Only 10 calories?

spiriteagle99
spiriteagle99 Posts: 3,743 Member
edited November 14 in Health and Weight Loss
I recently changed my goal from losing 1 pound a week to losing .5 pound, thinking that that would give me an extra 250 calories to play with. I was successful at losing a pound a week, or thereabouts, but only have a few pounds left to lose and I'm not in a hurry. When I logged in next, MFP had changed my daily goal from 1200 calories to 1210. Really? That's it?

Replies

  • malibu927
    malibu927 Posts: 17,562 Member
    1200 is the absolute minimum MFP will assign
  • SusanMFindlay
    SusanMFindlay Posts: 1,804 Member
    I'm taking it you're sedentary and quite small? If MFP is telling you to eat 1210 calories to lose 0.5 pounds/week, that means it thinks you're only burning 1460 calories per day. It would have had to tell you to eat below 1000 calories/day for you to actually lose 1 pound/week - and that's not healthy so it cut off at 1200.

    If you want to get your calorie allowance higher, try incorporating more movement into your day. Getting yourself from sedentary to lightly active would buy you about 200 calories/day. Taking an extra 4000-ish steps every day would do that. Or, if you prefer, incorporate more formal exercise that you can log.
  • spiriteagle99
    spiriteagle99 Posts: 3,743 Member
    I'm older (60) and mostly sedentary. I do log exercise, about 2 hours a day most days. I'm a runner and a walker and I eat back all my calories. I just thought it was funny that it only added 10 calories to my total when I was trying to slow down my rate of loss. I wonder if they'll only add 10 more for maintenance.
  • LAWoman72
    LAWoman72 Posts: 2,846 Member
    spiriteagle99 wrote: »
    I'm older (60) and mostly sedentary. I do log exercise, about 2 hours a day most days. I'm a runner and a walker and I eat back all my calories. I just thought it was funny that it only added 10 calories to my total when I was trying to slow down my rate of loss. I wonder if they'll only add 10 more for maintenance.

    No, because as was just explained to you, probably to legitimately lose the full pound a week you'd have to eat less than 1200 calories, but MFP can/will not assign fewer than 1200 calories per their rules, so it had to start you there even though by the numbers/by calculations you would have needed to eat less.
  • rileysowner
    rileysowner Posts: 8,328 Member
    If you were losing a pound a week on 1200, I am pretty sure you could eat substantially more than 10 calories more.
  • DonM46
    DonM46 Posts: 771 Member
    A friend, who is quite large, signed up on MFP. When filling in the info, she said she wanted to lose 5 pounds per week. Got a budget of 1200 cal.
    She didn't think she could go that low, so she changed it to 3.
    Same thing, 1200 cal per day.
    How could that be, she asked.
    I told her that she'd never be assigned fewer than 1200, no matter how fast she wanted to lose. Also told her that very high loss rates are unhealthy unless regular and frequent medical oversight was anticipated.
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 10,092 Member
    rileysowner wrote: »
    If you were losing a pound a week on 1200, I am pretty sure you could eat substantially more than 10 calories more.

    ^^ Exactly this.

    It's possible you burn more than MFP thinks you do (perhaps you said you were sedentary when under MFP's understanding you're lightly active or even borderline lightly active/active), or you don't log all your exercise, or you don't eat any of your exercise calories back, or you radically undercount your exercise calories out of concern that MFP/cardio machines/your HRT is overcounting them, or you engage in a lot of overestimating of calorie-intake "just to be safe." There are all kinds of reasons MFP's estimate, based on the information you give it, could be off. And that doesn't even touch on factors that could affect your actual deviation from the formulas that MFP uses to get good estimates for most people (i.e., those people in the middle of the distribution curve).

    In any case, if you've been logging 1200 calories reasonably consistently* and losing a pound a week reasonably consistently, go ahead and reset to 1450 manually (or just--gasp!!!--eat 1450 and **babysloth** the red numbers), and see what happens.

