1200 calories a day will be the end of me

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  • ouryve
    ouryve Posts: 572 Member
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    pinuplove wrote: »
    I'm a little taller (5'2) and a little lighter (133), and I can't live with 1200 calories per day. The last time I calculated it out (based on my food logged and weight loss over a period of months) my TDEE was a little over 1800. This is with an office job and not a lot of intentional exercise. That puts me in the 'lightly active' (plus a little) bracket of MFP activity levels. I lose slowly on 1500, which is far better than starving on 1200, IMO. It's also more sustainable.

    Just because you're small doesn't mean you must, or even should, eat 1200 calories per day to lose weight! Commit to eating a set portion of your exercise calories and log your food faithfully for several weeks. After you have a decent amount of data, you should be able to see what is most appropriate for you.

    Yes. You can choose your calorie intake. Sey it to 1500 and see where you are in March.
  • Cahgetsfit
    Cahgetsfit Posts: 1,912 Member
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    Teabythesea_ wrote: »
    Suly09 wrote: »
    No I am not because as silly as I sound, I don't know all the proper terms for the exercises I am doing. Also to be honest, I do a few sets of different exercises and I guess I am too lazy to input each one individually.

    Just started back up about two weeks ago. Lost about .5 this past week.

    You may be better off figuring out your deficit from a TDEE calculator which takes into consideration your exercise as well as non exercise activity. You subtract calories from that number and, manually input your goal into MFP and eat that amount whether you exercise or not that day. That way, you dont have to log exercise but still get to enjoy those extra calories.

    This is what I was going to suggest too. I don't use the MFP numbers, I calculate using tdeecalculator.net and I don't bother to log exercise calories (I call all my exercise "1 calorie").

    It gives me more than 1200 and i'm not starving.

    Also, as mentioned above, what you actually eat can make a difference in your satiety levels, however you shouldn't be feeling starving. A bit peckish like you could eat more, but controllable peckish.

    I get like that after dinner - like I could eat another plate full. So i have a frozen juice tube at 35 calories - suck it really slowly and it takes that edge off and is like a dessert.

    Give TDEE a go. Might work better for you. And you can ignore all your exercise calories.
  • Suuzanne37
    Suuzanne37 Posts: 114 Member
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    Consider eating the calories for maintenance at sedentary level for two weeks with your same level and intensity of exercise; if you have a loss each week, that would be your approximate deficit.
  • DomesticKat
    DomesticKat Posts: 565 Member
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    It may just require some experimentation on your part. I'm 5'1" and lose with significantly more calories per day, but I did have to collect my own data to figure out my calorie needs. Before I had a fitness tracker (fitbit) I didn't know what my activity level really was (it was higher than I expected) and MFP underestimated my calorie needs in general. I tried to balance things out and slow my rate of loss by eating at or above maintenance a couple of days a week. Once I bought an activity tracker and used that for a couple of months, I was better able to manually adjust my calories on MFP. I suggest picking a number slightly higher than where you are now, say 1400-1500, and try that for 4 to 6 weeks and see where you are then.
  • HeliumIsNoble
    HeliumIsNoble Posts: 1,213 Member
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    Silentpadna wrote: »
    Teabythesea_ wrote: »

    Weight training actually burns fewer calories than cardio.

    Just a minor quibble here. This is true most of the time, but not always. In the context of the OP's exercise, it's most definitely true. However a lot depends on the intensity of each thing. For example, doing weight training with isolation exercises, like curls or leg extensions and such don't have a high burn rate because they don't engage the same systems as cardio. If you lift heavy weights and compound movements, it can be a very effective HIIT-style burn. If you are dead lifting and squatting heavy, these movements engage almost your entire body at once. It drives up heart rate and oxygen consumption in same way HIIT does, because unlike isolation exercises, the demands placed on the body are much greater.

    So when people talk about strength training and cardio, it's important to keep context in mind.

