Maintenance Calories?

cgcrutch

What are maintenance calories? Calories to remain at current weight? Or calories to maintain ideal healthy weight? For an overweight person, should I be eating calories for the weight I SHOULD be? or just a 1000/day calorie deficit of the calories "needed" for my weight now?? Maintenance calories for a 140lb woman seems REALLY high to me. If it matters, my goal is a minimum of 10lbs/month weight loss.

Sunny_Bunny_

Maintenance calories are the calories that maintain your current weight.
How big a deficit you choose is up to you.
One method is to eat what your maintenance calories would be if you were at your ideal weight. Others figure out maintenance calories then subtract whatever deficit they want from that.

kpk54

Since you're using MFP and if you're using it as intended:
It really doesn't show maintenance calories unless you put in your current weight and set your goal to maintain. It would then show, on your food diary, the number of calories you need to maintain that current weight.

If you put in your goal weight and choose maintain as a goal, it will show you the number of calories you should eat to maintain that goal weight. I've often thought it would be interesting to lose in that fashion. It would slow your loss down in the latter part of your weight loss (in theory) but you wouldn't have to reverse-diet to ease into maintenance calories.

A bit of a caveat is that MFP won't lower your calories to less than 1200 (at least that was the case in the free version a few years ago). Well, since my maintenance calories at 203 pounds at sedentary and age 59 were only ~1800, if I had selected a 2 pound loss, MFP would have given me deficit calories to eat of 1200. 1800-1000 per day to lose 2 pounds a week is only 800 not 1200. LOL.

As on overweight person you should be eating the number of calories MFP assigns as calories to eat in a deficit (the number that appears on your food diary) if you have entered your stats and goals properly. If you exercise you should be eating back at least a portion of those calories since MFP is based on N.E.A.T and not T.D.E.E.

When you add in exercise calories either by entering the exercise yourself or via a synced tracker (ie fitbit), MFP will give you more calories to eat. I will guess that most keto people will eat up to what might be provided in protein calories or fat calories but not the carb calories. Calories/grams are added to each of the 3 macros based on the % you have assigned in MFP.

I hope the above answers your question. FWIW- my maintenance calories as a 64 year old, 5'6", SEDENTARY female at 140 pounds=1530. Yours should be higher because 1) you are considerably younger and 2) you may have (or entered) a higher level of activity than sedentary. I am truly sedentary on many days getting no more than 2000 steps around the house. On days that I take my "fitness walks" my free tracker that I have synced with MFP might provide about 300 calories for achieving ~10,000 steps. Then and only then would I feel comfortable eating a portion of those back. 5000 of them are above the 5000 max steps usually assigned to sedentary. That's just my way of doing things that has "worked". My weight remains stable. I basically use "exercise calories" for food diary errors, forgetfulness and a cushion for days I'm hungrier than others.

Also FWIW, I've found MFP (and my free step tracker on my phone) to be on target for me. I began exploring other alternate calculators for TDEE and such sometime ago (I've been here nearly 5 years, 4 of which I've been maintaining). Choosing the numbers given by 5 or 6 and averaging them, they equaled MFP. They're all just a guide. MFP included.