Maintenance Caloric Intake?

Little_Lisa_Ann
Little_Lisa_Ann Posts: 59
edited January 15 in Health and Weight Loss
I read something recently about the maintenance caloric intake (the amount of calories it takes to maintain your current weight). I found 2 websites with calculators for this - one which just gave me a number of calories to maintain and the other with a maintenance number, number for fat loss, and a number for extreme fat loss. Even for fat loss it says I should be eating almost 200 more than MFP is giving me. What is the difference between Maintenance Caloric Intake, and how does MPF calculate daily calorie allowance?

Replies

  • kae_blah
    kae_blah Posts: 180 Member
    The first thing that comes to mind is whether the other calculators factor in activity level and exercise, or are they like MPF where it expects you to eat back your exercise calories - therefore giving you more calories a day to eat than the starting number.
  • michellekicks
    michellekicks Posts: 3,624 Member
    Yep. MFP's estimates of TDEE are not based on exercise being included... so you'll notice it just asks about your lifestyle outside of exercise - what kind of job you have, how you spend your day etc. Other calorie calculators will use your BMR and a standard multiplier for figuring out your total daily burn based on your exercise i.e. sedentary, 1-3 hours light activity, 3-5 hours moderate activity, 5-6 hours heavy, 7+ hours extreme.

    There are others still that take body fat % into consideration, which are even more accurate.

    The MFP one on its own is just an estimate of what you burn. In fact, they all are. I'm a stay-at-home mom but over the last year I've found that I burn about 2200 calories/day without exercise. Even if I set MFP to "Highly Active" (the top one) it still thinks I burn less than 2000 calories daily for my age, height and weight.

    To some extent you have to figure out your own true TDEE. Start with a calculator... any one. Set your goal based on how much you want to lose (or not) and then after one month of tracking diligently every bite, lick and taste (weighed and measured on a food scale), compare your actual results to expected results. That's the only way to know.
  • nxd10
    nxd10 Posts: 4,571 Member
    I'm moving into maintenance and decided to trust MFP. When I started this (33 pounds ago), I fiddled with my activity level until I was losing a pound a week. That's worked fine for me. I'm assuming that's 500 calories or so under maintenance, as that would lead to a pound a week weight loss.

    So I'm just going to slowly up from that until I stop losing and don't gain. I'm sure it will be an adjustment.
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