How much calories should I eat?

alexandraarnold88

Hi. I’m new to this losing weight journey. I weight 140 and I’m 5 feet tall. I want to lose 117 by the end of the year. I don’t understand how to start. I’m looking meal preping ect . However, how many calories should I intake and how many should I burn? Anyone knows? I’m totally clueless so I’m sorry for my ignorance. How do I use a meal scale? Idk any of these things hopefully someone can guide me.

15822

Alright, let's math.

You weigh 140 and you want to be at 117. You want to lose 23 pounds this year. There are 147 days left in 2022.

You need to cut 3500 calories to lose 1 pound of fat, so you're trying to come out with a deficit of 80500 calories until end of the year, or 548 calories per day.

Next up, you need to know how many calories you burn normally in a day. You need a total daily energy expenditure calculator, like this one - I don't know how old you are, but making a wild guess based on the 88 in your user name, let's say 34. The calculator here says, assuming you have a sedentary job, that you burn about 1500 calories per day.

General guidance says it's not safe to consume less than 1200 calories per day, so that means you should go for about 1200 calories per day and burn at least 200 calories a day through exercise to get to your goal.

15822

It's important to remember however that your body does not care for calculators and will do its thing at its own pace. You could gain weight after exercise, you could gain weight with hormone fluctuations and a dozen other reasons, but on average the math above checks out.

Eating a specific number of calories means no 'eyeballing' your portions. If you eat ready made food, you can scan the barcode in the MFP app. with home cooked foods, you need a food scale to measure out anything you put in to your meals.

I can't tell you what 200 calories of exercise looks like for you as I'm much heavier than you, but you can click around here to see some estimates.

Lietchi

Have you asked MFP to calculate a calorie goal? https://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/change_goals_guided

Exercise comes on top of that: your activity level is meant to reflect only non-exercise activity.

Lietchi

PS: I recommended reading the topics linked here:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10300331/most-helpful-posts-getting-started-must-reads#latest

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10300319/most-helpful-posts-health-and-weight-loss-must-reads#latest