Calculating CICO: Home-made Food, Irregular Exercise page

[qqemokitty]

Hi Everyone,

In my efforts to analyze the health and nutrition for both myself and my SO, I have started building a spreadsheet to track key numbers in our lives. (This helps me twofold, as I am also taking an excel course and find that a topic I am interested in helps me practice and apply things learned in class to a better degree than the coursework alone.) I am trying to figure out some very basic numbers, and having trouble because I am NOT eating packaged food of any kind. Go figure. I want to make my own spreadsheet for my SO and I to share, to track our data, and to get a good overview of our very different issues [him: underweight, exhausted - me: overweight, exhausted :P] that I am trying to heal through the same means: wholesome food and basic, unstructured exercise, where exercise may be considered deliberate physical activity, and also calories expended through the course of our regular busy lives.

Things I currently track:

Food and water intake
Whether a meal contains GMO ingredients or not (for my own curiosity)
When we eat out, either separately or together
Weight (once weekly)

Things I want to figure out and log:

Calorie counts of home made foods
- This will end up being a pretty comprehensive nutritional catalog very similar to what you might find in a restaurant's Nutritional Facts PDF. But HOW do I determine the data, when home-cooked food tends to be imprecisely prepared and portioned?
- May also desire to track fat/protein/carbs but am more concerned with calories to begin
Calories he and I burn through our usual day [I am really clueless to figure this one out.]
Calories expended through yoga
The # of calories I should be aiming for to decrease to a healthy weight.
The # of calories he should be aiming for to increase to a healthy weight.

I am also looking for simple body weight exercises that he and I may be able to do together - very basic and quick ones for the morning before we head out to work. We are both terribly out of shape and have sedentary jobs. We both attend college in addition to working ~50 hours a week. We both have extracurricular activities that take up a large quantity of time but are not physical (he is an artist, I raid competitively in WoW (don't judge me! :P)). I also caretake a bedridden mom for 8 hours every Sunday.

This seems really open ended and impossible to me, to determine all this stuff. I know this is a LOT of help to ask, and if I thought hiring a nutritionist might help, I'd consider it... I think we all know how that would go, though. [Eat moar fiber, run forever!]

Thanks for feedback, if any!

[Cryptocode]

"simple body weight exercises that he and I may be able to do together - very basic and quick ones for the morning before we head out to work. We are both terribly out of shape and have sedentary jobs"

Mark's beginner exercises are excellent. Watch out, they're much more effective than they may appear. See the exercises at:
Action Item #4: Exercise Primally – Move, Lift, and Sprint! | Mark's Daily Apple

There is also http://startingstrength.com/index.php/site/videos

On nutrition thaere's http://www.calorieking.com/foods/cal...d=-1&sid=14775. There's a better site but I can't find it right now. Look for it in PubMed.

[qqemokitty]

Good point on the PB link, thank you for both! I'm trying to aggregate this stuff for the boyfriend so he isn't too overwhelmed. >.<

[ksrcrider]

Losing weight is pretty simple once you understand what insulin is.. Insulin being one of the most important hormones along with leptin.. People think leptin is the obese hormone.. Its the starvation hormone that works with insulin. Leptin hormone sends signals to the brain saying hey!!! I'm hungry, feed me.. Brain is looking for carbs for energy which every time you eat something with carbs whether it be simple or complex your insulin is alerted.. In result your brain telling you man i feel good again.. Most people who have a high carb diet, its your leptin kicking on all the time alerting the brain i want fooood!!

Reduce your carb intake to around 100-150g a day will confuse the brain and then using the next best thing for fuel which is fat.. You wil feel crummy for a little bit, because your body is not used to using fat as fuel. Reason why a lot of people fail at a diet because they cant stand the headaches and what not involved with changing up your diet..

You guys can use bands for resistant work outs. You can use them for your biceps, triceps, shoulders etc... Things like a bar for pull ups, you can do triangle push ups which are awesome for the chest and triceps.. There is tons of info for band exercises..
Easy Resistance-Band Exercises | RealSimple.com

[qqemokitty]

Thanks for the exercise advice. =) I already eat around 100 carbs on the average day and am not concerned with that at this time, as my diet is both paleo compliant and all carbs eaten result from vegetables and naturally occurring sugars (fruit, raw honey). I have tried LCHF and VLC protocols, and am no longer interested in traversing those paths.

I am most interested in ensuring I have a caloric deficit, but not a dangerous one. I suspect that there are times when I am under-eating, and times when I am over-eating, but since I have very little idea of the calorie content in my food (and the calorie expenditure of me, just living my life), it is hard for me to judge that. I just want to analyze what I am taking in, and what I am putting out, in terms of calories.

So I am not, in particular, looking for HOW to lose weight - I already know what works for me in that regard, and what is sustainable.

