Need Advice AGAIN!!

Congrats on your upcoming anniversary and it's a bonus to have some added savings because you're living healthier! I hope you guys get to do something fun...since your diet is a joint effort, you both deserve a treat!

You'll lose weight eating a healthy amount, and fast too. You'll lose weight slower or not at all if you keep up eating so little -- eat more! Exercise moderately. Don't kill yourself -- your body is smarter than you think. If you don't respect it by starving and overworking it, it WILL backfire. I know partially from experience, and from research.

Anyway, it sounds like youre eating pretty healthy, besides the amount. Going vegan and eating more naturally is a great goal, but just keep in mind you still need to eat ENOUGH. 'no pride in starving yourself.

In terms of macro nutrients, I would say this... in terms of importance, it's protein, fat and then carbs. And no single macro will make you fat or gain weight unless their calorie content is in excess of your TDEE. Based on your stats, your TDEE is going to be rather high. While there is no benefit of eating more than 1g of protein per lb of lean body mass, it also wont necessarily hurt if you exceed that. I have about 176 lbs of lbm and I frequecnt eat 150-200 g of protein a day. But this is also why I suggest a macronutrient profile that will ensure proper protein goals are met as well as fats.

How many calories do you intend to go forward with?


Now, while the bike is good for exercise as it can provide resistance, I would also suggest starting a resistance training program for your upper body/total body. This will also improve muscle retention and help maintain your metabolism which will inevitably slow down as you lose weight.

Well, already have started my new thing...check out my food diary for today...and I'm going to work up to 1200-1500....and that low, but because I have a horrible back, right foot and right hip along with no gym member ship....I'm kinda screwed. This lady that runs a bootcamp program told me that unless I can do the bike very AGGRESSIVELY that all I would be doing is depleting calories. She advised to try and get the calories up, at whatever pace I can do, and then, after a period of time when my body recognizes that I'm not going to starve it, then i should start biking at whatever level I can do. Sound about right??

I would agree that you need to increase your calories. There is no real necessary to eat that little, especially since you have an estimated BMR is around 1800. I would suggest eating around 1600-1700 calories and on days you can exercise, then up it to 1800. In fact, if you can, just start weight training. It's much lower impact and if you do compound lifts you will get an anaebolic effect which means you heart will go pretty high.

Ok how do you calculate BMR - I dont understand and I am stuck so any help would work! Feedback welcomed

your total daily energy requirements are a combination of these things:

1) the amount of energy you need to live. this includes breathing, digestive functions, heating your body, etc.
2) the amount of energy you expend doing normal every day activity, such as walking to the mailbox, brushing your teeth, combing your hair, etc.
3) the amount of energy you expend doing extra exercise, such as jogging, running, playing a pickup game of basketball, playing tennis, etc.

these activities are described as follows:

1) BMR. you get this from one of several calculators using details about your body or you can have it medically tested.
2) this is hard to calculate, so its estimated using the Harris-Benedict equation. basically, you determine your normal activity level (excludes exercise) and that gives you a multiplier to use on your BMR. if you are sedentary, it's 1.2. if you are lightly active, it's 1.375. etc.
3) these are separate exercise calories.

TDEE = BMR x Harrs-Benedict multiplier + exercise calories

if you eat more than your BMR and less than your TDEE, you will lose weight and being in this range will give you the greatest probability of avoiding any sort of unexpected side effects. eating less than BMR will usually cause some side effects. eating more than TDEE will cause you to gain weight.

0 < BMR < calorie goal < TDEE

this relationship is what you want for your calorie goal. as you can see, to make sure your calorie goal is correct, you need to know your BMR and TDEE, but as i explained above these are not difficult to determine.

there are some scenarios where being between BMR and TDEE can still cause side effects, so those "corner cases" need to be handled separately. for example, if you are morbidly obese, you can have a very deep calorie deficit from TDEE while still being above your BMR (and even your BMR x Harris-Benedict multiplier), but end up with muscle loss issues anyway. so every person must look at their situation in closer detail, but what i've described above is the most general case that applies to the largest majority of people and will help increase their odds of avoiding any side effects (fatigue, poor nutrition, metabolic slowdown, etc.)