Calories as a Wheelchair User

thediamonds wrote: »

Hey all,

I'm looking to lose some weight but not sure if I should eat as mfp says or deduct some calories due to the fact that I don't do any activity at all?

Anyone got any advice?

Thanks

What kind of wheel chair? Motorized or old school you use you arms to roll?

If motorized, you should probably go sedentary.

Your base metabolic rate doesn't go down because you're in a wheelchair. That's the calories your body needs to keep you alive: organ function, brain especially, to keep your temperature, nervous system and all the other useful things. Your activity level is low it seems, thus set that one to sedentary. All done

Btw, can you move your arms and propel yourself forward in your wheelchair? Are you able to leave the house yourself? Maybe that's the way to work out some more. A friend of mine is in a wheelchair and wheels around outside an hour every day.

I'm disabled, often in wheelchair, with other health issues. But have also successfully lost weight, through diet alone by using mfp as a tool. If you have put in your statistics and enter sedentary, MFP gives you a calorie target. Log accurately and aim to hit this target everyday and you should lose weight.

Be patient, don't know how much weight you would like to lose, but for me slow and steady has won. After a few weeks, you will have your own data to look back at and adjust as needed.

Sometimes I'm completely sedentiary (like wheelchair sedentiary) and MFP calories for sedentiary are too many for me by about 150-200cal per day (based on 2+ years of logging plus spreadsheets of data). This is because the sedentiray includes about 5k steps. It has to be by trial and error for you.