How many calories should I be eating?

victoriaacain

Hello everyone. I have a question for people who have more experience in health and fitness. I am a 25yo female. I weigh 137lb at 5’4. I am relatively fit, I am just looking to lose some fat and tone up while gaining lean muscle in the areas that count. I weightlift/cardio at least 4 times a week for an hour. How many calories a day should I be eating? I am at 1400 a day now. I’m not sure if I’m eating enough. Thank you!

tomcustombuilder

1,400 may or may not be correct, it probably won’t be far off for Fatloss, however for adding muscle it may be too low. You’ll want to pick an amount and stick with it for a month and see the effects of that amount of calories

Toning up is a product of reducing fat that covers the muscles. Muscle is muscle. There is no actual “lean” muscle. What you’re after will come when muscle is added and the fat layer is reduced.

AnnPT77

You have two general options, either of which requires the same follow-up.

Options:

1. Go through the MFP guided setup process. Set your activity level based on your life excluding intentional exercise. Since you're not substantially over-fat, tell MFP you want to lose half a pound a week, because that will give you the best odds of maybe increasing muscle while still cutting calories to lose fat. When you exercise, log your exercise and eat back those calories, too . . . or better yet, synch a good fitness tracker, and let it and MFP handle the arithmetic. This will give you a higher calorie goal on exercise days, a lower one on non-exercise days.

2. Use an outside TDEE calculator to estimate your total average daily calorie needs including exercise, i.e., include the exercise in your activity level. Knock 250 calories per day off the total it gives you for maintaining weight, which will give you that same estimated half a pound a week loss rate. In this scenario, you eat the same number of calories every day, exercise or no, because the exercise calories are averaged in.

If you do the second one, I like this TDEE calculator:

https://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/

It lets you compare several research-based calorie estimation formulas, and has more activity levels with better descriptions than most TDEE calculators have. Because it has all that info, it looks a little scary at first, but you can figure it out pretty easily.

Either of those methods can potentially work. It's more a matter of personal preference which way to go.

What you need to consider is that either of those is giving you an estimate that's basically the average for people similar to you with respect to those few data items you enter. Most people are close to average, a few are noticeably high or low, and a rare few are surprisingly far off in either direction. (It may not be obvious why.) That's because it's an average, and we're individual humans. (That's the nature of statistical estimates, y'know?)

That brings us to the follow up: As Tom says, follow that estimate for 4-6 weeks. (If you have menstrual cycles, compare body weight at the same relative point in at least two different cycles.) Compare your average loss rate per week to your goal, and adjust your calories if necessary going forward, using the assumption that 500 calories per day is roughly a pound a week. Using a short time period won't work as well, because weight changes don't happen linearly.

One caution: Slow loss can be slower to show up. When losing slowly, I've had it take 2 months to show up clearly. You may need to go for more like 8 weeks/2 menstrual cycles to be sure. Since you want to "tone" - which does just mean adding some muscle and having little enough fat that it shows - losing slowly will be the best plan for you, as someone with little weight to lose. Gaining muscle becomes increasingly unlikely as rate of weight loss increases.

Other people's experiences will tell you nothing about how many calories you should eat. It's better to start with an average from one of the calculators, because most people will be close to that by definition. If you start from someone else's experience, they may be very different from average and very different from you.

Best wishes!

tomcustombuilder

Calorie amounts per the calculators and other people’s experiences are a guess and accuracy in counting is another factor as far as if these equations work or not.

Ha! Ann is alway giving great dissertations to get to the point in detail.