how many calories to loose weight and body fat?

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MonkeyFlower
MonkeyFlower Posts: 92 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
Sorry i Feel like an idiot who should be able to work this out by myself but i keep overcomplicating it and getting confused with how much I should be eating.

I joined in early Jan and set MFP to 1200 cal a day which I just upped to 1300 and have been eating back roughly ½ my exercise cals, I normally work out on average 30-45min a day with a mixture of running, steps, pilates and just started adding in weights.

My stats are im 5’4 and 32 years old. I currently weigh 58.4kg and had my body fat come out at 26% (I have quite a small frame but am very squishy) I am hoping to get back to my pre pregnancy weight of 53kg and be at at least 20% body fat. (my youngest is 1 ½ so I haven’t just given birth or anything)

After lurking on the forums I got interested in all the talk about TDEE and my BMR so did the calculations and basically 20% of my TDEE comes out at about 1308 and my BMR comes out at around 1360. So should I leave my 1300 a day calorie goal? Does this sound reasonable…felt quite nervous putting my 1200 up to 1300 but have a sneaking suspicion i should be raising it more?

...oh just to add i don’t feel particularly hungry on the cals im eating but i want to do it properly and not muck my body up by eating too low or too high so thought i would ask the people on here who seem to know a lot more about it than me :happy:

Sorry for rambling…blame it on the fact I’ve just woken up!

Replies

  • DopeItUp
    DopeItUp Posts: 18,771 Member
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    Go to My Home, Settings, then Update Diet/Fitness profile. Fill out the info. Eat what it tells you to eat.

    I'm not sure why you're adding all this extra complication in, half the beauty of MFP is the simplicity.
  • SteveTries
    SteveTries Posts: 723 Member
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    I think your approach looks good. It's well considered and you've evidently factored in all of the info you've read here that made sense for you.

    Ignore the unhelpful poster previous. Don't blindly follow MFP which just applies an algorithm based on what you enter as goals, regardless of if they are sensible or not. I think you are right to think it over more and try to understand the process.

    You can readily adjust your approach if you are losing too fast. In my opinion 0.5 kgs a week is a good rate at your size.

    Good luck. Happy to offer opinion anytime you want a sounding board.
  • MonkeyFlower
    MonkeyFlower Posts: 92 Member
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    Thank you so much @sjb74uk.

    I'm not sure why you're adding all this extra complication in, half the beauty of MFP is the simplicity.

    and im 'adding all this extra complication in' because after reading the forums it seemed other posters had a really good knowledge base about calories/nutrition and had had some amazing sucsess with eating more calories so i thought i would try and expand my knowledge and ask their advice.
  • PaulKruse
    PaulKruse Posts: 12
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    Losing weight almost certainly means losing both fat and muscle. The trick is to lose more fat than muscle. You already have good advice on that. Weight training helps.
    Everyone is a little bit different. If you run some algorithm for figuring your metabolic rate, treat that as a ball park number. Then back off 500 calories per day to lose a pound per week. Monitor the results for a couple of weeks. If you are losing more than a pound per week, then add a few calories back in your diet. If you are not losing enough, cut back a bit. Try to keep both diet and exercise the same while running this check on yourself. Too many variables mucks up the results.

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