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Based on the information you entered at our site, we estimate the following information:

Your BMR is 1719
Your TDEE is 3349

I put in 120 mins of elevated heart rate exercise, but was pretty surprised at how high this TDEE number is. So figuring two pounds per week (7000 cals) I should be taking in 2349 cals a day?

Fair point. I guess it's just going to be very difficult in practice to do this. I often cook for my family and weighing out and cooking a separate meal is going to be a pain. I'll certainly investigate further.

Excellent advice and basically what I was thinking. Many people have been telling me to weight train "because muscle burns fat!", but that seems counter-intuitive to someone trying to get really lean.

This I don't understand. Serious exercise is counter-productive? It's all about creating a calorie deficiency, correct? Exercise with a good handle on diet is the way to do that, right?

Adam,

I'll respond more fully later, but a good rule of thumb is to take the "lightly active" multiplier instead of what you chose, which iirc is around 1.3xBMR (so about 2230 if my quick mental math is correct). Which would mean around 1750 to lose a pound a week, plus whatever extra you can wring from steady state cardio.

Re: meals, you should be able to eat what you make your family for dinner, assuming it's something reasonable. We have a recipe thread here that may be a good resource; lots of serious eats recipes that are reasonable calorically. Or just have a half cup of mashed potatoes instead of a cup and a half and leaner cuts of meat and load up on vegetables. It's doable.

My god I was fat, jesus. Will post more current pics when I'm ready.

Very happy not to be that guy any more!

In principle yes. In practice the biggest impact comes from diet. So if your target intake with no exercise is 1600 calories, and you are burning an extra 300 cal per day, your new diet goal is 1900 cal.

So while both diet and exercise are factors, as a heuristic it's useful to think about diet as the primary factor and exercise as an adjustment.

In my non scientific opinion, if you burn x calories via exercise you're liable to adjust the diet by more than x calories, for a variety of reasons.

If you are confident in your ability to behave completely rationally you can safely ignore this post and just focus on net calories in whatever combination you find most enjoyable.

Well not terribly long ago the "understanding" was each pound of muscle burns an additional 40 calories per day, just by being there. More recently this number has been amended to 6. So used to hear, "Dude--add ten pounds of muscle and then you can just sit on the couch and burn through a pound of fat per week!" all the time. I suspect these many people just haven't gotten the memo yet.

GL.

Unless you offered him some unrelated bet, accepting the $25k seems morally dubious (if we assume the most likely reason for him to offer the bet, haven't listened to the podcast). Obviously still do the cut because it's life ev+.

Morally dubious? Perkins is a half-billionaire who likes spending his money helping people make positive changes (or in Antonio's case, lunging everywhere he went for 48 hours for $50k). He's also got a weight prop going with Jaime Staples and his brother, his $150k to their $3k.

I was wrong, the lightly active multiplier is 1.375, so with a 1720 BMR, your TDEE should be around 2365.

1800 calories per day is probably a good initial target based on where you are right now.

Rapid Fat Loss by Lyle Mcdonald seems obvious in this case

Would definitely not do weight training or any strenuous activity

Massive weight loss is accomplished with diet. OP isn't a pro athlete.

Oh I just saw there's a separate milestone bet to get to 180 in five weeks -- RFL is the way to go.

FYI-I've found intermittent fasting (fast 16 hours, eat in remaining 8) to be a strategy that works well for me because I'm virtually never hungry for bfast and can go until 1 pm without food and just black coffee and water. Then I eat 2 meals between 1 and 9 pm eating more lean protein and low fat at lunch so I can save my tasty cals for dinner. Only eating 2 meals makes for bigger portions that help me feel more satiated. Lean protein fills me up big time (it also bores me to death).

ymmv

Win the freeroll first, lift once you've lost weight and the bet is over. The equity loss on an injury or just inactivity due to DOMS is too great in this particular case.

Can we get a shout out when you win? We've fallen off the map a bit

These should have been easy compared to previous pics that may or not have been you.

Good luck Adam. Really rooting for you and glad you made this thread as well. I have been slowly losing for last month or so, going to ramp up efforts after a trip this weekend and may start my own thread to help myself long term.

Gogogogoogo

Gl. This should be a fun sweat.

+1 to all the RFL comments to make your July 22 milestone
GL, hope you pull this off!

Keep it up, A. You got this!

"Excellent advice and basically what I was thinking. Many people have been telling me to weight train "because muscle burns fat!", but that seems counter-intuitive to someone trying to get really lean."

Weight training and extra muscle does burn extra fat but it also builds muscle which weighs more than fat. If you were doing this for health reasons and to burn fat it would be great advice. Unfortunately this is just weight regardless of body composition so weight training is not a good idea.

Also very strategic of BP to make the weekly weigh ins over the Christmas/Holiday period. But you can do it!

+1 to RFL & +1 to buying a food scale and getting in the habit of using it. It is cheap & easy.

Good luck Adam!

Yesterday food/exercise:

2 egg Denver omelette
1 cup fresh fruit
1 Starbucks breakfast tea latte (no syrup)
1 Chicken stir fry with veg
hand full of nuts

Exercise:
90 mins treadmill. 9.5 kilometers, 800 cals burnt
Weigh in this morning: 189.2

Today food/exercise:

1 cup strawberries
1 English breakfast tea latte (no syrup)
2 scrambled eggs
1 salmon poke salad with lots of veg
2 cups blueberries

No exercise

Nuts are bad for weight loss - high caloric density/low satiety. Might want to look into alternative snacks.

They look like fairly good food choices Adam. I'm unsure on the Starbucks latte but I'm assuming you have checked to make sure it's not a trillion calories like some of their stuff. The great thing about you doing most of the cooking is that you can be careful measuring out oil etc and ensure you are eating healthy low calorie food, which is good for your family also. Be a little bit wary of nuts though as they can be major calorie bombs. Fruit can also be deceptively high in calories.

I really want you to win this money!

Seems like those Starbucks drinks are ~200 calories if I'm googling the right things; they should be cut out too, as liquid calories are the enemy in a bet like this. Just get regular coffee, or tea with milk; on the bright side, if you make it at home for the duration of the bet, it'll be like you're winning 26K instead of 25.

Agree with Aidan about the nuts, especially because "a handful" could quite easily be ~500 calories since you're not measuring.

Don't worry about logging calories burned from the treadmill; it's almost certainly inaccurate by at least a factor of two and quite literally doesn't matter since you're not using calories burned to add to your daily caloric budget.

Other than that things look good (I don't want you to feel like we're beating you up; asping out over this stuff is kind of our raison d'etre round here). The amount of fruit you're eating is fine, and fruit is typically satiating so w/e. Up the lean protein and veggies a bit and things will be even better.

+1 to Monte on the nuts kcal and exercise kcal.

I even weigh/measure nuts and still rarely have them because fitting them into the kcal budget often isn't worth it.

This has already happened in one of the OOT fats threads. One guy was eating at a calorific deficit and even tracking calories but claimed he was still gaining weight, the only thing he wasn't tracking was "a couple handful or nuts." That couple handfuls was a ton of calories and ruining his diet.

Maybe we should just complete the circle and make sure Adam is aware 7up contains calories even though it's clear.