The Insanity Nutrition Guide Versus My Questionable Math Skills

I just did some interesting math, which might help you if you are doing Insanity and not seeing the results you expected to see. I don’t know if anyone else doing the program has experienced this, but I just cannot figure out where they get their calorie totals for the nutrition guide…

In the advertisement, they say you can burn (up to!!!) 1000 calories in an hour during an Insanity workout. Okay, I will grant you that is probably true if you are a large, very heavily muscled male who performs every exercise to the absolute maximum, without sacrificing form OR speed, and without taking breaks, for one whole hour. However, I am a large, mediumly muscled woman who takes breaks when I need to and sometimes modifies exercises that strain my joints too much or are just plain too hard for me to do correctly. Plus, only the month 2 workouts last (almost) an hour, and those include several minutes of warmup/stretch time, and probably have a few more minutes combined of rest time scattered throughout the workout. If they would FINALLY release this darned thing, which I have been drooling over since I found it around last Christmas time, I would be able to tell you exactly how many calories I burn per workout. Alas, it has been in development and field testing for an eternity now…

I checked out the nutrition guide’s calorie recommendations, and what I found really raised my eyebrows. To lose weight, I should be eating 2313 calories. That’s with the 500 subtracted from my maintenance calories of 2813. Holy cow. Like, as in, bring me an entire cow because I should apparently be eating it.

What I have found actually works for me in reality is that I have a maintenance level of a pretty standard 2060 (This is the estimate that calculators have given me, so I usually take the exactness with a grain of salt and just round down to 2000) calories per day, and that to lose weight, I can comfortably eat about 1560 calories per day plus whatever I estimate I burned off in exercise that day. On days I do Insanity, I decide to play it safe and estimate low, so I add about 200-250 to my calorie allowance. On days where I go to my martial arts class, I add another 100-150. Et cetera. If I do both, I can eat up to 1900 or so calories, exercising off about 400 for a net of 1500, and still be losing weight. Not bad at all. Note that I tend to estimate high when I calculate calories I have eaten and I estimate very low when I add how many calories I burned (I am reasonably positive I burn much more than 200-250 calories per Insanity session, but I want to play it safe).

The last two weeks, with the previous couple of days of being on plan excluded, I have for the most part just eaten whatever I felt like without regard to my calorie limit. In the interests of experimentation, though, I still logged everything I ate on MyFitnessPal, just to see what kind of damage I was doing. Here’s what happened.

Two weeks and three days ago, my weight was 180. Three days ago, my weight was 179.8, which I figure I should just round up to 180. I totaled up my net calories, after I subtracted out the calories I burned with exercise, and found that my average daily intake was 1990. This is 70 calories below my estimated maintenance level of 2060, and above my weight loss goal of 1560 by 430 calories per day.

Assuming that I was, on average, 70 calories below my maintenance level for two weeks, I had a deficit of approximately 70*14 = 980 calories, or 0.28 pounds. This is in contrast to the 500*14 = 7000 calories (2 pounds) I would have lost if I had stayed on plan. As expected, my weight pretty much stayed the same.

Compare that to the amount of calories that the nutrition plan recommends I eat. If I ate 2313 calories, that would be 753 calories above my weight loss goal and 253 above my maintenance level. In two weeks, I might have a 253*14 = 3542 calorie surplus, and have gained a little over a pound.

As far as the Insanity workout goes, I am convinced it is solid, and I have had a lot of fun with it, I have gotten some excellent results with my cardiovascular capacity and endurance, and I know it is helping me decrease my body fat percentage. But I am still scratching my head over the nutrition guide. Maybe someone smarter can explain that one to me.

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