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Daily Calorie Goal

Should my "Daily Calorie Goal" be my net calories (food in - calories burned)? Or the total amount of calories that I can consume, with/without working out?

Answers

  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 10,256 Member
    Your calorie goal is what you should eat each day. If you set MFP up correctly then your activity level includes day to day movement for work, cleaning the house, etc but not exercise. You're supposed to log exercise and in addition eat the calories given to you. However, exercise calories are often grossly inflated, both from various trackers and from the options available here. If you've set up mfp correctly then maybe start eating half of the exercise calories back and see how it goes. If you after one month lose faster then eat more (fast is not necessarily good), and if you lose a lot slower then re-evaluate. We can also help with that.

    On that note, if you're female and mfp has given you 1200 calories, or male and it's 1500 then your weightloss goal per week is too big and you won't lose as fast as you hope. It's the minimum numbers of calories you're given. Especially here it's important to eat back exercise calories as you don't want to starve yourself.