Maintenance Calculator

I think from what others have said to me on here it's very much trial and error! The calorie calculators seem to give me all sorts of different daily cal amounts. I was told to gradually increase your cals by say 100 cals a week until you stabilise your weight x

Scooby is probably the most accurate

See if @heybales will respond with the tdee spreadsheet. Quite helpful and allows you to get really granular with your activity level. If you go by bf% to calculate things it has that too.

Start with Scooby or TDEE Calculator as a base. Exercise calories burned are the wild card in these things because who knows if "moderately active" is based on 250 calories burned or 1000.

Just TDEE Please spreadsheet - better than rough 5 level TDEE charts.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1G7FgNzPq3v5WMjDtH0n93LXSMRY_hjmzNTMJb3aZSxM/edit?usp=sharing

The problem with live data is how variable many peoples lives are in 4 weeks - compared to the next 4 weeks.
Throw in seasons with daily activity changes, can get real interesting trying to make adjustments.
But it does provide best bet eventually with a rolling avg system.

The problem with the tables based on the Harris (of BMR calc) 1919 study for 5 rough TDEE levels - is daily activity isn't a factor, only exercise.
Is the desk jockey and the mailman with equal stats both doing 5 days of 1 hr of workouts really having the same TDEE?
Or is the runner @ 3 hrs weekly and lifter @ 3 hrs weekly really the same TDEE if same jobs?
Is the single person at work and the mom with 3 kids with work at home really equal if same aerobics classes?

If your body is far from average, like much higher fat %, or opposite actually, then going by Katch BMR could be needed to create a deficit.
My profile page has more detailed spreadsheet - just stick on Simple Setup and Progress tabs (which allows doing that live data adjustments as mentioned above).

MaxPrinz wrote: »

thank you very much, looks awesome, unfortunately i cant edit the sheet...

Believe you need to save a copy in order to edit

@MaxPrinz Try this one. It gives all the formulas and averages them. I found this to work the best for me pretty accurate. I got it from another member/moderator.

http://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/

TimothyFish wrote: »

None will get it exactly right because what one person considers light activity is different than what another person considers light activity. Pick one and then adjust your intake up or down based on whether you are gaining or losing weight over a month or so.

This has been my experience with the TDEE calulators. I find the them all to be kind of confusing. I have a desk job. I do 30-35 minutes of yoga 5 days per week and I walk 3 days per week and jog 3 days per week. I don't ever know quite how to set my activity level on the TDEE calculators. I know I'm not really sedentary, but I don't really know how vigorous my activity is. Scooby gives me 1771 and sailrabbit gives me 1727. @heybales spreadsheet gave me 1970 which I think it probably the closest. Although I really didn't know how to judge my exercise. I use yoga as strength training but it isn't weight training. I walk about 3 miles per hour, but not flat. I walk at a park that has lots of hills. And I jog at the same park, but it takes me about 30 minutes to go a little more than 2 miles. My fitbit says my average burn about 1850-1875 per day, but when I eat that much I still lose weight. That's why I think the spreadsheet was closest. Mfp gives me 1700 plus my exercise adjustment which usually puts me at about 1900 for the day. I don't know if I'll ever really figure it out. Every time I think I have hit my maintenance level I will drop some more. So far I have dropped 10 below my goal so I just keep resetting my maintenance range.

I do think the best thing is to just pick one and use it for a while and see how your weight goes and adjust as needed. It just sometimes takes a while to figure out what your maintenance calories are.

+1 to the idea that any calculator is not as good as your own results, as long as you're logging consistently for a month or so to get a range of data (throw out the first two weeks of losses at the start of a deficit, IMO, though, because of the water weight weirdness).

At best, an estimating calculator gives you a starting point for your own experimentation. They can be close for a lot of people, but by definition will be far off for a few percent of the population, because that's how normal distributions work.

There's also this piece of spreadsheet-y awesomeness to help with that "own results" thing - as far as I know it still works: myfitnesspal.com/blog/EvgeniZyntx/view/mfp-data-export-tool-the-overview-659927.

Pulls your MFP history, turns it into useful info. Seriously amazing.

Many calculators seem to over-estimate for me. However, I have PCOS and have seen studies that women with PCOS tend to have slower metabolisms on average than other women so that might be the difference for me.