help me understand "calorie goal"...

BartBVanBockstaele

AnnPT77 wrote: »

BartBVanBockstaele wrote: »

mtaratoot wrote: »

Someone mentioned how you might have your profile set. I played around on Sailrabbit to see what combinations of age, height, weight, gender, and activity level would spit out a TDEE around 1610 calories. Seems like most likely you have your MFP profile set as slightly active or sedentary. I think that works best if you want to use a watch to estimate your daily energy expenditure. If you do have your profile set to more active, then MFP would assign you a higher goal, and if you add exercise on top of that, it would give erroneous goals that are higher than they should be.

I did not know Sailrabbit so I checked. Although it is more of a coincidence than anything else, the daily intake it suggests is 12 g higher than what I am actually using. That means it is astonishingly close. That said, I cannot tell it anything about exercise, because when I do that, it grossly overestimates my energy consumption. That is not much of a criticism, all energy estimaters I have tried, have the same issue. My conclusion is simply that I am a bit of an outlier which, while –by definition– unlikely, would be consistent with other facts that also confirm me as an outlier, most notably BMI, although I should add there that BMI ranges are not usually used to indicate ideal weight or lean weight, only to indicate normal weight, and that is significantly higher.

This is a semi-digression from OP's question, for which I apologize.

Just as a point of possible entertainment value, @BartBVanBockstaele, you might want to play with the part of Sailrabbit that uses formulas that adjust for body fat percent (BF%). That's assuming you have a rough estimate. IIRC from other threads, you've mentioned appearing as if you have a higher BF% than one might expect from your BMI. Here and elsewhere, you mention being an outlier with respect to calorie needs.

I've played with this concept - how BF% affects BMR/TDEE estimating algorithms - a bit, and it's interesting IMO.

https://www.calculator.net/body-fat-calculator.html

will give you a couple very simplistic BF% estimates, one of which is based on BMI. (Other so-called calculators are available that use more measurements and offer more estimates.) As a higher-calorie-needs semi-outlier, I think that for me some of the discrepancy between non-BF% BMR/TDEE estimates and reality is that my BF% is very likely lower than my BMI predicts for a woman my age/weight.

This is not some deep or profound idea, just sort of a fun toy. I think mentioning the concept is potentially interesting in context of OP's question - as one possible confounding issue with some standard BMR/TDEE estimating methods may be inaccurate for an individual - though it's not fully on-point. If you want to discuss it further, that should be on some other thread where it's more appropriate, I think.

Thank you very much for the suggestion @AnnPT77 , I like the calculator you mentioned quite a bit and it is one I have been playing with a while ago. You are completely correct, by the way. I have higher than normal body fat. It is one of the reasons I am contemplating a scan (DXA/MRI) to estimate how far I can/should go. My current plan is to wait until I reach the "ideal weight" according to the old Broca index (which is the lowest one of the ideal weight formulas that have been proposed over the years) or the newer German standard of a BMI of 21. I forgot its exact name, but I think there is an American association of anesthesiologists that uses a BMI of 22. In my case, that is definitely an overestimate, given how obviously overweight I still am at slightly less than 23.