Maintenance calories

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naturalbeautii
naturalbeautii Posts: 72 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
How do you figure out what your maintenance calories are?

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  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 33,943 Member
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    In GOALS, set your goal to "maintain."

    Then you use that for a while and see if it's right. It's a starting point.
  • naturalbeautii
    naturalbeautii Posts: 72 Member
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    cmriverside wrote: »
    In GOALS, set your goal to "maintain."

    Then you use that for a while and see if it's right. It's a starting point.

    Thank you. I wish I would have known that a long time ago.
  • TavistockToad
    TavistockToad Posts: 35,719 Member
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    naturalbeautii wrote: »
    How do you figure out what your maintenance calories are?

    Use your real life data based on how many calories you've eaten to lose weight
  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,811 Member
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    If you have been logging consistently you should know your actual rate of recent weight loss - that will be a simple but good guide.

    If you like maths then you can add up your total calories eaten for 4 weeks, add 3500 cals for each pound lost in that time and then divide by 28 to get a good estimate corrected for your own food logging accuracy/inaccuracy.
  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 33,943 Member
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    She joined MFP in November. Maybe not quite enough ongoing data yet.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,034 Member
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    Thread about it here, where people discuss multiple possible strategies for finding maintenance calories (some of them apply only when actually ready to eat at maintenance, since it's in the Maintaining Weight part of the forum):

    http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10638211/how-to-find-your-maintenance-calorie-level

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