Maintaining weight goal

crinus

Hello everyone!
I recently hit my weight loss goal of ninety pounds. Once I had lost quite a bit of weight I began to slowly add activity. Now I am at a point that I stretch twice daily and do light cardiovascular 3 times a week. I recently added weights to the mix. I am going slowly due to some back and hip problems. My question is as I try to maintain my weight while working out how many additional calories should I be eating?

Thank you!
Cindy

cwolfman13

crinus wrote: »

Hello everyone!
I recently hit my weight loss goal of ninety pounds. Once I had lost quite a bit of weight I began to slowly add activity. Now I am at a point that I stretch twice daily and do light cardiovascular 3 times a week. I recently added weights to the mix. I am going slowly due to some back and hip problems. My question is as I try to maintain my weight while working out how many additional calories should I be eating?

Thank you!
Cindy

Go reset your goals on MFP from lose to maintain and MFP will give you a maintenance target.

sijomial

Congrats Cindy, that's an impressive achievement. :flowerforyou:

Are you logging and eating back your exercise calorie estimates like the app intends?
If you are then exercising more will automatically give you more to eat.

Log strength training under the CV part of your diary.

Only you know what your weight has been doing recently and that's a good guide to roughly what your maintenance calories might turn out to be. Do please expect to have to keep adjusting, don't be afraid of experimenting.

AnnPT77

There's also a thread in the Most Helpful Posts section about various ways to figure out maintenance calories, one of which is mentioned above. Direct link here:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10638211/how-to-find-your-maintenance-calorie-level/p1

That doesn't directly address your exercise calories question, but there may be some helpful ideas there.

If you've figured out how to maintain your loss, and had been doing so for a while before adding the exercise, you can get some rough ideas of the exercise calories by using methods others here use during both weight loss and maintenance to account for calories.

Estimating exercise calories is . . . approximate. There tend to be better and worse ways of estimating different exercise types, not a "one size fits all" estimating method that's best for everything.

If you have a fitness tracker that will synch with MFP, synching that (with negative adjustments enabled) is one option, and can be fairly accurate for average-ish people, which is most people.

If you don't have a fitness tracker, based on my own preferences/reading/experience, I'd suggest:

* For the stretching, use the MFP exercise database estimate for "Mild stretching" in the cardiovascular section.
* For the strength training, if it's normal reps/sets with short rests between the sets, use "Strength training (weight lifting, weight training)" in the cardiovascular section. Use the whole time period, including the short rests between sets.

For the cardio, it matters what the cardio is, like walking, running, cycling, dancing, etc., and maybe whether it's steady-state exertion or intervals (alternating more intense for a bit, then less intense). Often, the MFP database is not the best way to estimate these things.

Any exercise estimate can be quite approximate. In that sense, you might want to make an estimate, then start by eating back a good chunk of the estimated amount but not the whole estimate to start (average it over a week, if you like having the same calorie goal every day). Then you can pay attention to how your scale weight responds, on average over a period of quite a few weeks. If necessary, adjust based on results. If you're in the ballpark, there's not much chance of any fast gain.