A Nutritionist Once Told me...

No, and it's not accurate. Your calories for maintenance (which is what she's basically talking about) will be different based on activity and height and muscle mass (to some extent). Also, even assuming one is sedentary (which is not ideal), those numbers seem low except for shorter people.

I am about 130, and my maintenance is not 1300, and I lost down to 125 while eating around 1600 cals per day.

Theoldguy1 wrote: »

psychod787 wrote: »

lemurcat2 wrote: »

No, and it's not accurate. Your calories for maintenance (which is what she's basically talking about) will be different based on activity and height and muscle mass (to some extent). Also, even assuming one is sedentary (which is not ideal), those numbers seem low except for shorter people.

I am about 130, and my maintenance is not 1300, and I lost down to 125 while eating around 1600 cals per day.

Yes ma'am. I'm 208 and maintain on 3000+ because of exercise and food choice. While using modifications like 10,1,2,14×bw can be a rough ball park, only self experimentation tells the whole truth.

Yeah, I'm basically the same weight and like you maintain at around 3,000 calories.

I'm 6'3" average 15k steps and lift 4 days a week. When I was 180 my maintenance was 3400. That's when I was weighing and measuring everything I ate. I have let myself drift up to 210ish 18% bf. Have maintained that on roughly 3700 cal for the past 2 months. OP. If I listened to your nutritionist, I would be ina deficit. We are all n=1.

I am 58, female, 5’7” averaging 132 for the past month or two.

I’m very active, and do weight training.

I lost weight steadily and reliably. I started at 1490 and it came off too fast, increased incrementally, finally reaching 2300, at the suggestions of dietician and trainer. I lost weight all those.

I still try to keep my daily still at 2300, as I’m slowly learning that at that level I can handle a heavy day once or twice a week and maintain. I figure my real maintenance averages out to about 2600. (In other words, will “bank” for tortilla chips and chocolate chip cookies!)

Again I’m probably unusually active (though not compared to some of the MFP friends who show up in my feed!) so YMMV.

My cousin who is a university trained nutritionist told me two women of the same height, age and activity level could eat the same thing and still be at different weights.

I would see a Registered dietitian, not a nutritionist. Anyone can take a 2 day "certification" and call themselves a nutritionist, but Registered Dietitians actually go to college and get a Masters Degree in nutrition.

skinnyjingbb wrote: »

It is obvious not accurate for everyone. I felt it was good advise for the OP. For average height women, if not counting exercise, the number is about right. Also I felt the important take away in the nutritionist advise is to think about maintenance calorie from the beginning. Do not set a goal for an idea weight because you like that number or you see it on a chart somewhere. Set your goal by determining the calorie budget you can live on relatively comfortable for long time, so it is sustainable. Say your goal weight is 140lbs, you lost weight to 150lbs successfully with 1500 calorie, but further reducing calorie make you miserable, or doing lots of exercise is not your thing, then just stop and maintain at 150lbs and find other way to improve your health and well being.

Frankly, I don't even accept the premise that we can all predict in advance whether we could maintain comfortably on calorie level X, when we're far from the body weight that calorie level would support.

I know that there are many complex factors involved (adaptive thermogenesis, hunger/appetite hormone settling issues, etc.). Still, if a person can make it through a potentially challenging early phase of sensible maintenance, some of that stuff does (IMO) tend to settle down a bit to a new normal.

I'm doubtful that the thinner person will *necessarily* feel dissatisfied with her lower number of calories, from a hunger/cravings standpoint, at least, because the smaller body requires fewer calories. That requirement is not the only influence on appetite, but surely it's one of them.

I 100% understand that some people in maintenance *are* unsatisfied with their calorie goal for a variety of reasons.

All I'm saying is that I don't think those aspects are predictable from the get-go (and I suspect that in a limited number of cases, the expectation of dissatisfaction has at least a small role in creating the dissatisfaction).

