Calorie calculations

For set-up and calorie recommendations, go to Goals > view guided setup
https://www.myfitnesspal.com/account/change-goals-guided

I would suggest using the "Lightly Active" setting under your Goals settings for the first month at least.

To be in a healthy BMI, you are aiming for what, 30-40 pounds of weight loss? Set your Goals to "Lose 1 pound per week."


For the strength training - you don't really burn a lot of calories in a strength session, but you can find it under Exercise > Add Cardio Exercise > Strength training (weight lifting, weight training)

Log food for a month. Adjust according to results at the end of that time.

fkbbbfksks wrote: »

Thank you for the advice. I’m hoping to lose inches more than pounds if that make sense. I figure that 12st of lean muscle is better than 12st of fat, but I really do struggle to work out whether this regime will make a difference or if I should just stick to the cardio.

I will try the calculator using light exercise and see what calories I get. Previously I was around 1800 a day and only lost 7lb and an inch all over in 3 months!

It sounds like you're doing a lot of the right things for your goals already.

For fat loss, eating fewer calories than we burn is the basic objective. We burn calories from all activities: Just being alive, job/home chores, exercise. So, exercising during weight loss allows us to lose weight at the same rate while eating a bit more.

If a person eats very close to weight-maintenance calories, but follows a good progressive strength training program (while getting good nutrition), it's possible to slooooowly use the fat as fuel to add muscle, as long as the eating pattern includes adequate protein.

Under the best possible conditions, gaining 1-2 pound of muscle per month would be a really good result, and for most of us it would happen slower than that. