Weight Loss Question (How To Be In A Caloric Deficit)

[TBT]

I've recently gotten into exercises and weight-loss, and one thing that's very prominently said throughout my journey is that I need to be in a "caloric deficit", which means I need to burn more calories than I consume.

However, I'm a bit confused in this regard.
Say I consume 2000 calories in a day and burn 300 of those calories in a 45 minute workout, I'm still left with 1700 calories that I have eaten. How am I supposed to burn the rest of the 1700? My work is on a computer all day so I am rarely active other than my 45 minute gym sessions, 5 days a week.

Pardon me if I sound a bit ridiculous but I'm just confused. If someone could clear this up for me I'd much appreciate it haha, just trying to get in the swing of things

 

[Llama]

Hey TBT and welcome to our forum! You burn calories even when you´re asleep in your bed. How many depends on your how much active tissue your body has to keep going and it´s usually estimated going from your age, height, weight, gender, and activity level. There are many different sites on the internet that´ll give you an estimate, some of which may vary quite a bit. Here´s a link to NHS´ BMI calculator - it´ll give you an estimate of your daily total burn after you input your basics BMI calculator | Check your BMI

 

[TBT]

Hey TBT and welcome to our forum! You burn calories even when you´re asleep in your bed. How many depends on your how much active tissue your body has to keep going and it´s usually estimated going from your age, height, weight, gender, and activity level. There are many different sites on the internet that´ll give you an estimate, some of which may vary quite a bit. Here´s a link to NHS´ BMI calculator - it´ll give you an estimate of your daily total burn after you input your basics BMI calculator | Check your BMI

My BMI is around 24 and it's stated that to lose weight, I should be cutting around 1,708 calories per day, which is a 500 calorie per day deficit from my maintenance of 2,208 calories per day.

If I burn about 300 of those calories per workout, the remaining 1400 will burn when I'm asleep I assume?

 

[Llama]

Asleep, sitting around, digesting food, walking to the fridge... Whatever you do, your cells are breathing, reproducing, and generally doing things they need energy for 24/7. 1700 kcal/day sounds like a good amount for steady weightloss (around a pound per week if you have a 500 kcal/day deficit) and will allow you to eat a range of satisfying foods so you don´t have to be hungry all the time.

 

[TBT]

Asleep, sitting around, digesting food, walking to the fridge... Whatever you do, your cells are breathing, reproducing, and generally doing things they need energy for 24/7. 1700 kcal/day sounds like a good amount for steady weightloss (around a pound per week if you have a 500 kcal/day deficit) and will allow you to eat a range of satisfying foods so you don´t have to be hungry all the time.

Great! 0.5 pounds a week is a nice amount of weight loss in the long run.

So all I need to do is have a healthy diet whilst eating around 2200 calories and burning 500 calories a day in my gym session, and I should let my body do the rest of the burning throughout the day.

Since I don't get much other activity outside my work and gym session, would you say it's worth it to purchase a smart watch, or an app to help me count some extra steps around the house to lose some more calories?

 

[Llama]

So all I need to do is have a healthy diet whilst eating around 2200 calories and burning 500 calories a day in my gym session, and I should let my body do the rest of the burning throughout the day.

1700 calories, I think, not 2200? Although it depends on what you put into your calculator, of course. If you said you were inactive (no exercise) and it still gave you 2200 calories a day for maintenance then you´re right that eating 2200 calories and burning 500 extra in the gym should let you lose a pound per week. Just be careful keep up the intensity with your workouts because most cardio machines are a bit generous with the amount of energy they say you burn versus what you really burn. You´ll see about that soon enough though.
Things to watch out for in general:
- If you haven´t been working out up until now and you´re suddenly going for an hour you may be too sore to go every day and you´ll definitely retain water in your muscles for a couple of weeks, which may mask initial loss of fat on the scale. Don´t overdo it with the exercise and listen to your body to avoid injury.
- Count your calories carefully. It´s very easy to be off by as much as 400 calories a day if you´re not weighing or accurately measuring your food. And that would ruin your progress.
- If eating 2200 calories of healthy food a day is a drastic change from what you´d normally consume you may see a much bigger drop on the scale than you´d expect for the first week or two. That´s great, it feels amazing, and if you plan to keep eating healthily for the rest of your life it´s a 100% win BUT the extra drop is likely water weight, which would return within a day if you returned to your old diet.
- In general: the only weightloss program that works long-term is one you keep up long-term. If you go back to doing the things that made you gain weight in the first place the weight will come back. I struggle mightily at times but keeping a diary here helps to remind me why I´m trying to be healthy and the comments from my forum friends are excellent motivation. You are more than welcome to do the same.

 

[alligatorob]

Hey TBT, welcome to the forum!

I see you have gotten some great advice from LaMa, she knows what she's talking about and more knowledgeable than I, but here's my two cents anyway. Since I am not an expert this is based mostly on my own experience, which may help you. However I am aware we are all different, so you path to weight loss will be different from mine.

• Most of your calorie burn comes from just keeping your body alive, exercise does add to it, but not hugely. So most weight loss is through calorie reduction.
• Estimating exercise based calorie burn is hard and often inaccurate. Try a few different calculators and you will see a wide range of estimates for the same exercise. It is still a useful thing to do, but don't take the results as quantitatively accurate.
• When I was in my weight loss phase I did not count the exercise burn, I made sure I was in deficit without considering exercise. For me that worked pretty well.
• Now that I am in maintenance I do think about the exercise burn, but only qualitatively, right now I am closely tracking my weight as my primary metric. If I lose or gain I plan to adjust my diet accordingly. I recently had surgery so am not able to exercise a lot, so I did cut back my calories a bit to correct, only about 100 per day, not a lot.

Best of luck to you!

 

[overlandflyer]

My BMI is around 24 ...

you are actually right on the cusp of a healthy BMI, normally considered anything under 25 (yes, even 24.9). this is what a lot of people are shooting for. that's the good news. even better news is that you are apparently concerned enough to catch what you might perceive as a trend now.

things that would help... how old are you? how much control do you have over your diet (by diet i merely mean what you eat normally, or at least up until now)?

if you're still wondering where those extra calories go, search on "basal metabolic rate". this is an important number. the most common failure in weight loss (typically with "eat less, move more" diets) is when your BMR starts to decrease.

 

[TBT]

1700 calories, I think, not 2200? Although it depends on what you put into your calculator, of course. If you said you were inactive (no exercise) and it still gave you 2200 calories a day for maintenance then you´re right that eating 2200 calories and burning 500 extra in the gym should let you lose a pound per week. Just be careful keep up the intensity with your workouts because most cardio machines are a bit generous with the amount of energy they say you burn versus what you really burn. You´ll see about that soon enough though.
Things to watch out for in general:
- If you haven´t been working out up until now and you´re suddenly going for an hour you may be too sore to go every day and you´ll definitely retain water in your muscles for a couple of weeks, which may mask initial loss of fat on the scale. Don´t overdo it with the exercise and listen to your body to avoid injury.
- Count your calories carefully. It´s very easy to be off by as much as 400 calories a day if you´re not weighing or accurately measuring your food. And that would ruin your progress.
- If eating 2200 calories of healthy food a day is a drastic change from what you´d normally consume you may see a much bigger drop on the scale than you´d expect for the first week or two. That´s great, it feels amazing, and if you plan to keep eating healthily for the rest of your life it´s a 100% win BUT the extra drop is likely water weight, which would return within a day if you returned to your old diet.
- In general: the only weightloss program that works long-term is one you keep up long-term. If you go back to doing the things that made you gain weight in the first place the weight will come back. I struggle mightily at times but keeping a diary here helps to remind me why I´m trying to be healthy and the comments from my forum friends are excellent motivation. You are more than welcome to do the same.

I completely agree with these points and will start doing all of these, thanks! And yes I got mixed up with the number of calories at the time haha. The TDEE calculator recommends that I consume around 2200 calories a day and burn around 200-500 for weight loss.

 

[TBT]

you are actually right on the cusp of a healthy BMI, normally considered anything under 25 (yes, even 24.9). this is what a lot of people are shooting for. that's the good news. even better news is that you are apparently concerned enough to catch what you might perceive as a trend now.

things that would help... how old are you? how much control do you have over your diet (by diet i merely mean what you eat normally, or at least up until now)?

if you're still wondering where those extra calories go, search on "basal metabolic rate". this is an important number. the most common failure in weight loss (typically with "eat less, move more" diets) is when your BMR starts to decrease.

