Help?

fatgirlinheels
fatgirlinheels Posts: 6
in Food and Nutrition
Hi all. I'm new to myfitnesspal.. According to my settings, its suggesting I only have 1200 calories per day and I'll lose 1lb per week. This seems really low to me. I'm scared my body will go into starvation mode if I only have 1200. Should I ignore it and just aim for 1300 instead?

I workout at least 6x a week for 20/30 mins.

Help?

Replies

  • ArtemisMoon
    ArtemisMoon Posts: 144
    A lot of people don't go by what MFP says. I eat as much as 300 cals or even more sometimes over and still lose weight with little to no exercise. go to fitnessfrog.com and use their calculators to try to find a calorie count to aim for and then adjust according to how your body reacts.

    You don't seem to have much weight to lose, so you might to best weight training to lose inches and ignore "dieting" and the scale. But if you do just aim to lose weight, try to be realistic and patient. With that little to lose, it probably won't come off very fast at all.

    And eat back at least part of your exercise calories.
  • Lift_This_
    Lift_This_ Posts: 2,756 Member
    that is just a baseline you can start with...i went back and did the custom feature....1200 is low...like everyone says..haha...i work about 4-6 days a week for at least an hour...so if you feel its low by all means change it.
  • antipholous
    antipholous Posts: 116
    Best piece of advice: Find out what your BMR is. That's Basic Metabolic Rate, which comes down to how many calories your burn naturally (no exercise). You can guesstimate with a lot of different tools easily found on Google, but the best way to do it is to get an armband or another device that can measure it. They typically cost around $200, so if that's out of your price range or interest go with the free Google apps, but remember you're guessing so you won't get perfect results.

    Once you know what yours is (mine is around 2,600 calories) you can use that to calculate how much weight you want to lose vs. how much food you want to eat. That'll give you a timeline. There are 3,500 calories in a pound. If you're eating at a 500 calorie deficit everyday you'll lose 1 pound a week. Higher deficits make for faster loss, lower deficits make for slower loss.

    As for "starvation mode," I've never really experienced this, and I've lost over 100 pounds. Over a single week or a single month there may be some fluctuation between my calorie deficit and weight loss, but over the series of a few months it just about matches, give or take 5%. In my opinion, weight loss really is that simple. Others will disagree, and I'm sure they will below, but that's what my advice is.
  • BR3ANDA
    BR3ANDA Posts: 622 Member
    Did you include your exercise when you calculated your goals? 1200 would be the LOWEST net calories you should consume, when you add in your exercise your calories for the day will increase ( you get to eat them back). It was way to low for me, so i set mine manually based on my BMR that I got from a few other websites.

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