Hi, from Engineer.

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engineer

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Hi, all.

I am a 34 year old male engineer, height 169.8 cm. I've been on some medication with the side effects of gaining weight up to 83.5kg at the end of October 2010.

This caused liver problems, and so I had to lose weight. Since then I have managed to reduce my weight to 68kg, but have been recommended by the doctor to reduce to 63kg.

Being a signal processing and IT engineer I went via spreadsheets, calorie counting, records of calories burnt for various forms of exercise and allowing for my basal metabolic rate.

I am having some success although inclined to make errors from time to time. Being not of an athletic background and nutrition not being my field I occasionally make mistakes like between 20 repetitions and 20 minutes. Ouch, won't do that again :D. Another one being mistaking someone's 1,400 kcal per day for their daily exercise calories burnt (and only reaching 798 kcal during a 3 hour 15 minute workout while trying to match them. Double ouch. :D)

As such I appreciate advice from those with more experience at this.

Since I wanted to plot improvements in my fitness I was using my metabolic rate as a measure of how active I was. Or more particularly, my calculated metabolic rate based on my weight loss divided by my metabolic rate from web basal metabolic rate formula. This gives me an estimated activity modifier that I have been using as a measure of how active I am or how 'fit' I am. Yes, I know that is probably not accurate but its a bit of a ball-park figure.

I am pleased so far that it has increased from 0.9 to nearly 1.4, so I have gone from less than sedentary to now being low active. :)

My daily consumed calories are 1,971 kcal per day so far, and I exercise regularly at about 450 kcal per day, except for recuperation from injuries. I have all my serving sizes covered for the different food groups. My exercise includes walking (I use to walk 10km per day until the blisters got to me), exercycling (pleased to be now at level 16 for 30 minutes with an 8kg flywheel), ab glider at 600 swivels per day and 600 glides per day, and other miscellaneous activities such as gardening. I now usually wear a pedometer to track my activity levels.

So far I have managed to get my exercise regiment to a one hour workout and a diet that includes some treat foods.

Right now, I pass my weekly weight stats into a spreadsheet that calulates what my metabolic rate was for the week using an energy balance formula. I then have to pass it through a 5-tap low pass filter to extract a running average for my 'fitness' level.

This is to remove what appears to be a 4 to 5 week cycle in my metabolic rate. The same two weeks out of every five my metabolic rate is about 1,200 kcal higher per day which can be problematic as I find out a week later as to why I wasn't feeling so good during that time.

I am trying to figure out whether it is a cycle, and if it will repeat every 4 to 5 weeks so that I can allow for it without having weeks with much higher daily calorie deficits. I does seem to repeat though after 5 weeks.

Combined with the low metabolic rate weeks though this tends to give me an average weight loss within reasonable limits, but if someone knows what the 4 to 5 week cycle is the info would be appreciated. :) It is messing up my dieting and exercise plan a little but not significantly.

So that's my intro, a bit about me, and what I'm attempting to do weight loss wise.
 
So interestingly, I just googled "weekly metabolic rate cycles" and your post on this forum came up on the first page of results.... this tells me there's not a lot of info out there yet on the issue that you've raised!

So, with you being an engineer, I'm not all that inclined to question your skills at spreadsheets and developing stats, as I'm sure you have a much better handle on that than I do. There are a couple of things that I would ask you though, just for clarification:

- you stated that you're using your weight loss divided by the web basal metabolic rate. For weight loss, I'm assuming you're converting lbs to kcal. Is that correct? Also, for this calculation, are you factoring in calories eaten and calories burned through exercise?

- when you're putting all of your stats into an 'energy balance formula', what exactly is the formula that you're using?

- what weeks were you injured?

- are you still on medications and if so, what are they called?

If it's not really messing up your weight loss results, I would have to say that you shouldn't worry about it too much, however, from a more scientific viewpoint, I'm intrigued by the possibility of metabolic cycles. I'll keep looking into it and see what I can find!
 
Yes, I am converting lbs to kcal at a rate of about 3,500 kcal to the lb. I know that's an approximation though.

I weight all my food to the nearest 1g, and 10ml then combine these with food labels and online research for the calorie content per weight or volume for the foods. My spreadsheet also differentiates between the calorie content and serving sizes of different types of fruit, vegetables, meats, dairy and so forth.

I use 0.53xweight in pounds x distance in miles for my walking calories using my current weight before leaving for my walk.

My exercycle and ab glider calories are read off the machines. My other activities calories are obtained from the count calories website usually shortened to cc.

I calculate my BMR using online pages, and from my exercycle and using the formula

Calculated BMR calories = 66 + (6.3x weight in pounds) + (12.9 x height in inches) - 6.8x(age in years)

they all give about 1,610 kcal to 1,630 kcal. I weight in each morning and the spreadsheet uses the average for the week to determine my Calculated BMR. I use the set of weights for the following week to determine the weekly weight difference and then calculate my Estimated BMR.

