How many calories for a peri menopausal woman training for an ultra marathon?

KathyMacRae

Hi all,
New here and love the app so far.
I'm curious as to what you know about perimenopause and calories while training. I run 4-5 times a week and do CrossFit 2 times a week.
Average mileage a week ranges from 30-70k (recovery week to peak week).
I've selected "active" in the app, but unsure if that is correct or not.
Does anyone have any resources to share for calculations?
5'7" 170lbs
Trying to remain fit and ditch the meno belly that's growing!
Cheers,
Kathy

AnnPT77

The MFP design is to set your activity level based on your life before intentional exercise (in your case, excluding the marathon training), then log exercise when you do some and eat those calories, too. If you wear a fitness tracker close to 24x7, and it's one of the brands that sync to MFP, that's a reasonable way to log the exercise to start.

If you don't want to do that, use a more nuanced TDEE calculator outside MFP that lets you average in planned exercise. I like this one:

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

Perimenopause or menopause don't change calorie goals materially. (I'm saying that as a female 68 y/o short endurance athlete, for context. I've been in menopause for over 20 years.)

No matter how you do it, MFP or any other calculator (even a fitness tracker) are just a starting estimate. They tell you the average for people similar to you with respect to the data points the thing knows about you. Follow the starting estimate for 4-6 weeks (whole menstrual cycles for those who have them) then adjust based on weight changes over that time. (Assume 500 calories a day is a pound a week, roughly.)

Marathon training and weight loss are challenging goals to combine. (Both are physically taxing, basically, so stacking them is extra taxing.) If you want to lose weight while training hard, I'd suggest a very slow loss rate (like half a pound a week) at most, especially since you don't have much weight to lose (compared to those of us who started out obese).


Best wishes!

KathyMacRae

This is great, thank you! I appreciate you sharing the information and your experience.
I guess for me it's a perfect storm - training, meno belly, and trying to stay healthy. Realistically, I might be asking too much of myself with stacking (something I hadn't really thought about).
Appreciate you!