What I Learned From Tracking My Calorie Burn for a Year

It’s been over a year since I started using MacroFactor, an app that calculates TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) in real time. Paid app, but As pointed out when it came out, there is a free tool that handles the same calculation. Whatever method you use to track your TDEE, the results are enlightening. I certainly thought so.

What is TDEE?

Before explaining what we’ve learned, here’s a quick refresher on TDEE. As the name suggests, it’s your accountant. total Daily energy expenditure, or calorie burn. This includes the calories you burn through exercise, the calories you burn by walking around and fidgeting, and the calories your body burns just to keep the lights on, so to speak.

TDEE is often estimated using a formula. in this way, from tdeecalculator.net. You put your height, weight, age, gender, and activity level into the site and it estimates you at 2,090 calories per day. Spoiler alert: Everyone is different, and that rough estimate is nowhere near what you’d get using more accurate methods.

Some people try to get a better sense of their TDEE by entering numbers as if they weren’t doing structured exercise and adding calories burned to their fitness tracker reports for exercise sessions. Let’s say the calculator thinks you’ve burned 1,700 calories just by being there, then runs 5 miles and records that you’ve burned another 500 calories. It will be 2200 yen in one day.However Exercise doesn’t burn as many calories as you thinkso the numbers may be off.

Why does your TDEE matter?

If you eat more than your TDEE, you’ll gain weight. If you eat less than your TDEE, you’ll lose weight. That’s the whole idea behind the concept of a Calorie deficit or surplus. (If you eat the same amount of TDEE, your weight should stay the same.) There are many caveats to this process, but it’s the model we’re working with.

The MacroFactor app and earlier spreadsheets ask you to track your calorie intake and weight. Eat some enchiladas and log them in the app (480 calories). Eat a banana (105 calories) or something later. By the end of the day, calculate the total calories I ate.

Meanwhile, I weigh every day, or at least most days. If he’s losing about a pound a week, he’s probably burning about 500 more calories than he eats in a day. So if you’re eating 2,000 calories on average, your TDEE should be 2,500. If your weight is stable, the amount you are eating should equal your TDEE.

The TDEE calculation is model

People often chant “calories in, calories out” as if it were. as reliable as the law of thermodynamics. However, in practice this is not the case.The numbers we have available are Labeled Calories from food packages and databases, and what we can do is Quote Our calorie burn can come from any of a variety of sources.Energy is neither created nor destroyed in the universe, but the way we measure food and movement does not represent a rigorous description of energy in the physical sense. Two biochemists once got hookedexpecting different metabolic processes to produce the same energy output is real thermodynamic violation)

For example, how many calories your body can actually extract from food depends on factors such as the type of food and your gut microbiome, which varies from person to person, and can vary from day to day for the same person. food labels cannot accurately reflect all of them.

Similarly, the number of calories you get from a particular food is also an approximation. If you eat a banana, record it as the same food every day (“Banana, medium, 7-7-7/8 inches long”) and record the same 105 calories in your food record each day.However, some of those bananas are smaller and some larger than others, releasing more sugar as they ripen. Exactly 105 calories.

Similarly, there are many uncertainties regarding calories burned. As he gets better at running, he runs more efficiently (at the same pace he burns fewer calories per mile). Even if you’re using TDEE to measure calories burned based on your weight, there are more things than burning or putting on fat that can change your weight. If you eat salty food, you will gain weight the next morning. A few beers will dehydrate you a little bit and you’ll see your weight drop. This might change his calculated TDEE, but it doesn’t change how many calories your body is actually burning.

our imprecise measure “calorie intake” mathematically balances the inaccurate measurements of “Burning calories” is not a fundamental truth of the universe.that we simply declare Then run some numbers to see what you can learn using those assumptions. Alternatively, scientists like to say: All models are wrong.some models are usefulAnd this has been pretty helpful to me.

My actual TDEE is quite different from the calculator

Let’s go back to the quote taken from tdeecalculator.net. I’m probably consuming 2,090 calories per day. Well, according to MacroFactor, my spending varied from 2,383 (when I started using it) to 2,179 (when I got sick with COVID and skipped all my workouts for a week) to 2,516 (a few days ago).

Even with the caveats above, this information is still useful. I know that if I want to gain weight to allow muscle growth, I need to eat a total of 2,516 calories or more of food on an average day. calculates and recommends specific calorie goals based on your current TDEE and the weight gain or loss you are trying to achieve.)

Exercise does not increase TDEE as much as expected

Did your exercise change while you were recording? Yes. However, it is not always in the direction indicated by TDEE. Last winter I rode my stationary bike almost every day and did some short strength training sessions in between busy days. TDEE is 100-200 calories higher than when I was using the Peloton app continuously.

Given what we know about metabolism, it’s not surprising.While exercise can temporarily increase calories, Your body tends to adapt to conserve energy elsewhere When you’re spending money on exercise. An active person may have a higher TDEE than a less active person, but not as much as one would expect.

This is also why it doesn’t make sense to track the calories you burn in each workout. I don’t track most of my workouts, so sadly I can’t go back and compare estimates. I’m more confident than ever to say that The number on your fitness watch does not represent how many calories you actually added to your total calories burned for the day.

Eating more increases TDEE

If you increase your physical activity and still don’t burn enough calories, do Do I get those spikes and valleys all over the graph? The most noticeable difference is simply how much I am eating.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the more you eat, the higher your burn. This may be because my body has more fuel available and thus spends more on activities and metabolic processes that might otherwise go unbudgeted. You might be a little more on a tight budget when you’re eating at.

But that’s not the only possible explanation. Remember that the TDEE model assumes that TDEE is a single number, inferred from changes in intake and body weight.I always do maintenance rangeFor me, it might be something like 2,350 to 2,550 calories. Reports as a “true” TDEE. If you want to gain weight, you have to go over the high end of that range, and the higher number looks like my true TDEE.

This is kind of an intuitive hypothesis, but it’s consistent with my observations. Whatever the explanation, simply switching from a weight loss diet to a weight gain diet can “add” a few hundred calories to your TDEE. diet.

Muscle mass increases TDEE

This is harder to track month to month because muscle growth is much slower, but looking back further than last year, I can see that my body burned a lot more calories at the same activity level. was losing weight on 1,800 calories a day, but was able to gain weight in the late to mid-2000s. Last year, before I started using Macrofactors, I was gaining weight at about 2,700 to 2,800 calories per day.

My maintenance burn is now at 2,500. If you want to lose weight, you need to go down to about 2,100 calories per day. To get it, you need to eat close to 3,000.

why? We know that lean body mass (including but not limited to muscle) affects metabolism. Learn more about.Simply put, the bigger the body and the more non-adipose tissue, the higher the metabolism.

Looking back at the workouts I did years ago, when TDEE was in the late 2000s, I was smaller, maybe 15 pounds lighter, and had a lot less muscle mass. all The difference is muscle, but probably a lot of it. And I wasn’t that strong, so I was working with lighter weights.The working weight for a series of squats is probably 50 pounds more than I was back then. That adds up when it comes to my total calorie burn.