How many calories will I be eating to maintain?

rayw89

I haven't hit my goal weight yet, but I'm confused about calorie intake when I finally do. Right now I'm at 1,200 calories daily max, and always come in under my goal. I am 5' 8", and my goal weight is 140 lbs. Will my calorie allowance increase once I hit goal? Or will it need to stay the same to maintain?

misheri90

Yes, you are currently in deficit and once you switch to maintenance you remove this deficit and should be eating more. How much all depends on your stats. When you reach your goal, go back to the MFP goal settings and adjust your settings, follow the suggested amount like you are for losing weight. After 2-3 weeks, re-evaluate if need be.

sijomial

2000 cals/day is often given as an average calorie intake for a woman - you are taller than average but of course your activity and exercise will make a big difference to what your maintenance calories turn out to be. You may need to experiment!

Would suggest tapering off your deficit as you get closer to goal rather than shooting for 2lbs/week all the way which I'm assuming you have selected at the moment. BTW hope you realise your goal is currently 1200 + exercise calories?

yesimpson

The amount of calories you can eat to maintain will be more than what you are eating now to lose (your MFP calorie goal, which includes a built in deficit, in addition to your exercise cals).

Once you reach goal weight, your maintenance amount will depend on how active you are generally i.e. do you have a job where you stand/walk around for most of the day or are you sedentary, do you chase around after little kids at home, are you a naturally energetic fidgety person or do you slump on the sofa in the evenings? It will also depend on how much formal exercise you do on top of this. You get a few extra calories if you have more muscle mass, and some people seem to be 'just lucky' and have a very slightly higher maintenance level than someone else of similar proportions. I think that younger people often need a little more than someone older although I'm not sure why that is.

There are websites you can use to estimate a rough maintenance level for someone of your goal weight, activity level, age and gender, but it is an individual thing really, and you have to determine your own TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) for yourself through trial and error.

rayw89

Thank you everyone! I look forward to the possibility of eating a *little* more.

xMrBunglex

Use a BMR calculator (I use http://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html) to determine your resting calorie burn, and go into deficit based on that when you want to lose.

rayw89

Thanks for the link, I think this will help me decide my calories when maintaining.

cwolfman13

rayw89 wrote: »

I haven't hit my goal weight yet, but I'm confused about calorie intake when I finally do. Right now I'm at 1,200 calories daily max, and always come in under my goal. I am 5' 8", and my goal weight is 140 lbs. Will my calorie allowance increase once I hit goal? Or will it need to stay the same to maintain?

why would you continue to eat in a deficit to maintain? That doesn't even make sense.

I cut on 2300ish calories per day and I maintain on 2800ish.

farfromthetree

I heard to increase slowly..say 100 calories at a time for a couple weeks. This is what I did. I found my maintenance is about 300-400 calories more in a day

rayw89

That sounds like a reasonable way to do it. I was imagining I would probably end up on 1,500-1,600 a day for maintenance, so 300-400 sounds about right.