The formula I use is

Estimated BMR = (Weekly Calories Intake - Weekly Calories Burnt from Exercise - weight difference in pounds between current and next week x 3500) / 7

Since BMR is usually modified by an activity modifier of 1.2 to 1.9 depending on sedentary to highly active I took my estimated value which would include the activity modifier and divided by my Calculated BMR.

So

Esimated BMR / Calculated BMR = Estimated Activity Modifier

or that was the idea. This is an attempt at determining my current metabolic level.

I keep my calorie consumption roughly the same each week and my exercise regime. I designed my spreadsheet assuming a slow and gradual change, not really for large 5 week cycles.

I checked back on the injuries and recuperation. The injuries were either 1.5 inch blisters lasting 5 weeks, or pulled muscles lasting 2 - 3 days (which happened only three times). Yep, being an engineer I recorded them :patriot:

I did notice that on the two week peaks my exercise levels were lower. Those weeks tend to have other unpleasant symptoms such as nausea, irregular sleep, muscle aches, irritability and what appears to be blistering and swelling associated with burning and cutting pain (doctor suggested runner's nipple - not pleasant :(). I recorded those too :p

These were occurring before I started exercising and dieting though at originally a 4 month cycle but had reached every 5 weeks before I started dieting and exercising. So, I'd guess before exercising = not exercise related. Also, they're the reason why my exercise levels are lower on those weeks. I exercise half as much and yet lose more weight than the other weeks.

The medications are olanzapine at 2.5 mg three times weekly, fluoxetine at 20mg three times weekly, pantoprazole 40mg once per day. The olanzapine and fluoxetine dosage use to be much higher at 20mg olanzapine per day at one stage and 20mg fluoxetine per day. Hence the weight gain. If you look them up they have quite the list of side effects.

I did find that by the time I'd built up to 10km walks every day at a speed of 5.7kmph that my activity modifier had only increased to 0.9. :( By my guess, that is only 75% of someone who is sedentary and has a modifier of 1.2.

10km, is 12,800 steps for me. Online it said 12,500 steps was suppose to be highly active at 1.9 not 0.9. Hence why I modified my spreadsheet to include the back calculation for an Estimated BMR when I found some unexpected results.

I had hoped the modifier would have been higher but it is slowly increasing and is nearly 1.4 or low active now. When it peaks though during those two weeks it is 1.8, but when it drops it drops to 1 or 0.9.

Being a signal processing engineer I use two digital filters in the process. One to remove the effect of the 5 week cycle, and another to isolate it for graphing and hence future prediction of its effect.

I'm using the peaks to assist in weight loss where possible. Unless I get doctor's advice not to do that I'm just going to take advantage of those two week boosts when I can. :D

The last jump was 1,297kcal between two weeks ago and last week. Or from an estimated 1,728 kcal one week to 3,025 kcal the next week. I lost 1.07 kg instead of a predicted 0.13kg. Makes up for the weeks where predictions were 0.3 to 0.5kg and I got only a 70g loss ie no difference.

I attempt to track NEAT (non-exercise related activity thermo effect) using my pedometer which stays at about 3,000 to 4,500 steps per day ignoring walking exercise. But over 1,200 kcal is more than a 25,000 step difference for me.

Even if I was running a temperature for the week it would have been over 4 degrees celcius higher for a 50% difference in BMR and I'm thinking I would have been sick that week not just uncomfortable.

So right now, I continue dieting and exercising and recording these things.
 
Wow, OK I think you've covered all your bases there!

I think that this changing metabolic rate might be applicable to many others out there that are trying to lose weight. Almost always, we see that the amount of weight loss per week fluctuates; some weeks people lose weight, while other weeks they don't. This is just based on observation, but it makes sense. I'm still looking for some good info on it, so if I find it, I'll let you know!

For now, if you're still seeing results, I would stick with what you've been doing. I guess the only thing that is throwing me off is that during these weeks of higher metabolism, you're also not feeling well. Not sure what to make of that at the moment.

Keep us posted!

P.
 
Hi engineer! Thought I'd have a read of your post since you read mine. I have to say I LOVE the numbercrunching - I do a lot of it myself to keep me motivated, although I like to do it in my head rather than with spreadsheets. Actually, it's what keeps me entertained when I swim - I set myself a number of lengths, say 60 withing a given time frame, say 45 minutes, as a goal, then as I swim I count the lengths and calculate the percentages and fractions of my goal that I've completed or that are remaining, whether I'm on track to swim the target lengths within the target time, and approximate calories I'm burning, etc etc. How sad is that?! Never mind. Keeps me going. Congrats on all your achievements so far and keep up the good work!
 
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