Is calorie intake correct?
claritza0922
Posts: 2 Member
Hi,
I am a 25 year old female, I weight 246 lbs and I work mainly on my feet as my full time job. I marked myself down as “lightly active” since I haven’t been consistently going to the gym in recent months. I ideally would like to lose 1 lb per week. My calorie intake is over 2,000. Could I have done this incorrectly? Any insight would be great, I’m afraid 2000 would be too high to start with.
I am a 25 year old female, I weight 246 lbs and I work mainly on my feet as my full time job. I marked myself down as “lightly active” since I haven’t been consistently going to the gym in recent months. I ideally would like to lose 1 lb per week. My calorie intake is over 2,000. Could I have done this incorrectly? Any insight would be great, I’m afraid 2000 would be too high to start with.
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Replies
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You don't say how tall you are, but yeah, that could be about right. I'm 5'9, 177 lbs, and lose about 0.5 pounds per week on 2000.3
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How tall are you? It sounds about right. I'm 5'4, 145lb and lose at 1,400. Eat at 2k for a month and see if you lose.0
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Going to the gym is irrelevant to your MFP activity level, it's designed to be set on your daily activities not including intentional exercise. If you work mainly on your feet, "lightly active" or even "active" would probably be a good place to start.
I have no idea if you set your account up incorrectly (I didn't see you do it), but 2,000 for a lightly active 246-pound woman to lose 1 pound a week seems reasonable to me.
Why do you think 2,000 is too high?4 -
Yeah, that sounds like it's in the right ballpark.
Make sure that you're not logging any of the activity you estimated to get to "lightly active" as extra exercise, because that'll be double-counting it. If you do start going to the gym or doing any additional activity that wasn't included in your day-to-day activity, you can log that separately.1 -
When you weight more, you body actually burn more calorie that's probably why you can lose 1lbs per week on 2000 now, but after you lose some weight, you might need to lower the daily calorie intake if you still want to lose 1lbs per week.0
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I weigh 30 pounds less than you and MFP gave me 1870 to lose a pound per week and I was maintaining. Try it out for about 3 weeks at 2000, and see what happens.0
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A lot of people think of losing weight as spending as short a time as possible at the lowest possible calories you can manage, but that's both unnecessary and very often ineffective. Your body needs a certain number of calories to stay at its current weight. Given what you said and assuming you are of average height for a woman (5'4") you currently need to eat somewhere around 3000 calories to stay at your current weight. This can vary a bit on either side, but for most people with your stats, that's going to be about right (see https://www.supertracker.usda.gov/bwp/index.html). If you want to lose 1 pound a week, you need to eat 3500 calories less per week (3500 calories = 1 pound, roughly speaking). Since you're starting at about 3000, that means 500 less a day, or 2500 calories.
Now the problem you're looking at is that people are really bad at estimating how much they're eating, even when they try to count calories. Many diets therefore trick you into eating less by cutting lots and lots of things out of your diet, or giving you a really low goal (1200, anyone?) with the assumption that you might not hit that low, but you'll probably eat less than you're eating now. What I like about MFP is that it puts the power in your hands. You just need to figure out how to use it. Log your food as accurately as you can, use a food scale at least at the beginning ($20 on Amazon), read all the stickied posts here (http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10300319/most-helpful-posts-general-diet-and-weight-loss-help-must-reads), and be patient.8 -
^^what megamoose said^^0
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My height is 5’7”0
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claritza0922 wrote: »My height is 5’7”
Generally speaking, the taller you are the more calories it takes to maintain your weight, but it’s really not significant until you become much leaner.
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At your height 2000 sounds good for losing... give it a whirl and see. After 4 weeks you can then adjust cals if necessary.0
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I could never lose weight until I accepted that eating at 1200 calories and starving myself was not going to work, because I can't keep that up. These days I eat between 1500-1700 (I'm 5'1" and 182 at the moment, down from 225.) Once I realized that I didn't have to starve myself to lose weight, the weight came off.2
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Go Moose!
And evaluate your progress using a trending weight app or website and after a period of 4 to 6 weeks1
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