Cumulative Calories
 

Does anyone else keep track of their cumulative Calories Eaten, Calories Burned, and Calorie Balance?

I actually have a spreadsheet where I track the cumulative amounts from every day. It goes back 95 days.

227,050 calories eaten
359,539 calories burned
-132,469 calorie balance

If you divide the calorie balance by 3,500 it tells you how much weight you should have lost so far. For me, it gives 37.8 lbs. But I've actually lost 45.

Of course, if I was to take a day off from recording calories it would break my spreadsheet. So I have to make sure I record everything every day.

I let nutridiary calculate that for me. I love reports and graphs, so it's part of how I make this "fun" for me... geek, I know. Anyway, my reports also say I should have lost less than I have, but I guess it's partly because the formulas about calories burned are estimates; it's hard to know exactly how many calories any individual burns in an activity.

I use dietpower 4.0 to track all of this..it also tracks all your nutrients (you can customize) and tracks your "calorie bank" balance and your metabolic rate (avg).

Fitday does it, too...

I can't find that feature in Fitday. Where is it? I use the PC version.

Yeah, I do it in an Excel workbook. I have sheets for the days, then a weekly summary, then monthly summary. Then a "total" tracking sheet. One of the things I'm trying to do is pinpoint more accurately my metabolic rate as compared to the "calculators" available online--like anything for resting and active metabolic rate....and looking at the 12 calories/pound recommended as a maintenance level by Calories Queens. If I run the numbers with what I ate, what I burned in exercise, what I supposedly burned metabolically versus weight lost--is my metabolism running faster or slower than would be expected? So far....I'm losing a bit more weight than the numbers (3500 deficit being a pound) indicate. I'm just wondering how this wil hold up over time. I need to lose a bit faster (meaning about 2 pounds a week) for a couple months if I can so that I can train for my august hike, but if I'm convinced that maintenance *is* at the 12 (or 11 or whatever) level, then I'll eventually switch to eating my maintenance calories and let my weight loss slow down....at least to take a break for awhile.

This sounds like a great idea!
I may start up a spreadsheet and then go back into fitday and plug in my values...

...except that I don't log on the weekends.... hrm. (I don't have a computer except at work.)

Just write the weekends on to a piece of paper or note cards. I used to carry notecards around with me everywhere (the day's card in my purse) to write things down.

I thought I was the only one that did this! I log my food and activity into fitday than I have a spreadsheet. I have my calories consumed, calories burned and the difference. I used the formulas to have it show expected fat loss for each day and for the week and I put in my actual loss. I have one saved for each week. I find it keeps me on track because instead of just saying "I missed a day at the gym" or "I ate 200 extra calores" I can actually see that it was only .2 pounds instead of .4 or whatever. I also made it all sparkly and rainbow-y too. hehe.

Here's the chart I create from my cumulative calorie data:

http://bostondiet.blogspot.com/2005/...ess-chart.html