5’4, 103-105 pounds, how much to maintain?

dfh13101549

I was wondering if theres anyone at a similar height or weight as me that could tell me how much they eat to maintain! I dont really trust online TDEE calculators! The only excercize i do is making sure i take 10,000 steps a day, which for me only burns about 250 calories! I was thinking i probably need around 1500 a day to maintain? But im not sure.

SisterSueGetsFit

Put your stats in MFP to maintain. You are already about 5 pounds underweight.

Nony_Mouse

You are underweight. The first thing you need to do is eat at a small surplus to gain. If this idea scares you, you may want to speak with a medical professional/therapist.

AnnPT77

Sources of accurate maintenance calorie estimates, in order of likeliest probability of being close to correct for you:

1. Your own weight loss results from carefully logging intake and activity over a long-ish (multi-month) period of time.
2. A good quality activity tracker from a well-respected company.
3. An online TDEE or NEAT calculator that relies on research-based formulas, and ideally has more rather than fewer different activity level settings.
4. Other people's experience.

The last one is very, very unreliable. Only #1 IMO has really good odds of being sound, but 2 & 3 are better than 4. The trackers/calculators are based on research, and population averages. The very nature of statistics suggests that it's more likely you're close to average, than close to some other randomly selected person, even one of the same size.

And I say that as someone for whom #2 & #3 produce pretty terrible underestimates of calorie needs, let alone #4. For me #1 has worked just swell for almost 5 years now.

PAV8888

Weight trend applications show you your longer term weight trend and are less influenced by the spikes caused by single meals or bouts of exercise, or the many other reasons for water weight retention and loss.

It is unlikely (statistically) that you're much different from the mean--which is the values that all the apps use. So start from there. Then if your results over time (4 to 6 weeks for a person who is subject to monthly hormonal fluctuations) prove you're slightly off, adjust based on your weight trend results. Just like Ann did.

Please understand that a one or even four days spike does not make a trend.

Your potentially understandable fear of regaining is not letting you take the proper actions that would actually allow you to determine your maintenance level.

10,000 steps is very much into the ACTIVE level of MFP. If you're making your calculations based on sedentary and you're logging your food intake accurately you're under-estimating and not appropriately fueling the needs of your activity level.

Because of your current weight you're much better off to make an error that results in a controlled level of weight gain than you would be to make an error that would result in further weight loss.

One error is likely to improve your health over and above even pure maintenance.

The other to reduce it further.

The correct goal would be to regain a few pounds which would also make it very easy to determine your actual maintenance.

To do that you would eat at a level that shows actual weight gain and then back off once your trend is firmly back into normal weight territory.