A Nutritionist Once Told me...

kimny72

LMBelladonna wrote: »

A few years ago, I was referred by my General Practitioner to a nutritionist within our clinic (so, certified.) She was one of the most helpful nutritionists that I had been to and even helped me find more features that I had not used on MFP before!

As I was looking to reduce weight, she told me that the amount of calories that you eat per day essentially determines what your goal weight would be. Meaning, if you eat 1500 calories per day it equates to 150 lbs, 1600 cal/day = 160 lbs. and so on.

While this makes sense, I am curious if anyone else has been told this before?

In addition to your weight, the calories needed to lose, maintain, or gain weight also depends on your activity level and body composition. I would suppose those numbers might be a safe average. But I started at 145 lbs and ate 1500 ish calories to lose down to 125. I'm currently at 130 lbs and eating around 1700-1800 to maintain while being fairly lazy. I would've been starving and probably would've quit if I was trying to eat 1300 to get to 130!

With a great tool like MFP, there's no reason to settle with a vague generalized estimate. Let mfp set your calories to start, and then tweak it up or down after several weeks based on your results.