How many calories should I be eating...

alien_pickles
alien_pickles Posts: 6 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I know this questions gets asked A LOT, but here it is...

Several years ago I used MFP and lost 150 pounds. Then I ended up with hypothyroid and gained about half of it back before it got diagnosed and my meds got to the right levels. Now that I'm feeling better, I need to get back to where I was. I've tried to look back at my food diary, but it's not showing that I logged my food very often... I'm almost positive this isn't true, but maybe it got deleted since it's quite old.

I know that it used to be no problem for me to lose 2 pounds a week when I was obese without going to a ridiculously low calorie count. I ate mostly whole foods to stay full, but basically allowed anything in moderation as long as it fit into my calories. It wasn't a problem.

I've been back now to doing the same thing for a month. MFP was set at 1500 calories a day from the last time I used it, so I've been sticking with that. I've lost less than three pounds in a month. I'm a 35 yo F, 5'7", and currently weigh 250 lbs. I work a desk job and don't really exercise, so I feel like I'd qualify as sedentary. Since I'm not losing weight, I figured my calorie goal was off.

I decided to let the MFP algorithm run to see how many calories it thought I should eat a day. It came back with 1300. That seems insanely low at my current weight. Insanely low. I don't think I ever ate that few before. I also recently had an InBody body composition test, and it calculated my BMR as 1690. 1690 x 1.2 for sedentary = 2,028. 2,028 - (500/lb x 2) = 1,028 calories per day. So... that's even more insanely low.

Where am I getting confused here? I started out thinking I might need to eat MORE to accommodate my larger size than the last time I counted calories, but everything's telling me I need to eat substantially less. Anyone have any ideas? Diary's open if you're interested.

Replies

  • janejellyroll
    janejellyroll Posts: 25,763 Member
    What did you put as your goal for weight loss per week? That will heavily influence your calorie goal.
  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 34,419 Member
    Yeah, this site's Goal Wizard is a dumb tool. If you tell it you're sedentary and want to lose two pounds per week, it's gonna try to spit out numbers to help you do that.



    I started at 5'8" 220 pounds. I was a lot older than you and retired, minimal chores in an apartment. I used 1200 calories for the first 20-30 pounds of weight loss PLUS Exercise calories, which I was using anywhere from 300-600 per day. That meant I was eating 1500-1800, getting a little exercise (nothing too radical) and losing.


    At 180-190 I had to raise calories because I was suffering hair and skin and nail problems and I was wiped out all the time.

    So I lost the next 50ish pounds at 1500 PLUS Exercise calories. That meant that most days were 1800-2000 calories eaten in total, and I still lost at 1-2 pounds per week all the way to 140.

    You do have to use a bit of common sense. I think you'd be fine at 1500-1700 (before exercise calories) if you have any kind of job and do even minimal chores around the house.
  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 34,419 Member
    p.s. I'm also hypothyroid, treated, for 30 years. It doesn't affect weight loss.

    Just log for a couple months, then adjust if necessary once you have a good trending data set.
  • alien_pickles
    alien_pickles Posts: 6 Member
    janejellyroll wrote: »
    What did you put as your goal for weight loss per week? That will heavily influence your calorie goal.

    It's always been set a two pounds per week
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,254 Member
    If you truly are as sedentary as you claim (and by the way mfp uses 1.25 for sedentary and for most people that includes activity commensurate to approximately two and a half to three and a half thousand steps), then 2 lb a week is a very aggressive goal for your current combination of weight and activity level.

    Or if you want to think about it differently a 20% deficit off your actual TDEE is getting to be fairly aggressive. And you're trying for more.

    By the way, not knowing how you weigh yourself and how accurately you have determined your weight trend to date, it's not that you are not losing weight; it's that you currently believe you lost less weight than you had hoped to :)
  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,809 Member
    edited June 2021
    alien_pickles wrote: »
    janejellyroll wrote: »
    What did you put as your goal for weight loss per week? That will heavily influence your calorie goal.

    It's always been set a two pounds per week

    Don't set it for such a rapid loss if you don't like an "insanely low" calorie allowance.
    Remember it's also nnnn + exercise calories.

    Not exercising is nothing to do with your activity setting, activity and exercise are completely separate entities

    You are logging your food using some cup and spoon measurements, before thinking your calorie goal is off I'd swap over to weighing your food instead otherwise you can base decisions on badly flawed data.
  • alien_pickles
    alien_pickles Posts: 6 Member
    sijomial wrote: »
    alien_pickles wrote: »
    janejellyroll wrote: »
    What did you put as your goal for weight loss per week? That will heavily influence your calorie goal.