[ksrcrider]

I use ifitnesspal to track all my food.. That way i know exactly what im eating.. Women should never go below 1200 and guys should never go below 1500 calories a day.. Doing a huge calorie deficiency at once can really impact someones metabolism over time.. making it super hard to lose weight..

Thanks for the exercise advice. =) I already eat around 100 carbs on the average day and am not concerned with that at this time, as my diet is both paleo compliant and all carbs eaten result from vegetables and naturally occurring sugars (fruit, raw honey). I have tried LCHF and VLC protocols, and am no longer interested in traversing those paths.

I am most interested in ensuring I have a caloric deficit, but not a dangerous one. I suspect that there are times when I am under-eating, and times when I am over-eating, but since I have very little idea of the calorie content in my food (and the calorie expenditure of me, just living my life), it is hard for me to judge that. I just want to analyze what I am taking in, and what I am putting out, in terms of calories.

So I am not, in particular, looking for HOW to lose weight - I already know what works for me in that regard, and what is sustainable.

[qqemokitty]

Maybe I should have posted a more specific question. :P I am not a newbie to paleo or primal or weight loss in general, I know HOW I need to eat to get where I want and I need no education on carbs or the alleged dangers of under-eating etc. Thank you for your replies, though!

I am looking for more input on calculating calories on food cooked at home with no discernible measurement for portions.

This week I am eating chili for dinner. I made it myself.

Ingredients were:
tons of spices
4 TBSP Kerrygold butter
1 pound pastured ground turkey, browned
1/2 pound grass fed stew beef, chopped small and browned prior to adding
1 large yellow onion
1 can beef broth, no sugar added
1 can fire roasted tomatoes
1 can tomato paste
1 cup water

I will eat this for 4 meals (Mon - Thurs)

How the hell do I figure out the caloric value of this meal? Should I measure a cup of this and eat it? 2 cups? Should I add up the calories of the individual ingredients via something like MFP, then divide the number by 4 and call it good?

[ksrcrider]

like i said use ifitnesspal. If you are making everything from scratch it's even easier, you know exactly how much of everything is going into it. Just create a recipe, input all the ingredients, portions per recipe, and it will work it out.

[JoanieL]

Before food trackers, there was Google. I still use it (or my own excel sheet) more than trackers.

-Google "calories in name of food"
-if the amount is given in grams, 28.3 grams = 1 oz
-try to use the uncooked weight because cooking changes the weight by dehydrating the water out of food and we all cook things differently
-stuff in cans should have the calories on the can

Once you have total calories for your whole preparation, divide it by the number of meals/snacks it's going to make. In your above example, you're going to make four portions. So, total # of calories divided by four = calories per portion. Even if you don't make each portion exact, just make sure that the four days equal the total.

Example: You make something that has 1000 calories and it's 4 portions. Each portion is 250 calories. You eyeball the portions while counting 250 calories each time you eat it. You notice on day four that it looks larger than the other three portions. It doesn't matter. Still count it as 250. Total for 4 days is 1000 and while each day might not be exactly correct, it's calories over time.

Oops, I read every sentence in your post except the last:

Should I add up the calories of the individual ingredients via something like MFP, then divide the number by 4 and call it good?

Yes.

[BestBetter]

There's a lot of confusion about calories in/calories out because 1) while estimates can be more or less reasonable, they will never be precise and 2) it is impossible for a person without sophisicated lab equipment to measure calories out. These two issues lead many people to believe that CICO is BS, which isn't true; it just isn't something that we can precisely measure.

I understand your frustration; I had a similar issue when I wanted to precisely calculate the calories in cuts of meat I bought from the farmer's market. I could look up on the nutrition data website the amount of calories for oxtail, for example, but there was no way to know how those numbers matched up with the piece of oxtail I was working with, since bone size and ratio of fat:muscle meat can be significantly different from cut to cut or even depending on the season when the animal was butchered.

For the sake of your spreadsheet data, I would recommend looking up the standard macros on nutrition data, and use those values to calculate the calories of your food. I also suggest weighing your food on a scale in grams, instead of eyeballing volume measurements (ex: 100 grams of potatoes vs. 'this is about a cup of potatoes').

Again, with calories out, you'll have to estimate, so I'd recommend using some program like fitday and enter in '1 hour of yoga activity' to get a ballpark number for your spreadsheet. This number may be close to reality or not even close. Metabolism is not a static thing.

Two people doing the same physical activity can burn drastically different amounts of calories depending on their metabolisms, so if those two people took the same yoga class, one might burn 100 calories while the other one might burn 150...plus, a person's own metabolism changes day to day, so if your metabolism is depressed, you might burn 100 calories during a workout but then your body will try to compensate for this extra activity by lowering body temperature, slowing or stopping hair/nail growth, reducing autophagy activity, or cutting back on any number of unseen processes that reduce calorie burning without you ever knowing.