Finding Maintenance Calories !

kayleighshannon36
kayleighshannon36 Posts: 1 Member
in Goal: Gaining Weight and Body Building
Hi guys just asking does anyone know the best way to find my maintenance calories so i can add more to bulk. It’s just u don’t know what website to trust cause they are all giving me different answers. Thanks in advance

Replies

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 34,216 Member
    All the reputable TDEE calculators (or the NEAT + exercise approach built into MFP) use research based estimating formulas.

    Those formulas spit out a calorie estimate that's the average of people similar to you (same values of the things the calculator lets you input).

    Fitness trackers do pretty much the same thing - estimate - but can have more nuanced estimates because they have more inputs (all the usual profile stuff plus movement, heart rate, GPS coordinates, etc.).

    Most people are close to average, so those estimates are likely to be pretty close. A few people are noticeably higher or lower than average. A very rare few are surprisingly higher or lower than average.

    You won't know whether you're average, or how average you are, until you run the experiment (for 4-6 weeks, whole menstrual cycles if you're a woman of relevant life stage).

    MFP's estimates will be different from TDEE calculators because it expects you to set activity based on non-exercise life (job, home chores, etc.) and log exercise separately. Others can differ in how they phrase activity level descriptions, among other details. Usually, other than the difference between MFP-like methods and TDEE methods, the differences aren't huge, IME.

    This one will let you compare several research-based formulas, and it makes its assumptions explicit (like what activity multiplier it will use), plus it has more activity levels with better descriptions than most. Those facts lead to a busy-looking user interface, but if you take your time looking at it, there's a lot of info there:

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

    There's a thread over in the Maintaining Weight's Most Helpful Post section talking about various methods for estimating maintenance calories, either using such calculators or in other ways. Here's a direct link:

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

    Make an estimate, follow it for those 4-6 weeks, look at the results in real life, adjust if necessary. That should work.
  • Retroguy2000
    Retroguy2000 Posts: 1,847 Member
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb5xgU9zAFY

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