Calorie Intake

Lisa2117

Hi. I'm 5'3 and I weigh about 160. My goal is to get to around 135-140. Anything under 140 would be great and pre baby weight. I set my goal to lose 2lbs a week and it put me at 1200 calories. If I burn 500-750 calories with exercise should I increase my calories? 1200 seems a little low to me.

peaceout_aly

Typically, people advise to eat back only HALF the calories because MFP is pretty generous with the "calories burned" estimates.

IsaackGMOON

You don't need to lose 2lb's a week. You don't have that much weight to lose, only 20lb.

1200 is too aggressive, set your weight loss to either 0.5lb or 1lb; you'll thank me later.

When you exercise, you're meant to eat the calories back. Generally, people go with the rule 'eat 50-75% back to compensate for inaccuracies'... seeing as you're eating 1200 calories (if You don't switch goals), then just eat all of them back. You're already going to be in a deficit.

malibu927

1200 is low because it's the lowest MFP will give you, so you wouldn't reach a loss of 2 pounds per week. Change your goal to a pound a week (or even .5 pounds) and eat back half of those exercise calories on top of it.

juggernaut1974

Lisa2117 wrote: »

Hi. I'm 5'3 and I weigh about 160. My goal is to get to around 135-140. Anything under 140 would be great and pre baby weight. I set my goal to lose 2lbs a week and it put me at 1200 calories. If I burn 500-750 calories with exercise should I increase my calories? 1200 seems a little low to me.

Yes...you should increase your daily calories for exercise, as MFP's goal calculator doesn't take exercise into account.

But like the above poster said, be a little cautious...500-750 calories burned in exercise would have to be at least a couple hours of intense exercise. Don't rely on machines or MFP to give you accurate exercise burn calculations.

Finally - as an aside - with so little weight to lose, 2 lb per week is probably too aggressive of a goal. I wouldn't shoot for more than 1 lb per week at the very most.

Lisa2117

I have an elliptical which has a calorie counter on it and I also have a polar heart rate watch which gives me my calories that I burned when I use exercise videos so I have a good idea of how many I burn. Someday I'll just go for maybe a walk and not burn as many calories but some days I'll use the elliptical and maybe 1 or 2 workout videos. Would it be best to just eat back half on my more strenuous workout days rather than the lighter workouts? Yesterday I just went for a 2 mile walk and burned about 200 calories but it doesn't seem worth it to eat back half of that.

juggernaut1974

Lisa2117 wrote: »

I have an elliptical which has a calorie counter on it and I also have a polar heart rate watch which gives me my calories that I burned when I use exercise videos so I have a good idea of how many I burn. Someday I'll just go for maybe a walk and not burn as many calories but some days I'll use the elliptical and maybe 1 or 2 workout videos. Would it be best to just eat back half on my more strenuous workout days rather than the lighter workouts? Yesterday I just went for a 2 mile walk and burned about 200 calories but it doesn't seem worth it to eat back half of that.

And I'll re-iterate, cardio machines are notoriously lousy at estimating calorie burns.

At your size, it would need to be like 90-120 minutes of pretty strenuous elliptical-ing to really burn that many calories.

Lisa2117

ceoverturf wrote: »

Lisa2117 wrote: »

I have an elliptical which has a calorie counter on it and I also have a polar heart rate watch which gives me my calories that I burned when I use exercise videos so I have a good idea of how many I burn. Someday I'll just go for maybe a walk and not burn as many calories but some days I'll use the elliptical and maybe 1 or 2 workout videos. Would it be best to just eat back half on my more strenuous workout days rather than the lighter workouts? Yesterday I just went for a 2 mile walk and burned about 200 calories but it doesn't seem worth it to eat back half of that.

And I'll re-iterate, cardio machines are notoriously lousy at estimating calorie burns.

At your size, it would need to be like 90-120 minutes of pretty strenuous elliptical-ing to really burn that many calories.

Usually on the days I use the elliptical I'll do around 45 min on the eliptical and then do either a 30 min workout video or I have another one that's a 10 min abs video.

juggernaut1974

A lot depends on the intensity too. Just saying "45 minutes on the elliptical" doesn't really give much info.

But if I HAD to estimate - 45 average minutes on an elliptical plus an average 30 min workout video for a 160 lb person - your probably looking at somewhere around 350-400 calories burned.