Hello fellow-low-carbers!

You may have noticed my lament about stalling after my bike trip to Portugal in November, where I cycled a fair distance but didn't eat enough and even gaining weight in the holiday time (though that weight came off quickly).

I now present a few formulas and the calculations as done by means of the www.caloriesperhour.com website.

The crudest tool for low-carbing is to take a food intake of
10-12 x bw in lbs = 22-26,50 x bw in kg = 1606 - 1935 kcal

There are 2 known formulas for getting your basal metabolic rate:

One that takes weight, height & age and uses different formulas for men and women:
Men: BMR = 66 + (13.7 X wt in kg) + (5 X ht in cm) - (6.8 X age in years)
Women: BMR = 655 + (9.6 X wt in kg) + (1.8 X ht in cm) - (4.7 X age in years)
With this calculation I'd have a basal metabolic rate of 1457 kcal (73 kg, 158 cm, 39 y). People who work out a lot, may add 60% to that BMR, so I end up with 1970 kcal. It's recommended to shave off 10% from your BMR, so I end up with 1865 kcal.

The 2nd formula doesn't use different formulas for men and women or age, just lean body mass = Katch- McArdle formula
BMR (men and women) = 370 + (21.6 X lean mass in kg) = 1407 kcal
at LBM of 48 kg.

I took the latter formula and dug up all activities listed by www.caloriesperhour.com
They used the first formula, I used the second and re-calculated things.. (how fanatical can you be, which is why it took me ages to compile a spreadsheet).
The crudest part was guesstimating what on earth I'm doing on an average day..

When I diversified for Mon thru Sun, I came to values between 2440 kcal (Thurs=swimming day) to 3880 kcal (Sat=depletion day with: spinning, leg and hometrainer day & afterwards: junk day) with a low of 2100 kcal on Sunday.
This gave an average of 2997 kcal (I did the calculations again and was a bit more conservative in my time-estimates).

So for ease of calculation I'm assuming a mean of 3000 kcal.

Question is: weren't you supposed to have a total deficit of 1000 kcal?
500 kcal from diet & 500 kcal from ramped up exercise?
Apparently I ramped up my exercise between 340 and 1780 kcal a day.

So, instead of eating 1800-1900 kcal, I should be eating 2000 kcal, right??? I had even dropped back to 1700 kcal and had success with that...but if I'd follow Dr. Squat's approach I'd need to eat 2600kcal/day or so.. (10% less).


Confused in the Netherlands

Fietser