Calculation Help!

Welcome to the boards!

Firstly well done on stopping smoking, that's the single biggest improvement you can make to your health.

Don't worry too much about the bread and carbs issue for now - that's a fine tuning detail you can keep for later.

1200 is a very low level - did you tell MFP you were sedentary and wanted to lose 2 pounds a week? Change those to lightly active and 1 or even half a pound, and you'll get a more realistically achievable number.

Now, all numbers are estimates, so an online calculator is only giving you a ball park starting point for your BMR. This is the minimum your body needs to take in to function properly, which MFP defaults at 1200.

Are you sure that's BMR and not TDEE? Total Daily Energy Expenditure is the actual calories you use up each day. Now obviously that changes every day, as well as when you exercise, but in theory eating somewhere between those 2 will result in safe weight loss.

BMR is your basal metabolic rate or the amount of calories your body burns just being alive. If your BMR is 1494 that means if you were in a coma the hospital would need to drip-feed you 1494 calories for you to maintain your weight.

As soon as you do anything non-comatose such as get out of bed, stand up, walk around, sit in a chair and type etc etc you can probably add another 2 to 300 calories to that. This number is known as your NEAT or non-exercise activity thermogenesis. This is your BMR plus the calories you burn from your normal daily activity. So for you this is probably something like 1800 calories.

TDEE is your total daily energy expenditure. This is the number of calories you burn total in a day. If you don't exercise at all then TDEE = NEAT. If you do exercise though TDEE = NEAT + the calories you burn from exercising.

So lets say you go for a 5km walk and burn 150 calories and that is the only exercise you do but you do it every day. That would mean that your TDEE is 1800+1500 or 1950;

What your TDEE tells you is the number of calories you'd need to eat to simply maintain your weight. If you eat less than your TDEE then you lose weight, The difference between your TDEE and the amount you actually take in is your caloric deficit.

The bigger your caloric deficit the faster you lose weight. One pound of fat is about 3,500 calories. What that means is if your TDEE is 1950 and you eat 1450 your caloric deficit is 500 calories per day which means 3500 calories per week which would mean you would lose about 1 pound of fat per week. The trick here is if you make your defict too large you won't just lose fat but you will also lose muscle which will mean long term you will lose fitness and find it more and more difficult to lose the fat. What you want to do is stick with a consistant small deficit over time.

Keep in mind fat is not the only thing that has weight in your body. A lot of your body is water and water retention or water loss can cause your weight to fluctuate by 10 pounds easily. As a result of this sometimes you have to stick with a diet for several months before you can notice a definate loss in scale weight. This is because after say 5 weeks and losing 5 pounds of fat you could easily be retaining 5 pounds of water and seem to have lost nothing by the scale.

Hope that helps.

I really like this calculator: http://iifym.com/iifym-calculator/

Its so easy to use and told me exactly what I needed to use in an easy to understand way...

Carbs can make a big difference in your weight loss, if you are a carb junkie that could be part of the problem. I am currently doing extreme low carb, plus nutrition supplements, and the weight is melting off and I love it.

Then you probably should reduce that as 1kg is 2.2 lbs and generally 2 lbs is the highest recommended weight loss per week. At your weight you probably should be at 1 lb. Either way you can manually set your weekly calorie goals to any setting you want to try. I was just curious why it was giving you such a low number!

Tried it and still at 1,200 cals. I think maybe because i am choosing to lose 1kg a week not 1 pound?

Yeah that makes a HUGE difference. 1 kilogram is 2.2 pounds and a 2.2 pound a week loss is a very big ask. You should set your loss to about 1 pound per week which would be something like 0.4 kilograms and you should eat back calories you burn from exercise. The change in your goal to 1 pound per week should bump your calories up to 1500 and if you exercise frequently you might end up eating 1700-1800 calories a day which will make a big difference in how you feel.

Yes I've re-done and now have a goal just under 1500 a day which is much easier to stick too! Can I ask what the reasoning is on eating back the calories, how that benefits more so to having a 100 - 200 or so deficit after exercise?

The way I view it there are two goals: weight loss, and fitness.

For weight loss all you need is a calorie deficit. You decide what a healthy sustainable weight loss would be (like 0.4 kg per week) then you figure out how many calories you would have to eat in order to achieve that and you stick with it.

For fitness you need to exercise and your exercise needs to be fueled with appropriate amounts of food. If you work out and burn 400 calories your body needs that 400 calories for recovery.

You can do both at the same time provided that when you exercise and burn calories you eat those calories back. That way your exercise is fueled and your overall deficit remains the same. So you can make fitness progress AND lose weight.

If you view exercise as just a way of losing weight faster by creating a larger and larger deficit then you may as well go back to eating 1000 calories because it will have the same effect on how you feel.

Also, to the OP, congratulations on being a non-smoker! I quit a couple of months ago, and it's seriously the best thing I've ever done for myself. I know how difficult it is. Great job and I hope you can stick with it!