Any tips on calculating daily energy expenditure?

Hi guys!

I'd like to tighten up my macros a bit, and I'm having trouble adjusting my caloric intake to fit my activity level. 

I've been using some of the formulas from the book, "Girth Control" by Alan Aragon, and it's quite good, but it seems far to broad to be that useful. Iifym.com (If It Fits Your Macros) has good calculators but their TDEE calculator is still pretty unspecific.

Any tips would be appreciated! 

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Update:

To be more specific, one of my main questions is:

When using the these calculators/formulas for activity amount, if it asks how many hours of X intensity I do, do I include the rest times (total workout time -- I take very little rest) or do I try to estimate only the actual work time?

Hey man it doesn't matter what calculator you use. All of them just give you an estimate from which you should proceed on and track your results. It's just different for everybody.

Don't even bother with calculating the intensity of your work, that's over complicating.

Just go with either bodyweight x 15 or 16 if you're not an athlete and track add/subtract calories based on what results you get. You';; probably not be too far off so add/subtract 25g carbs after a week based on your results.

And don't blindly trust the 500 calorie surplus/deficit. That was a mistake of mine. 500 deficit from diet alone was way too much for me, I have to go with 150-300 and add cardio if needed, otherwise, besides feeling like complete shit, I start losing everything - my libido, strength, muscle.

You can't gain ''500 calories of muscle'' per day either, especially now when you're (?) advanced. 300 is the most I personally would go with, and that's overboard for me already.

Others do perfectly fine on +-500 (likely newbies or genetic freaks). But hey - I could bulk on over +500 when I was getting into weightlifting a few years ago. For 3-4 months I gained very high quality weight - body fat hasn't changed so the ratio of muscle to fat was very good. However, I got greedy and continued doing the same surplus and got to a quite fat (imo) 15-16%. Did the usual -500 cut and pretty much reversed my body back to where it was before even starting to lift weights. Almost the same amount of strength and muscle.

Been ''happily'' maintaining/slowly gaining/slowly losing ever since. My maintenance is sitting at 2400 calories (around 15.5 x BW) and I start to gain/lose at anything above that. Even if it's just 100 calories. Anything above 150 brings a much crappier muscle/fat gain ratio. Weight loss - not so sure. Scared to experiment too much.

Been a fan of AA long since Always wanted to get my hands on his book, but never did. Anything interesting you found there? (what you didn't on the i-net)

You get a direct control feedback loop with your weight measure.

Take the 20 days moving average of your weight loss (to iron out the food-in/crap-out daily variations, and the water content of your physical envelope too)

If you are losing 50 g per day, you are at about 400Kcal deficit (385)

If you are losing less than 50g, less deficit, if more, then more...

Control that with a monthly BF measure to make sure you are losing fat & not muscle.

Adjust your diet, caloric requirements calculations & protein intake accordingly.

@ Edgaron,

Not really. I think Joshua and others have covered most of the material here, to be honest. There's some good stuff in there for sure, but nothing really stands out in my memory.

Thanks for sharing your experience. It's very helpful to hear what has worked and not worked for you.

I will see about maintaining a +- 200-300 kcal deficit/surplus and see what happens. I am an athlete and am training like crazy right now, so going to try 2700-3000 kcal per day and monitor it my body weight like you and Fred suggest.

@ Fred,

Great idea. I may have to get another weight scale, though, because my current one is pretty broken.

But don't you mean "If you are losing less than 50g, *more* deficit, if more, than *less*..." ?

Thanks guys!

Patrick Smith said:

(...) don't you mean "If you are losing less than 50g, *more* deficit, if more, than *less*..." ?

Yes, probably..........

Ah, OK. That makes much more sense.