Basic Calorie Questions

spragukr

So I just typed out a long post and it all got erased -_-

Anyway - basically, MFP has told me that my calorie limit is 1310 calories per day in order to lose a pound a week. Recently I haven't had many opportunities to work out due to moving home for winter break and seeing friends/family, as well as not having the rec center I use at school to my disposal and also just relaxing at home with my parents the past few days. This means I don't even have exercise calories to eat back, so my limit really is 1310 per day.

I am mostly concerned about putting my body into starvation mode, I don't want to do that. MFP tells me that I need 1200 per day to stay out of starvation mode, and my main question is, is this correct? I just want to make sure that if I'm over 1200 that I am probably safe. I usually go a little over my daily limit anyways, by 100-200 calories, because 1310 is really hard for me to stick to. It just seems to me that there is little wiggle room between starvation mode and my daily limit, but is that okay as long as I'm getting the 1310 in per day, or even as long as I hit the 1200 calorie mark?

And another question, do you have to eat your BMR or is it okay to eat under, for example, if my BMR is higher than the 1310 that is assigned by MFP.

Thank you in advance for anybody that can help =] I'm incredibly new at this whole thing so I have a lot to learn.

Rae6503

You don't have very much to lose, so one pound a week might not be possible for you (and if it is, you might lose more muscle than is ideal). Change your goal to a half pound a week and your body and your mind will be happier. Our bodies don't like to be "lean". They like a little bit of fat storage in case of famine. It'll even use muscles first in order to preserve it's fat. You have to gently coax it into giving up that storage. This is done with SMALL calorie deficits and takes some time.

havalinaaa

When I first started with MFP I was eating 1360, what it set me at for 1 pound a week. Even with eating exercise calories, I was finding it incredibly hard to meet my macro nutritional requirements (fat/carb/protein) and I felt like crap a lot of the time - headaches and irritability. So I recently used about 15 different online calculators to get a more accurate picture of both my BMR and my calories burned on a given day, and I find that MFP's numbers for me seemed to be a little off. I upped my calories considerably and immediately started to feel better. I've only had one headache since I raised calories as opposed to nearly daily ones when they were lower. I'm set to lose about .5 pounds a week, and I'm ok with a slower change as long as I feel good and am still seeing results (which I am!).

Basically, I would listen to your body. If you feel good where you are, stick with it. If you don't, increase your calories and see if you are feeling better and still losing.

spragukr

Thank you both for the advice! I will see how the next few days ago and will probably increase my calorie limit and maybe drop down to half a pound per week. I was really just hoping on losing 10-15 pounds by spring break (my family is going to Hawaii) but if it is going to be hard on my body and health, then it isn't worth it.