I’m starting to suspect that my caloric requirements are a fair bit higher than my tools are predicting, by maybe 400 - 500 calories. I’m taking my calculated baseline, acute training load and thermic effect of food into account. What’s potentially missing from this is the chronic training load, or the energy cost of constantly recovering and adapting from training. I haven’t been able to find any information about this, only about EPOC/oxygen debt from resistance and HIIT training which isn’t really the same thing and doesn’t seem to be a big enough contributor to explain what’s going on for me.
Has anyone else found their caloric requirements to be significantly higher than expected? Also the other way around if you maintain weight and feel great on what simple calculators suggest please let me know.
For per-exercise calories I was previously just using Garmin. I’m not sure whether it’s basing expenditure on heart rate or power for cycling but I’ve moved to taking the estimate from intervals.icu which is regularly 150+ calories higher per bout. I’m not sure if intervals takes passive expenditure into account when it gives the calories per bout and that’s why it’s so much higher.
But I’m more talking about the expenditure from just existing in a state of active training - recovering, adapting, rebuilding etc.
This kind of rings a bell… But in no way am I going to say that it is your case to!
About 4 years ago, I was constantly hungry. I was working out 15-20 hours a week which, on top of a full time day job, isn’t to be underestimated. But the amount of food I was ingesting per day was really huge, especially for someone rather small and skinny (167cm height and ~62-64kg). I was eating 6 times a day healthy food and on top of that, I was constantly picking up unhealthy sugars in the form of cookies and other junk stuff. I was eating amounts big enough to get stomach problems on regular bases and my weight kept dropping to below 60kg.
Consulted my doctor who immediately requested an extended blood diagnosis. Turned out that I had a thyroid adenoma which released huge amounts of thyroid hormone. Nothing to be overly worried about because this is almost always easily removed with a minor chirurgical intervention. The thyroid hormone is what regulates your metabolism and is controlled by the hypophysis but if there’s too much in your blood, your engine is constantly revved up. You barely notice cold and resting HR is somewhat elevated (but you don’t notice that last one because it happens slowly over time). I was also feeling quite nervous all the time, while most people see me as a relaxed guy.
If your food intake seems not in balance with your activity, don’t hesitate to get your blood analysed. It’s a very simple procedure and may reveal the origin of your problem.
I still workout 12-15 hours a week now, but I eat healthy foods five times a day and almost never touch the sugary stuff anymore. If I do, it’s more an envy and not because I feel hungry. My weight is perfectly stable around 65kg now and I feel much more relaxed, sleep better and have no stomach problems anymore. My life quality has tremendously increased.
A few things here ring true for me, like increasing consumption of calorie dense junk to avoid blowing out my gut with real food lol. And definitely the sleep. I can only get around 4 hours of continuous sleep per night for the last 3 or so months. I even completely quit caffeine on Jan 1 and that didn’t help.
I was going to start incorporating regular blood and hormone testing anyway so I’ll bring it up with my doctor, thanks.
When I started out with cycling with power, I was logging my rides through my Suunto watch. After a few months of that I got a Hammerhead Karoo as well, I noticed there was a big difference in calories used as I logged a few rides in both. The Karoo uses a power based calculation, but it seemed that the Suunto watch still used a HR based calculation for calories despite having power data available to it. The differences were quite wild, a few hundred calories for the exact same ride. Maybe Garmin does this too.
Intervals.icu was recently updated to calculate calories for cycling based on the power formula, which should be accurate within a few percent (seen ~4% quoted).
My main experience with hyperthyroidism is with my cat, who as of yet has expressed no interest in joining me on my runs or my cycling workouts. Nor would a tracking watch fit his little paw.
It never hurts to get yourself checked out as the other poster mentioned.
Between bmr equations being off by +/- 200 calories on average, vague activity factors, metabolic efficiency, exercise energy compensation… the only reliable way to determine your energy needs is by tracking your intake, tracking your body mass, and reconciling the two. Eat enough to maintain your weight, no matter what the calculators say. If you’re losing weight despite eating 4000 kcal, eat more. If you’re gaining weight despite eating 2200, eat less.
For me, compensating factors neutralize a lot of additional caloric needs above what I’m actively putting into my body to manage the ride on the ride. Which is about 50g carb per hour.
When I ride especially hard, I typically avoid heavy activity for the rest of the day.
