maintenance calories for being truly sedentary?

cookiedope

This is semi hypothetical as my activity level will be increasing eventually, but given that at the moment my daily activity is limited basically to doing the washing up, cooking dinner, sleeping and sitting down, is BMRx1.2 actually needed for maintenance? or will i actually be burning less than that? does sedentary assume my NEAT is higher than that, or will i genuinely burn 1.2x more calories sitting on my bum and typing?

trying to find a baseline for my maintenance calories so i can be more accurate.

jemhh

In short, sedentary assumes you are sedentary. That doesn't mean you never get out of bed but it does mean that you are minimally active. However, the only way to know if the BMR x 1.2 calculation is correct is going to be to eat at that level for several weeks (I'd suggest at least 4) and then see what your weight is doing.

AnnPT77

Your personal maintenance calories may differ from the calculators - calculators are based on averages from studies of large numbers of people. Most of us are close to average, but some further from it in either direction. Therefore, a calculator is only giving you in initial well-founded best guess, not gospel truth.

If you've been logging food and losing weight for a while, your own loss data can be used to calculate your maintenance, and that will be more accurate.

Yes, you will burn more calories than your actual personal BMR just living a normal sedentary life. Your BMR is what you'd burn in a coma, basically. You move around more than that.

Is it 1.2 times more? That's an estimate that's also based on studies of large groups. It could be accurate for you, is likely to be close, but could be further off. For example, fidgety people burn more calories (up to a small number of hundreds more daily, potentially) despite being sedentary.

So, if you don't have better data (such as from being sedentary and logging food while losing a known amount of weight), then set your maintenance calorie goal based on what the calculator says. Monitor your weight for at least a month at that level, and adjust your eating as needed. Don't forget that you'll see normal weight fluctuations of up to several pounds daily, up or down, based on eating saltier or carbier food than usual; time of month; getting sore muscles, illness or injuries that require body repair; etc.

Many people choose to set a maintenance weight range to allow for the fluctuations. 3 to 5 pounds above/below goal weight is pretty typical. Then you base adjustments whether you're persistently above or below that range for multiple days or weeks in a row.

TimothyFish

It is doubtful that you know your BMR and even if you did it is doubtful that anyone could tell you what to multiply it by to get an accurate maintenance level. A couple of years ago I broke my pelvis and could hardly move without pain. I was trying to lose weight at the time I was upset about the setback but I decided that I would eat normally while I healed. During the couple of months of me mostly sitting around I lost seven pounds. The only way to accurately maintain your weight is to watch what happens on the bathroom scale.

rileysowner

As stated, start with what the charts based on good and fairly large population studies in a tightly controlled setting give you. Log your food really carefully, and see what your results are in 4 weeks, then modify your calories in number based on that. Looking to lose one pound per week and losing 1.5, increase eating by 250 calories a day. Looking to lose a pound and only losing half a pound decrease calories in by 250 per day. Of course your numbers are unlikely to fall so neatly so you get to put to use what those annoying word based math problems you worked at in school taught you to get more precise number, but the pattern is pretty clear. Of course all this depends on logging your food properly, but that is another topic.