Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet
3 years ago
> Write down what you eat for a while and its calories. Weigh yourself daily as well and write that down too. If after a week your weight went up: Your calories are above your TDEE. If it went down: Your calories are under your TDEE.
Not necessarily. It is important to remember that water weighs ~1lb/pt and there are a lot of things that affect how much water your body is carrying at any given moment. Depending on your body mass, it is not unrealistic to see 5lbs of fluctuation in a single day. On a calorie restricted diet your body will tend to retain water (because it does this for pretty much any stressor), so you may actually see a slight increase in body weight at first even though your TDEE is above your caloric intake.
A more reliable approach, in my opinion, is to do the TDEE calculation for your target weight and set that as your calorie limit.
That's why they are telling you (as is common) to compare the results on a weekly basis which reduces the variance. TDEE calculations from scratch are much much more unreliable than empirically finding out and mostly good for a starting point.
Yes, that’s why I suggested weekly
You can of course calculate the TDEE of your target weight but like you implied, unless you know your own, based on your own metabolism and intake, the data is never going to be accurate
For example I eat much less than my bodybuilder friends. When I went with the calories that they recommended to me I gained so much fat with a very active workout schedule and noone had a explanation why. Maybe it’s hormones, maybe medicine I take, maybe something else. I now eat much less than you’d expect from a person with my height and age, but I still gain weight, because my actual calculated TDEE is comparatively low
Having that data on hand as a reference is incredibly helpful to plan my weight progress