep a modest estimate since the average listed in this particular study was 8% more calories than what was listed on the package. So instead of 1200 calories, you are eating around 1300. Instead of a weekly 3500 deficit, you are at 2,800. So now instead of losing 1 pound a week, you are losing about .8 pounds a week. Over the course of 12 weeks instead of losing 12 pounds you have lost 9.6. Ok.

But that is assuming you are eating at a deficit every single day. But we are all humans here. Let’s say you have 5 perfect days a week, one day where you eat at maintenance, and one “cheat” day where you are eating over maintenance.

For the 5 perfect days you are at a 2,000 calorie deficit ( 5*(1700-1300)=2000). That would be about .57 pounds lost a week. For one day you ate at maintenance and neither added nor subtracted from your weekly deficit. On one day you ate over maintenance. Let’s say you ate 2,200 calories, exactly 500 over your TDEE. Your weekly deficit is now at 1500 for less than half a pound lost a week.

Factor in other weight loss wreckers such as not entering the correct portion size, not counting every single bite you put in your mouth, regularly going over your daily goal calories, and binging, and you can easily not lose weight despite sticking to your diet most days.

submitted by /u/Gdawg18
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