How do you know how many calories to eat a day?

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kellieolson05
kellieolson05 Posts: 11 Member
in Getting Started
The settings on here say to do 1200 but that seems a little low. Any advice? I am 5'3 and 198lbs.

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  • janejellyroll
    janejellyroll Posts: 25,763 Member
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    The settings are based on the goals that you enter. Did you tell MFP you wanted to lose weight? If you choose an aggressive goal, you'll get lower calories. Try shooting for 5.-1 pounds a week if you want to eat more.

    Also, MFP is designed for you to eat back the calories you burn through exercise. If you do exercise, you'll be eating more than your goal.
  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,811 Member
    edited January 2021
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    Suggest you go back to the goal set up but temporarily set it to "maintain current weight" and see what it suggests is your weight maintenance goal for a day with no purposeful exercise. (The daily goal is plus exercise calories.)

    Then when you set a desired rate of weight loss you will have a better idea of the influence of the speed of loss you select has. Make it sustainable rather than fast.
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,868 Member
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    kellieolson05 wrote: »
    The settings on here say to do 1200 but that seems a little low. Any advice? I am 5'3 and 198lbs.

    There are a few things going on here to take stock of...

    1) Your calorie target is based upon YOUR inputs...your stats (height, weight, etc) and you activity level (without exercise). Many, if not most people want to lose weight yesterday so they select 2 Lbs per week. This doesn't seem like a lot, but it is very aggressive...it is a 1,000 calorie deficit from maintenance...for both men and women, selecting 2 Lbs per week is more than likely going to bring you to the bottom of what MFP will provide for a calorie target...1200 for women and 1500 for men, unless you are severely overweight. Remember, we're talking about fuel here...it takes more fuel to move a Ford F-150 around than a Honda Civic.

    2) As mentioned above, part of this equation is activity level...many people select "sedentary" or "not very active" as a default regardless of whether or not that is true. I did the same because I had a desk job and that's what the descriptor said for my day to day hum drum...but I really wasn't taking into account other things I did during the day...cleaning house, cooking, doing my yard work, at the time helping to chase after a 3 year old and a 1 year old, etc. I wasn't sedentary! You also have to consider deliberate exercise, which isn't included in your activity level. If you exercise and regularly burn, say...200-300 calories, you log that and get additional calories to account for that activity...so in reality you'd be eating 1400-1500 calories after exercise if you were indeed exercising on the regular and burning those calories.

    3) Frankly, we're accustomed to eating quite a bit in the Western culture...so there can be quite an episode of "sticker shock" when we plug all of this into a calculator to see how much we actually need calorie wise to maintain the status quo...and then less to actually lose weight...granted it is based on population statistics, but individually, it's not likely to be hugely off. From what I can determine, MFP ultimately uses 2,000 calories for women and 2,500 for men on an average for lightly active for maintenance. So...you take a 1,000 calorie cut to either of those numbers, and there you go. Even more difficult is realizing that an average meal out when you're not really looking at calories is going to be in the realm of 1000-1300 calories...not something we really think about, but many of us do or did on a pretty regular basis without thinking about it. Like I said, we're accustomed to eating quite a bit of food...without giving it a second thought.

    Ultimately, 1200 may or may not be appropriate...it is likely a very aggressive weight loss target that you may or may not be able to stick with. Ultimately, as someone who lost quite a bit of weight years ago and has more or less maintained that loss, it's kind of a tortoise and the hare kind of thing...go back and read that story...who won, and why?
  • GaryRuns
    GaryRuns Posts: 508 Member
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    As others have pointed out, you likely set your weight loss goal to be too aggressive. People tend to be more successful at losing weight, and keeping it off, if they lose no more than about 0.5-1.0% of of their weight per week. Given your weight that would mean losing between 1 and 2 pounds per week.

    And MFP will never recommend below 1,200 calories per day for a woman. It's a hard limit they have set.

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