    Again, just a minor quibble, but there are times when the generalizations, while mostly true, in some cases are not true.
    That's interesting. Is that where the Strength Training entry in the database comes into its own?

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,055 Member
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    Silentpadna wrote: »
    Teabythesea_ wrote: »

    Weight training actually burns fewer calories than cardio.

    Just a minor quibble here. This is true most of the time, but not always. In the context of the OP's exercise, it's most definitely true. However a lot depends on the intensity of each thing. For example, doing weight training with isolation exercises, like curls or leg extensions and such don't have a high burn rate because they don't engage the same systems as cardio. If you lift heavy weights and compound movements, it can be a very effective HIIT-style burn. If you are dead lifting and squatting heavy, these movements engage almost your entire body at once. It drives up heart rate and oxygen consumption in same way HIIT does, because unlike isolation exercises, the demands placed on the body are much greater.

    So when people talk about strength training and cardio, it's important to keep context in mind.

    Again, just a minor quibble, but there are times when the generalizations, while mostly true, in some cases are not true.

    I usually agree with you. This time, I don't. Strength training generally, and weight training specifically, is totally worth doing, but even heavy compounds are still not the biggest calorie burners (as compared with many common forms of cardio). Summary of research-derived MET values, see categories 02050-02052-02054:

    https://sites.google.com/site/compendiumofphysicalactivities/Activity-Categories/conditioning-exercise

    (A number of cardio activities appear on other pages, because they fall in different major categories: The site is quite comprehensive).

    Fitness trackers and (especially) heart rate monitors are likely to give very inaccurate estimates for strength training activities - they often overstate by a lot.

    https://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/Azdak/view/hrms-cannot-count-calories-during-strength-training-17698
  • Jenr0819
    Jenr0819 Posts: 8 Member
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    Four years ago, I was so convinced peri-menopause was making me gain weight I asked my dr about it. I was convinced I needed hormones or medication to lose weight. He told me about MFP and told me to manually set it to 1500 calories/day. It’s more per day but I stuck with it. I lost 30 pounds! Unfortunately, I have gained it back and starting again today! I WILL LOSE THIS BY SUMMER!

  • Strudders67
    Strudders67 Posts: 978 Member
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    OP, I'm just over 5' although I weigh a little less than you. I too am allocated 1200 calories but, as I eat my exercise calories, I'm usually eating more than that. It's slow progress but my weight is going down and that's fine with me.

    My MFP setting is Sedentary as I'm desk based; my understanding is that that assumes you do about 3500 steps a day. I log my walk to and from work (using the setting for the appropriate speed) plus whatever I do in the gym, but I don't log the steps that I do in and around the office or home as they are my 3500 Sedentary steps.

    I think the exercise calories in MFP are fairly accurate for walking but my experience is that what MFP gives me for the elliptical is almost double what the machine says I've burned (and the machine knows the speed and intensity setting I did). I therefore only log just over half my exercise time on the elliptical.
  • pridesabtch
    pridesabtch Posts: 2,314 Member
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    I'm 5'1" lightly active and MFP has me at 1280. Previously on MFP it had me at 1200, but I stuck to 1360 and was able to lose. I exercised a lot and did eat very high protein with little processed food but it's still a calorie balance. I ate back a reasonable portion of my exercise calories. Some days I'd have really big burns (100 mile bike ride chalks up like 3000 cal), but I'd rarely add more than 1000 to my diet (I always had a candy bar and usually a beer on ride says). More than that just didn't make sense. I went from 160 to 105, but that was with dedicated training for time trials and was never meant to be maintainable. Unfortunately, after the races ended, work got crappy and I went back up in weight. Anyway, here are some generic numbers you can use to log your exercise.

    Conservative calorie burn at our size...
    1 mile flattish= 100cal, sometimes you do it in 8min, some time in 20min, still ~100cal
    Hard core cardio = 7-8 cal per minute. For continuous effort.
    Weight lifting = maybe 2-3 cal per minute, this assumes like a minute rest between sets or exercises.

    Good luck!

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