    It's always been set a two pounds per week

    Don't set it for such a rapid loss if you don't like an "insanely low" calorie allowance.
    Remember it's also nnnn + exercise calories.

    Not exercising is nothing to do with your activity setting, activity and exercise are completely separate entities

    You are logging your food using some cup and spoon measurements, before thinking your calorie goal is off I'd swap over to weighing your food instead otherwise you can base decisions on badly flawed data.

    But it wasn't insanely low the last time, and I had no problem losing 2 pounds per week.

    I always weigh my food.
  • alien_pickles
    alien_pickles Posts: 6 Member
    PAV8888 wrote: »
    By the way, not knowing how you weigh yourself and how accurately you have determined your weight trend to date, it's not that you are not losing weight; it's that you currently believe you lost less weight than you had hoped to :)

    I weight myself in the morning after using the bathroom and before doing anything else. 3 pounds a month isn't really losing weight at 250 pounds. That could very simply be water change... Especially since you'd expect to lose significant water weight initially when switching from a take-out type diet to a more whole food based one.
  • sijomial
    sijomial Posts: 19,809 Member
    alien_pickles wrote: »
    sijomial wrote: »
    alien_pickles wrote: »
    janejellyroll wrote: »
    What did you put as your goal for weight loss per week? That will heavily influence your calorie goal.

    It's always been set a two pounds per week

    Don't set it for such a rapid loss if you don't like an "insanely low" calorie allowance.
    Remember it's also nnnn + exercise calories.

    Not exercising is nothing to do with your activity setting, activity and exercise are completely separate entities

    You are logging your food using some cup and spoon measurements, before thinking your calorie goal is off I'd swap over to weighing your food instead otherwise you can base decisions on badly flawed data.

    But it wasn't insanely low the last time, and I had no problem losing 2 pounds per week.

    I always weigh my food.

    OK - can't get my head around why someone would bother converting weight to cups!

    A cup of cherios and a cup of milk yesterday I would have logged the actual amounts, seems strange to use such a wide variety of measurements that appear in your diary.

    A month really isn't a huge amount of time.
  • alien_pickles
    alien_pickles Posts: 6 Member
    edited June 2021
    sijomial wrote: »
    A cup of cherios and a cup of milk yesterday I would have logged the actual amounts, seems strange to use such a wide variety of measurements that appear in your diary.

    It's a prepackaged "cup." I scanned the barcode. It comes as one serving... Other times it's in the database as something like a tbsp, but the packaging says one serving size is 1 tbsp (15g), so I weigh it but let MFP enter it as a tbsp because it's easier...
  • yirara
    yirara Posts: 9,943 Member
    alien_pickles wrote: »
    PAV8888 wrote: »
    By the way, not knowing how you weigh yourself and how accurately you have determined your weight trend to date, it's not that you are not losing weight; it's that you currently believe you lost less weight than you had hoped to :)

    I weight myself in the morning after using the bathroom and before doing anything else. 3 pounds a month isn't really losing weight at 250 pounds. That could very simply be water change... Especially since you'd expect to lose significant water weight initially when switching from a take-out type diet to a more whole food based one.

    I had a little look through your diary. You started logging again on 13. May, thus that's 3.5 weeks and not four. It's not quite as dramatic as it might seem. The number of not-logged days is very low, thus that's good. A few things that I noticed:
    * you seem to prepare quite a bit food, but I never see any cooking oil. Do you cook without oil?
    * your carbs are not super high, but they might still account for some water weight. One of the reason why people initially lose weight on a diet is because they might reduce carbs. Carbs bind water. You might not have done so. Another reason is having less half-digested food in their intestines.

    How often do you weight? if you happen to weigh only once per week, and that happens to be on a day with a bit more water weight (it fluctuates due to anything, and especially due to hormonal changes) then the weight loss might be masked by that.
  • lmf1012
    lmf1012 Posts: 402 Member
    Truth be told, not everyone’s body follows the law of averages but theoretically based on your estimated TDEE (2,234) you should be losing just over a lb per week on 1500 calories. You’ve lost 3lbs in 3.5 weeks it sounds like. Not quite as much as the math would suggest but not so far off the mark I would be concerned.

    Your TDEE might not be as high as the calculator is estimating for starters. Also, not everyone loses a pound at exactly a 3500 calorie deficit.

    I would give it a bit more time to track and see if the weekly average loss creeps up closer to the expected loss before adjusting your calories downward to try to achieve a faster loss. You’d need to be around 1,230 calories for a 2lb per week expected loss. That might be doable for awhile but 1200 is not a lot of calories per day for the long haul.

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