Setting Caloric intake for weight loss

theclassylassy

Can someone tell me the best way to find how many calories I should be eating a day to maintain weight and then how many calories I should be eating to lose weight? Thank you!

yirara

Hi there, and welcome. There's a guided setup.

• The activity level only involves everyday activities related to work, household, kids, etc. Chose a realistic one there.
• You're supposed to log every exercise and eat back those calories. This gives you more calories to play with, but as exercise calories are often overstates maybe start with eating half of those back and re-evaluate after 4-6 weeks, or at the same time in your menstrual cycle if you have one.
• Chose a realistic weightloss goal. It's not realistic if you're given 1200 calories (female) or 1500 (male). Chose a slower rate as you'll not achieve the rate you've chosen. If you still get the same chosen an even slower rate. Remember that a smaller body uses a lot less energy, and hence losing a lot of weight per week is not possible.
• Log everything that has calories. Best done with a foodscale set to grams. Double check nutritional information because most in the database has been entered by other users. You can also add new food items.
• If you have a meal consisting of several ingredients that you prepared then log every ingredient separately. You don't know what ingredients and how much is present in a random chili con carne that other people added to the database. At first this might seem daunting, but after a few days it will only take a few seconds as commonly used food items will always come up again. I've been using the same entry for about 100 fruit, veg, rice, certain meat, condiments for many years.
• In the app you can also swipe to add the same food from the day previously (at least in iOS), or copy food from a previous day, or to the next one with the three dots. You can also save meals and recipes and divide them into servings later.