To be honest, I don't work like I wrote in this thread since I'm still a teen, 16. I thought saying so would make the responses easier for people.

When I wrote this I wasn't very active, but I now do 45 minute full body gym sessions 3 day a week. (30m weights, 20-25m cardio). It was hard at first, but I'm getting more adjusted to it and gradually increasing the weights / intensity.

The most concerning aspect throughout all this for me is my diet. I obviously eat what my parents cook, which is usually healthy. But since I can't actually count the calories in the food, I do what I can control, which is cut out of all junk foods that I would've usually ate when I'd be hungry. I only drink water & have also cut out the vast majority of my sugars. I've also controlled my food portions and listen to my stomach when I'm full.

I don't think I would stay consistent if I cooked my own food for the sake of counting my calories. Is this fine? Or is there anything I could do to improve. Let me know! Thanks.

 

[Llama]

Listening to your body's hunger/satiety cues and eating mostly healthy stuff you genuinely enjoy is the best way to lose weight if you ask me. If the scale's been cooperating so far I say you're doing it right. Eating as a family is a healthy thing to do and eating what your parents prepare is a good way to stop yourself from obsessing too much. That said: if you don't know how to cook from scratch yet and you have the time helping your parents out in the kitchen and/or cooking one family meal a week to improve your own skills would be a great investment in your future health.

 

[overlandflyer]

... When I wrote this I wasn't very active, but I now do 45 minute full body gym sessions 3 day a week. (30m weights, 20-25m cardio). It was hard at first, but I'm getting more adjusted to it and gradually increasing the weights / intensity.

The most concerning aspect throughout all this for me is my diet. I obviously eat what my parents cook, which is usually healthy. But since I can't actually count the calories in the food, I do what I can control, which is cut out of all junk foods that I would've usually ate when I'd be hungry. I only drink water & have also cut out the vast majority of my sugars. I've also controlled my food portions and listen to my stomach when I'm full.

I don't think I would stay consistent if I cooked my own food for the sake of counting my calories. Is this fine? Or is there anything I could do to improve. Let me know! Thanks.

don't take this as any sort of criticism because i know things today are different than they were 50 years ago when i was 16, but at that age, the only gym i saw was at school a few days a week. when my dad didn't have yard work for me to do, i was usually off bike riding or playing some sports with the other neighborhood kids. i had no idea i was actually exercising. of course, no internet, no cable TV, no video recording, CD's or DVD's... only 7 TV channels, AM/FM radio, vinyl records and a thing called the library... that might have helped.

i believe my eventual cooking ability came from watching my mom in the kitchen. in retrospect it never occurred to me to ask if i could help. let me just add, there is no downside socially in having some skills in the kitchen. perhaps you could be more involved in your diet than you think. i don't strictly follow recipes very often, but there isn't a day that i don't get some ideas from searching the net.

 

[Babatunde king]

I've recently gotten into exercises and weight-loss, and one thing that's very prominently said throughout my journey is that I need to be in a "caloric deficit", which means I need to burn more calories than I consume.

However, I'm a bit confused in this regard.
Say I consume 2000 calories in a day and burn 300 of those calories in a 45 minute workout, I'm still left with 1700 calories that I have eaten. How am I supposed to burn the rest of the 1700? My work is on a computer all day so I am rarely active other than my 45 minute gym sessions, 5 days a week.

Pardon me if I sound a bit ridiculous but I'm just confused. If someone could clear this up for me I'd much appreciate it haha, just trying to get in the swing of things

I've recently gotten into exercises and weight-loss, and one thing that's very prominently said throughout my journey is that I need to be in a "caloric deficit", which means I need to burn more calories than I consume.

However, I'm a bit confused in this regard.
Say I consume 2000 calories in a day and burn 300 of those calories in a 45 minute workout, I'm still left with 1700 calories that I have eaten. How am I supposed to burn the rest of the 1700? My work is on a computer all day so I am rarely active other than my 45 minute gym sessions, 5 days a week.

Pardon me if I sound a bit ridiculous but I'm just confused. If someone could clear this up for me I'd much appreciate it haha, just trying to get in the swing of things

If you are aren't burning enough calories just by working out u should try dieting . I got some tips if u want