Confused by what my maintenance calories should be

ruths19 · February 2016

I used this site to estimate my BMR: http://www.iifym.com/iifym-calculator/
It gave me 1315 calories for BMR and 1512 calories TDEE with activity set to sedentary. But MFP gives me a goal of 1640 calories with activity set to sedentary. I do walk most places instead of drive, and work out, but it varies from day to day so I'd want to log that separately from my base activity level, but now I'm confused whether I could eat those exercise calories, or what my goal should actually be on a day where I don't do much - that's over 100 calories difference which seems a lot!

lemonychild · February 2016

100 cals is not a lot. none of these things are perfectly aligned to your body. the afraid part makes me think u should go with the lower number. and yes. if you place your self under sedentary and then do activity that is not sedentary you should eat the cals back. if u dont eat the cals back you will be in deficit therefore lose more weight,

valskeete · February 2016

Figuring out your maintenance calories sux. It took me a long time to get there.

I know it's not what you want to hear, but trial and error is the only way to go. Add 50-100 cals and revisit it monthly.
It's also important to keep in mind the type of calories you're consuming and not just the amount. Good luck!

sijomial · February 2016

First make your mind up - TDEE same cals every day including average for your exercise or MFP base calories plus exercise. Both work.

Stick to your goal for four weeks at least, be thorough in your food logging. Then adjust based on actual results.

!00 cals is nothing! Expecting calculators to be that accurate is dreadfully optimistic. Even in the unlikely event of them being spot on a tiny error in your food logging, activity or exercise logging would skew the result.

Don't try to micromanage your weight or you will cause yourself pointless stress - have a reasonable weight range.

cnbbnc · February 2016

I was making myself crazy trying to figure out what my calories should be. You do have to decide whether you're going to go by tdee, or mfp and eating calories back because they're two different things. Since my exercise fluctuates too, I'm just using mfp and adjusting calories based on activity. Same as I did before.

Neither calculation is going to be spot on though, so you're going to have to play with it yourself to see where you fall, be it a few more or less calories per day. Don't be afraid of it. Just increase a little at a time and you'll be fine.

ruths19 · February 2016

I typo'd - it's a 1000 calorie difference. That's about 7% of total BMR + sedentary calories for someone my size. It just seems weird that TDEE with no activity would be that much different from MFP with no exercise added.

I'm going to go with the 1500 calorie figure and adjust my macros accordingly, eat back my exercise calories and track my weight for a month.

BurnWithBarn2015 · February 2016

Calculating your maintenance calories is not that difficult. You can get a pretty good approx number.
( i suppose because you post in the maintaining section that you are done losing weight)

You take your last months total intake calories ( so the amount you ate over for example the last 60 days)
you add the amount you lost in those 60 days...so when you lost 4 pounds in those 60 days you add 4x3500 calories to that total food intake.

This total amount you divide by 60 days and you get the number that you shouldn't lose weight ( so maintenance level)

Example
you ate for 60 days 1200 calories a day, so 60x1200=72000 calories
you lost 4 pounds in those days, so 4x3500 = 14000 calories
Means 72000 + 14000 = 86000
This divided by 60 = 1433 calories a day to maintain.
This is a calculation WITHOUT exercise calories. So you can subtract those if you want or need to etc etc

Take your own data and do the math
Remember this is an estimate...always
inaccuracies in logging or burned calories or scales etc can make the difference...but not much most of the time.
But you play a bit with it by going up slowly add 100 calories a day for 1 or 2 weeks and repeat till you stop losing weight

middlehaitch · February 2016

@BurnWithBarn2015's method is like the one I used 6 years ago. I also worked out my average calorie burn for 60 min exercise.
Now I have good numbers to work from no matter my activity level. It hasn't failed me in 6 years maintenance.

Cheers, h.

EvgeniZyntx · February 2016

If you have Excel on a PC - you can have your data pulled and calculated for you: https://www.dropbox.com/s/10mhbzig1v4v7h2/mfp6v5.xlsm?dl=0

BurnWithBarn2015 · February 2016

middlehaitch wrote: »

@BurnWithBarn2015's method is like the one I used 6 years ago. I also worked out my average calorie burn for 60 min exercise.
Now I have good numbers to work from no matter my activity level. It hasn't failed me in 6 years maintenance.

Cheers, h.

yes it is the closest you can get i think
Correct me if i am wrong lol

And here the same, i calculated my exercise too.

Its nice to have it and tweaking from there is easier. Except i seemed to had/have my activity level wrong.

middlehaitch · February 2016

@BurnWithBarn2015 I think extrapolating ones own calories has to be the as accurate as one can get without complex lab equipment.
The nice thing is doing your own takes into account any logging errors you consistently make.

I was so excited when I first figured out that I could just work from my collected data.

I have found IIFYM does pretty good numbers for me, but Scooby is way to high. I run them occasionally just for comparison.

Cheers, h.

BurnWithBarn2015 · February 2016

@middlehaitch

Same here scooby is a bit high for me too. i use sailrabbit

But own data still works best for me.

Confused by what my maintenance calories should be

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