Counting calories

alicegrayshaw

Is 1200 calories a day enough for a 19 year old girl?

JeromeBarry1

It depends on a lot of stuff. How tall are you? What do you weigh now? How active are you? Did you plug in a goal of losing 2 lb/week and MFP set your calorie target at 1200? That's another way of saying that your goal is too fast and you don't have much to lose anyway.

SueInAz

It's impossible to answer that question without knowing a lot more about you. How active are you? How tall, how much do you weigh? How much weight do you need to lose?

If MFP has given you 1200 calories (the lowest it will go for a female) and you are not very small or only have a few pounds to lose, it is a good indicator that you're trying to lose too much too quickly. Here's a good set of guidelines for how many pounds you should be attempting to lose each week. The number in parentheses is how many fewer calories you should eat than your body burns each day to reach that goal:

Pound per week goals
75+ lbs: set to lose 2 lb range (-1000 calories per day)
Between 40 - 75 lbs: set to lose 1.5 lb range (-750 calories per day)
Between 25 - 40 lbs: set to lose 1 lb range (-500 calories per day)
Between 15 - 25 lbs: set to lose 1 -.50 lb range (-500 to -250 calories per day)
Less than 15 lbs: set to lose 0.5 lbs range (-250 calories per day)

As you can see, to lose 2 pounds per week you need to be eating 1000 calories per day fewer than your body burns. If you don't have a lot to lose it's pretty hard, if not impossible, to meet the 1000 calorie deficit unless you are spending hours at the gym. What all of this means is that even if you set MFP for 2 pounds per week, if you aren't reaching that 1000 calorie deficit daily you aren't actually going to lose that much because you aren't creating the necessary calorie deficit.

Here's an important thing to keep in mind. You want to set yourself up NOW for a healthy relationship with food and your weight into the future. Do this the right way. Learn how to eat to maintain the weight you want. Don't crash diet just to lose weight quickly. You'll only regain the weight, probably crash diet again and it's a bad cycle to get into.

When we eat too far under our maintenance calories on a regular basis our bodies think we're starving and won't have access to food any time soon. Rather than take all of the energy it needs from stored fat your body will start breaking down lean muscle mass for fuel, especially if you aren't using those muscles aggressively, like in a weight lifting program. So what you end up with at the end is a lower weight on the scale but a higher body fat percentage than you would have (since you lost lean muscle mass). If you then put some of that weight back on (and aren't lifting heavy weights) it's going to be all fat which means your body fat percentage will be even higher than before and it'll be even harder to lose weight the next time around.

Rather than trying to lose weight really quickly in an unhealthy way, eat at a reasonable deficit and lift heavy weights to maintain muscle mass. It may take a little longer but you'll be happier with the results and it'll be easier to maintain your goal weight when you reach it.

John1643

I had 30 pounds to lose after college (age 22) and 1200 would have been unnecessarily low for a 1 -2 pound weekly weight loss with regular exercise. I mostly kept that off until 37-38-ish when it started to creep back on. At 43,with regular exercise (including strength training), I need to keep it around 1200 - 1400 calories a day to lose a pound a week. I would experiment to see how high you can go and still lose at an acceptable rate (which I consider 1 -2 pounds a week to be) rather than see how low you can go - 1200 sucks.