Increasing calories question

How exciting! I have wanted to meet with a nutritionist for a while. Fill us in after you get your info!

MFP's calorie goals are based on you not exercising. When you exercise and burn calories, then it increases your calorie goals by that amount and you are supposed to eat more. Personally, I find this doesn't work that well. Most of my workouts are weight lifting, and it's difficult to calculate how much you are burning, because lifting increases your metabolism so you continue to burn calories after the workout. I had to also do trial and error and raise my calories. I'm still working on it, but aiming for 1500 rather than 1200 seems to do it for me. I'm losing weight and I'm not starving! I suspect I could eat even more, and will probably consider another increase after a month or so.

With me, my dietician put me on 1600 cals. I was keeping it between 1400 and 1600, which she wasn't really thrilled about, but accepted. Experimenting with MFP, it told me I should drop to 1200. I did this, lost weight for awhile, and then everything slowed down dramatically. I was getting really frustrated and tried pretty much everything else before I relented and upped my cals again. I'm now back to 1500, my dietician's happy and I'm once again losing weight. So, as counterproductive as it sounds, increasing calories CAN help you lose weight.

mom020305, how's it working for you? I just decided today to up mine!

I had been rolling along really well -- melting away for about 5 months. Then I hit a wall and didn't lose anything for 3 weeks. 1 week into that plateau I decided I wasn't eating enough. I went from eating 1200 calories and hardly any exercise calories to eating 1200 base calories and 50% of my exercise calories (and I exercise every day). This put me around 1350-1450 calories a day. It worked, and 2 weeks later I started dropping weight again. I lost 8 pounds in 3 weeks and now I've stalled again (though I fully admit I didn't have a great week). But I'm using that as an excuse to lower my weight loss goal to 1.5 pounds a week which gives me 1350 base calories. Then I'm going to eat 50% of my exercise calories on top of that. Today was a run day for me so I'm eating 1500-1550 calories. Wowee zowee -- that's a lot of healthy food!

So, yes, increasing calories has worked for me once and I very much expect it to work for me again.

Edit: And I think it needs to be noted here that once you increase your calorie intake, you need to accept the possibility you may not lose weight (or *gasp* you may even gain) for a couple of weeks, so if that bothers you, do NOT weigh yourself for 3-4 weeks after increasing them. You have to give your body time to adjust to any changes you make in your diet. Lack of patience is one of the main reasons people get frustrated & quit fighting for their health and weight goals. :flowerforyou:

Yes--this worked for me, too. I did MFP a couple years ago and stuck to the 1200 (plus all the exercise) calories. I did lose weight, but I was absolutely starving all the time. (My BMR is 1750; that probably has a lot to do with it). I now have a trainer and she has put me on 1875 calories/day and it's wonderful. I'm still losing weight (12 lbs this month) but I no longer obsess about being hungry all the time.