How many calories to lose 2lbs question

dawnfern13 wrote: »

My calorie stats to lose 2lbs a day is 1,733 calories a day and I set my activity level as inactive. (That will change shortly).
Today my calorie intake jumped up to 2,060. Is that because I did not eat 327 calories from yesterday?
I have lost over 1,300 pounds in my lifetime and was forced fed the 1,200 calorie a day (starvation) standards by dieticians since particularly birth. I once again & for all eat a Paleo lifestyle, organic, real foods with high quality fats. I do not believe all calories are equal, so I am striving to eat nutritious calories. I am having a hard time figuring out how to count calories when I cook chicken in coconut oil or duck fat & etc. I am new & trying to accountable to my health.
Thank you.

It takes about a 1000 Calorie deficit per day to lose about 2 pounds per week. MFP will subtract those Calories from your estimated maintenance Calories, but it will go no lower than 1200 Calories per day for women or 1500 Calories per day for men.

If MFP set your goal at 1733 Calories, then MFP estimated that you would maintain your current weight at Sedentary (Not Very Active) with 1000 more Calories per day, or 2733 Calories. If you consistently net between those two numbers over a period of a few weeks, you should lose weight. You do have to track your food and drink carefully and accurately; most people find it is easiest to do that by weighing solid foods, using measuring cups and spoons for liquids, and verifying Food Database items using outside sources, such as websites and Nutrition Facts labels.

MFP provides your daily goal deficit without including any purposeful exercise Calories. That allows for people who are unable to exercise to achieve their goals. When you do purposeful exercise above the estimated MFP Activity Level, you should log it. The extra Calories earned from logging purposeful exercise are then added to that day's goal so that you can eat the proper amount to maintain the 2 pounds per week loss rate. Most people that choose to log exercise Calories will eat back a portion of those Calories, somewhere between 50 to 75 percent, to start; then after a few weeks, if the rate of loss is either too fast or too slow, they will adjust the eat back percentage.

Edit to add: For comparison I am 55, 5'8", 150 lbs. and mostly Sedentary. If I net 1700 Cals per day, I lose weight. I have to eat about 2200 Cals, log on average 400 Cals in extra walking Cals above Sedentary from my Fitbit, and net 1820 Cals per day to maintain my weight.

jwcanfield wrote: »

Weigh/measure food carefully as well as the oil/fat you use for cooking. Most are in the database. Oils/fat - high in calories - although not all absorbed I usually count the fat that I cook in into my daily calories. And I think (please someone correct me if I'm wrong) is usually the way it works.

Which is why I tend to use lower-fat cooking methods (bake/grill/broil/boil) and reserve oil/fat/butter for seasoning to more accurately count the calories. You would need a calorie deficit of 7000 per week to guarantee a 2 lb loss. That's a huge daily deficit no matter how nutritious the choices you make.

Two pounds might be perfectly safe for her to lose. It depends on what her starting weight is. I am assuming that it is relatively high considering that MFP gave her 1733 calories at sedentary to lose 2lbs a week.