Is 1200 calories too little for me?

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  • WinoGelato
    WinoGelato Posts: 13,454 Member
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    Is there something you are still confused about OP? You've entered your stats and activity level in MFP (sorry which activity level did you choose - sedentary because of your job, right?) and chosen a rate of loss of 1 lb/week - which may actually be a little aggressive given that you only have about 20 lbs to lose, a goal of 0.5 lb/week may be better. That would give you another 250 cals on your baseline target.

    Are you logging accurately using a food scale? With little to lose, accurate logging will be important.
    Then let your garmin and MFP sync up your calorie burns from exercise and daily activity and eat back at least a portion of those.

    I think other respondents in the thread were debating a bit about the estimated calorie burns based on your stats and the feedback from the devices - but at the end of the day, what matters is your actual results. You need to pick a calorie target, and how much of your exercise calories you are going to log and eat back, and then by logging as accurately as possible, in several weeks (ie 6-8) you should have some data that you can rely on to determine if you need to make adjustments.

    Good luck!
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,737 Member
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    nct310379 wrote: »
    If it helps, my calories burned on the treadmill are calculated via a heart strap and through the wahoo app. I walk at 4km per hour for about 50 mins and then on alternate days (3/4 days a week) do the same but include 8 rounds of 30secs run at 12km/hr, walk at 4km/hr 90secs
    Thanks again, this is all helping :)

    HR-based devices have the potential to be misleading, especially for intervals.

    Here's a very oversimplified explanation of why: When you go faster (intense phase of intervals), your heart rate doesn't instantly increase to whatever its peak will be. It comes up more gradually as your body "notices" how you're challenging it, and tries to deliver more oxygen. On each intense interval, it's likely to respond a little more quickly (because of cumulative challenge, oversimplifying).

    When you drop the speed (easy phase of the interval), it also takes a bit of time to register than and have your heart rate slow down during the easy phase. That may also differ from one interval to the next. Your device is likely to think you worked harder on each successive interval, burning more calories, even if you went exactly the same speed. (Perceived exertion = how you feel; work = what you accomplished, in basically the physics sense of "work"; higher perceived exertion is not necessarily higher calorie burn).

    So, heart rate is lagging the triggering activity, be it fast or slow. The device doesn't know how hard you're working (how many calories you're burning), it only knows how hard your heart is beating (and some other inputs, none of them measurements of calories - they're all just roughly correlated things that your device will use to estimate calories).

    How fast your heart rate increases during the fast parts, and how quickly it recovers during the easy parts, is a function of fitness level. Given two similar-sized people, one very fit and one not, the fit person's heart rate will tend to climb more slowly, recover more quickly, and (at the same speed/resistance/incline/etc. work) average a lower bpm. That will tend to make the device estimate that the less-fit person has burned more calories, and the more-fit one has burned fewer . . . which is pretty inaccurate, if they're the same size and have done the exact same thing. This would be true even for steady-state activity, and a reason why HRMs can estimate calories inaccurately in general, but it's even worse for intervals.

    Some current devices strive to evaluate fitness (via things like resting heart rate, age, or performance on certain easier-to-quantify tasks), but that's another estimate, not a measurement. Further, unless you've had your maximum heart rate tested (via fitness test rather than diagnostic medical stress test), your device is likely estimating your maximum heart rate based on your age. Age is not a very reliable predictor of HRmax, so that's another potential confounding influence on calorie estimates. Also, heart rate tends to be higher when it's hot, when we're dehydrated, and more, none of which has any direct effect on calorie burn via exercise.

    If you have a way to estimate calories via calculations that involve measuring the actual work (like the distance- and bodyweight-based estimating formulas for walk/run on level ground, or machines that can measure watts for an exercise of relatively invariant efficiency), that could be more accurate.

    I think it's fine to use your HRM/tracker estimates as an approximation for calories, but useful to understand that they're estimates, not measurements, as background.
  • Chelle8070
    Chelle8070 Posts: 165 Member
    edited May 2019
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    //Exercise isnt necessary for weight loss though. So, feeling fatigued and not working out as a result of not eating enough wouldn't mean that you stop losing weight.

    If someone is eating so little that they are too fatigued to exercise then I guarantee they will continue to lose even if they completely stop. They wouldn't even come close to maintaining.//

    Right, but OP mentioned working out 5-6 days per week so exercise is something to consider for this person.

    And I understand my goals are slightly different. I don't have weight-loss goals per say. I have muscle building and body fat reduction goals more than just strictly scale fluctuation.
  • gogetemrogue
    gogetemrogue Posts: 80 Member
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    OP has received some good advice, but I wanted to advise OP to try to schedule her weigh ins for the morning after a sedentary rest day. I find that even light exercise can cause me to retain weight, even without any DOMS to speak of. I almost always see my "new low" the day after I was completely sedentary.
  • Teabythesea_
    Teabythesea_ Posts: 559 Member
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    Chelle8070 wrote: »

    Right, but OP mentioned working out 5-6 days per week so exercise is something to consider for this person.

    And I understand my goals are slightly different. I don't have weight-loss goals per say. I have muscle building and body fat reduction goals more than just strictly scale fluctuation.

    OP walks 5-6 days a week, and even if they didn't, their deficit is still built into MFP's calorie goal... The only situation in which stopping exercise would cause weight maintenance is in a situation where the individual is eating at maintenance or slightly above and does not eat back exercise calories. In this situation a calorie deficit is being created entirely through exercise. However, eating at maintenance or slightly above is far from too little, bringing me back to my first point... under no circumstances will eating too little cause weight maintenance or gain, even if such a diet is accompanied by a complete lack of exercise.
  • Scottgriesser
    Scottgriesser Posts: 172 Member
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    Fitnessgirl0913 wrote: »

    Can I ask what may be an ignorant question about walking, forgive me if the answer is obvious. Does speed at which you walk not matter for total calories burned on a walk? For example, say I walk 3 miles at 2.5 miles an hour then the next day walk 3 miles at 4 miles per hour, based on that calculation those walks would burn the same amount of calories, but I would think that walking almost double the pace would burn more calories? Again forgive me if this is a silly question but I am genuinely curious as to why speed does not factor in.

    Not as much as you would think. Speed does very slightly increase the burn, but only minimally. Your weight and the length of the trip account for about 95% of the caloric burn.

    Things like incline/decline or doing spurts of high intesnity will account for a bit more, but still almost all of it is weight and length.

    I was quite surprised when I found this out myself.

    Now, obviously the faster you go means the more time you have so if you do timed workouts then moving faster=moving farther=more burn.
  • rheddmobile
    rheddmobile Posts: 6,840 Member
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    For the OP: strength training doesn’t have to be at a gym or use a lot of expensive equipment. If you’re new to it you can start with bodyweight squats, lunges, pushups (on knees or an elevated surface if you can’t do a toe push-up). Water bottles of different sizes make great dumbbells, and you can even use two gallon jugs full of water and a broom handle to make your own barbell! The main thing is that doing some strength training will encourage your body to retain muscle while you lose weight.

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