Fortunately, there's no need to figure out ultimate goal weight up front, so some of those issues can work themselves out along the way. The caveat is that deciding firmly, later in weight loss, that a certain calorie goal is the minimum satisfying amount, and stopping loss, may still not have full advantage of knowing where hormones/NEAT/BMR and other influences will settle, after some of the post-diet effects work out . . . and those effects will land a little differently, I suspect, depending on the bodyweight chosen. We don't know what we don't know.

Also, the drama in the numbers isn't always that huge, IMO. Sailrabbit's sedentary average estimate for me at 120 pounds is 1571. At 130, a fairly meaningful weight difference, it's 1664, 93 calories different - less than half a serving of peanut butter daily, or about 2.5 miles (5000-ish steps) of walking (conservative net calorie estimate at .3 x Weight x miles, at the lower weight).

For people who are even moderately off from "calculator" calorie needs estimates, that 93 calories may not even be real. For people further from average, it might be ridiculously far off, and a poor basis for decision-making at starting weight.

(Personal example, more detail: I'll continue using Sailrabbit, although it's sedentary multiplier is a little different concept from MFP, because TDEE vs. NEAT. I've been losing very slowly for several months now at a pre-exercise calorie goal of 1850, from upper 130s to upper 120s bodyweight. Best guess at pre-exercise maintenance, in the stay-at-home pandemic era, is 2000-2100 at around 130 pounds, not 1664 . . . and I thought my "metabolism was slow" when I was obese, because I was very athletically active for over a decade, eating mostly healthy foods, and still stayed obese! I was wrong.).

Naturally, I'm biased by that, into thinking that all of this is not as predictable or deterministic as some (possibly nearer-average) people think.

This prompts a question about what I'd suggest, rather than setting goal weight based on presumed satisfying calorie level, I guess. Personally, I think an experimental approach is about the best we can do, and even that has pitfalls.

There's no reason we need to have a firm goal weight in mind at the start of weight loss. In the MFP world, the goal weight setting has literally no effect on the calorie goal MFP will give you. It asks for a goal weight so it can give you supposedly helpful progress updates and "attagirl" type feedback along the way. You can change it 87 times along the way, and the only effect might be that if you re-run guided setup when you do that, you'll trigger MFP to re-evaluate your calorie goal based on then-current weight sooner than it might have done that normally. Goal weight doesn't matter, until we reach it, as a practical matter: The process is the same, no matter the goal, as long as goal is below current weight. Goal weight just tells you when to stop having a calorie deficit, that's it.

My suggestion: Sure, have a starting goal, for your own motivation. Be conservative, be aggressive, whatever suits you motivationally. As you go through the process, and get closer to that provisional goal, you'll get a better idea how you'll need to eat, how you'll feel, how you'll look. You can reconsider then, with more information. You can even reconsider once you get into maintenance that weight X is too high and you could live happily on fewer calories (or more activity, or a combo) . . . or that weight X is unsustainably difficult, after a fair trial. You can decide at any point, as long as you keep your hands on the steering wheel.

P.S. If it makes any difference in considering the basis of this theorizing, I'm in year 4+ of maintenance, after 3 decades or so of obesity previously. In 2016, I maintained for 6 months or so at my initial/final 😉 adjusted goal of 120 pounds (around BMI 20), then started drifting upward, not so much continuously/gradually but rather in maintain-then-increase cycles, hitting around 138 (BMI 23) in late 2019. Since October, I've been intentionally drifting ultra-slowly down again, to 129 (BMI 21.5) today. (I'm 5'5", age 64, still slowly losing while generally thinking of myself as in maintenance.)

TL;DR: What one thinks, at starting weight, about the satisfaction from a thinner self's calorie goal, is not a very sound way to set a goal weight, IMO. I'd go with a more experimental approach, deciding when closer to maintenance, and even then keeping an open mind in maintenance about where the balance is between bodyweight satisfaction, food-consumption satisfaction, and activity level satisfaction. It's complicated, and none of these decisions are irrevocable.