Do You Set Your Calories or Do You Roll with MFP?

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  • Lyadeia
    Lyadeia Posts: 4,603 Member
    I went with MFP's settings in the beginning, starving off the 1200 calories a day it set. I was miserable! Then reading the forums, and seeing a lot of people losing doing TDEE - 20%, I manually changed my settings to that. It has helped and I'm much happier eating more :)

    This is me, 2.

    I started off with MFP's 1200 suggestion and was starving, feeling weak, etc. and not losing nearly as much weight as expected. Even with exercise, that's about 1500-1600 calories which still didn't seem to help, but it made me feel completely awful on non-exercise days.

    Using TDEE-20% which for me is around 1800 calories, I've been enjoying plenty of food daily and losing fat a lot faster than before (about 1/2-1 pound per week which is what MFP said I'd be losing by starving myself).

    I think the issue lies with the fact that most of us choose sedentary (according to their recommendations) and also choose the most amount of weight loss possible, neither of which is optimal for most of us. TDEE-20% takes these things into account (as long as you don't use a bad TDEE calculator).

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