Can my goal be less than 1500 calories?

edgarlikespie3222

Hello. I am shorter than most men. 5’1 to be exact. I weight around 155 pounds and was overweight. I’ve done great progress and come down to 127 pounds now (averaging that weekly). My calorie requirements are not changing at all. At 155 pounds I required 1500 and now at 127 I am not seeing the calories change. Maybe I am getting impatient but, it feels like I’m losing weight slower. With my stats my BMI is at “24.0” according to the calculator which just slightly beneath overweight. And I certainly don’t like my appearance in the mirror. I’m assuming MyfitnessPal doesn’t want to starve a normal sized man and is capped at 1500 calories. Is there way to go below 1500 calorie goal or is MyFitnessPal capped at 1500?

cmriverside

You can manually change your calorie goal in "Goals," then just choose,"EDIT."

https://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/my-goals/daily-nutrition-goals

PAV8888

But I would caution you that slow loss from ground level really does feel like no loss at all.

And at BMI 24 you are within the normal "healthy" weight range regardless of how you perceive yourself in terms of aesthetics.

Range means that for most people their one single healthy weight will end up being somewhere in the range. It doesn't mean that any one particular point in the range is equally healthy for everyone.

yirara

You need time as change won't happen from one day to the next. The reason men need more calories, regardless of size is because they tend to have more muscle than women. Hey, woman have lots of non-muscle tissue compared to men that all count to the total body mass: breasts, additional organs plus the padding to keep it safe, etc. You don't have this, but likely a lot more muscle mass instead. Which needs proper nutrition.

lynn_glenmont

It's normal and appropriate to have your rate of loss slow as you get closer to your goal weight.

westrich20940

I'd suggest trying to put your stats into a Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) calculator - follow the directions and it will ask your activity level, this is intended to include your normal daily life activity as well as the typical intentional workout/activity that you engage in. However, the results at the end will give your daily caloric estimate for all of the levels (BMR, Sedentary, Light Exercise, Moderate Exercise, Heavy Exercise, and Athlete). Just try that and consider what it suggests vs. what you are consuming.

Weight loss will always slow down the closer you get to your goal/the more weight you lose. MFP will not automatically go below 1500 for a man - you'd have to manually change your daily calorie goal. However, even though you are short - it's not likely that your daily caloric need would truly be less than 1500...unless you are also basically super sedentary or aging.

SweatLikeDog

The app is only as good as the assumptions they make when calculating calories. Height, weight, age, sex, and activity level will never give you the exact calories that you think you need because they don't factor in muscle mass and your individual metabolic rate. They're just a starting point. If you don't see results, adjust your calories up or down 200 calories and see what happens. You can double check the MFP numbers with the most widely used equations here: https://www.omnicalculator.com/health/bmr-harris-benedict-equation

cmriverside

SweatLikeDog wrote: »

The app is only as good as the assumptions they make when calculating calories. Height, weight, age, sex, and activity level will never give you the exact calories that you think you need because they don't factor in muscle mass and your individual metabolic rate. They're just a starting point. If you don't see results, adjust your calories up or down 200 calories and see what happens. You can double check the MFP numbers with the most widely used equations here: https://www.omnicalculator.com/health/bmr-harris-benedict-equation

Just as an FYI to anyone reading (not necessarily to SweatLikeDog) but MFP uses Mifflin St Jeor - totally different calculation than Harris Benedict. Mifflin St Jeor is recommended as more accurate and useful for obesity calculations. With MFP, you would also input any purposeful exercise at the time you do it which then increases your daily calorie goal.

Here's the explanation: https://support.myfitnesspal.com/hc/en-us/articles/360032625391-How-does-MyFitnessPal-calculate-my-initial-goals

Sailrabbit has a good TDEE calculator. However, if you use a TDEE goal calculation while also using MFP, you would not add in extra exercise calories into MFP when you do them, as TDEE calculators figure (weekly) exercise into your daily goal. It comes out the same both ways, the two are just different ways to account for calories expended during purposeful exercise .

AnnPT77

If you try to close your diary at lower calories, you may get a generic warning message. Closing your diary doesn't do anything magical, so it's OK to ignore the message, if that calorie goal is appropriate to your situation.

How fast are you actually losing weight at this point? It can be health-promoting to slow down as one gets lighter. Something in the range of 0.5-1% of current weight lost per week is IMO a good goal, with a bias toward the lower end of that when not pretty seriously obese.

It's OK to go below 1500 if necessary, and at your height it might be reasonable. I'm asking, though, because at a similar weight (and female) but only a little taller (5'5"), I would've lost at a pretty good clip at 1500. Everybody's different, so I'm not saying you should eat more than 1500 . . . just explaining why the question occurred to me.

Best wishes!

LiveOnceBeHappy

I logged into a food tracking app that is a competitor to MFP, and it recommended less than 1200 calories for me (female). It recommended 1052 calories per day! I won’t be doing that, but I found it interesting that it would recommend below what I thought was considered the absolute minimum.

yirara

LiveOnceBeHappy wrote: »

I logged into a food tracking app that is a competitor to MFP, and it recommended less than 1200 calories for me (female). It recommended 1052 calories per day! I won’t be doing that, but I found it interesting that it would recommend below what I thought was considered the absolute minimum.

That the calorie goal is below 1200 calories for a female is not good. But this website/app probably just processed the input data you gave it, thus your current stats and your weightloss goal. If it's too steep then MFP corrects this to 1200, this other product apparently doesn't. On that note, I think MFP should tell people when their desired weightloss goal is too big. But I suppose it would put potential customers that buy premium off too quickly.

PAV8888

Why would you use Harris based on a 1918-19 predominantly normal weight sample of 16-63yo as opposed to at least going with Mifflin from the 1990s using a dataset of people ranging from normal to obese and aged 19 to 78? Even the populations average height has changed since 1918.

MargaretYakoda

lynn_glenmont wrote: »

It's normal and appropriate to have your rate of loss slow as you get closer to your goal weight.

Normal, appropriate, and annoying!