[sl1ck731]

My anecdote: I lose weight very easily by CICO. Over the course of of a few months in college I ate a very strict diet of x calories. At the time it was something like 1100/day as a ~200lb 21 year old. Supposedly dangerous, but a lot of things are. Anyway, by keeping an excel sheet of the exact calories I ate every day, minus my calculated metabolic rate, I knew exactly what %/lb I lost per day/week. I kept such good track that by measuring my weight every day I was able to reverse calculate my metabolic rate by the daily weight loss (it was very close to online calculators so I wouldn't bother going out of your way to try it).

The most important thing for me is seeing it as a game. Being able to see daily results even if they are fractions of pounds a day or week. Knowing exactly what I'm aiming for at the end of the week and how I'm getting there.

The most difficult party is meticulously counting calories and ratios when making things. A kitchen scale is essential.

Anyway I was 50 lbs lighter when I quit. It has come back over the course of 6 or 7 years but I'm a pig and I will just lose it again when the time comes.

[claudiawerner]

I'm about 145lb 22 y/o, and also doing 1100 calories/day but usually in the form of one meal for dinner. How did you calculate the amount you should lose per day/week? I'm interested in filling such a spreadsheet myself.

[sl1ck731]

When I started I used a metabolic rate calculator.

https://www.active.com/fitness/calculators/calories for example.

The amount of calories lost per day = the metabolic rate from the calculator - the amount of calories you eat that day.

The amount of pounds lost per day is: burned calories (above) / 3500 (number of calories in a pound of fat).

After a couple months of measuring my weight daily and knowing exactly what my caloric intake was, I calculated my real average metabolic rate by doing the reverse.

total calories lost in a period = lbs lost * 3500

calorie burn (metabolic rate) = total calories burned + total calories eaten

The above is per period so I calculated the average values for the days in a month and used them.

I didn't exercise much so the basal metabolic rate was fairly close to my real burn.

[dragonwriter]

If you aren't exercising much,the assumption that all loss is fat is optimistic, and lean body mass has only 600 kcal/pound instead of 3,500 for fat.

[sl1ck731]

Yes that is also true. I accounted for about 20% of lean mass loss included and then had to hit the gym after the few month diet :)

Though it wasn't my biggest concern since I overshot my loss by about as much.