    *And I do mean consistently, not accurately, because it doesn't really matter for the purposes of your being able to eat a little more whether you're actually eating 1000 cals a day or 1200 or 1400 -- if your logging is consistent in terms of methods used for estimating your intake, and you've been losing a pound a week, you should be able to increase your intake by 250 of "your" calories (using the same methods you've been using) and still lose a half pound a week.
  • SLLRunner
    SLLRunner Posts: 12,942 Member
    spiriteagle99 wrote: »
    I'm older (60) and mostly sedentary. I do log exercise, about 2 hours a day most days. I'm a runner and a walker and I eat back all my calories. I just thought it was funny that it only added 10 calories to my total when I was trying to slow down my rate of loss. I wonder if they'll only add 10 more for maintenance.

    If I were you I'd recalculate.

    Say your goal is set to lose one pound per week. For anyone, an increase of .25 would be 250 calories more each day, an increase of 1 pound to maintenance would be 500.
  • WinoGelato
    WinoGelato Posts: 13,454 Member
    SLLRunner wrote: »
    spiriteagle99 wrote: »
    I'm older (60) and mostly sedentary. I do log exercise, about 2 hours a day most days. I'm a runner and a walker and I eat back all my calories. I just thought it was funny that it only added 10 calories to my total when I was trying to slow down my rate of loss. I wonder if they'll only add 10 more for maintenance.

    If I were you I'd recalculate.

    Say your goal is set to lose one pound per week. For anyone, an increase of .25 would be 250 calories more each day, an increase of 1 pound to maintenance would be 500.

    Actually I agree with the posters above. If MFP thinks her NEAT maintenance is 1460 and she originally had it set to lose 1 lb/week, MFP would try to subtract 500 cals, but would bottom out at 1200 instead of the true 960. Then when she changes goal to lose 0.5 lb/week, MFP subtracts 250 from the 1460 and she gets a goal of 1210. It feels off to her because she was expecting more but it's just the numbers that the system provides.

    I also agree with @lynn_glenmont that it is likely she can lose eating more because these are all just estimates based on averages and an individual person may be more active than the system presumes. OP if you were losing 1lb/week consistently and want to slow that down then add 200 or so cals to what you were typically eating and monitor for a few weeks.

  • RobD520
    RobD520 Posts: 420 Member
    spiriteagle99 wrote: »
    I recently changed my goal from losing 1 pound a week to losing .5 pound, thinking that that would give me an extra 250 calories to play with. I was successful at losing a pound a week, or thereabouts, but only have a few pounds left to lose and I'm not in a hurry. When I logged in next, MFP had changed my daily goal from 1200 calories to 1210. Really? That's it?

    The lowest MFP allows is 1200 irrespective of what you say your weight loss goal is. You could test this by entering a 2 pound per week goal and note it gives you 1200.

    It sounds like, based upon your entries, you would have had to go down to 1210-250= 960 calories for your original goal. However, this is too few calories unless one is medically supervised.

    You entries are likely off, or you were over counting calories, or undercounting exercise. These are all estimates; even with my food scale I lose faster than MFP projections. So I adjust accordingly. You may have to do the same.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,216 Member
    spiriteagle99 wrote: »
    I'm older (60) and mostly sedentary. I do log exercise, about 2 hours a day most days. I'm a runner and a walker and I eat back all my calories. I just thought it was funny that it only added 10 calories to my total when I was trying to slow down my rate of loss. I wonder if they'll only add 10 more for maintenance.

    +1 to those who say that if you're losing a pound a week on your current calorie intake budget, just add 250 calories to whatever you've been eating in order to lose 0.5 pounds/week. Your own data is more accurate than the calculators, including MFP's. We don't all burn the mean number of calories; it's a bell curve. Your own data tells the truth.

    I'm 61, sedentary outside of intentional exercise (all of which I eat back), and I maintain on around 1900-2000 net calories (at a weight in the low 120s pounds). The calculators (including MFP) put me at around 1500 net to maintain. I would lose steadily at that level - I'm on the lucky end of the bell curve, for no reason I can identify.

    Once you have experience with weight loss (i.e., after you ignore the loss from the first couple of weeks of deficit eating, where much of the loss may be water weight), then you can do the math to figure out how much to eat for a given loss rate, using your own experience. Each pound lost per week is roughly a 3500 calorie deficit for that week.
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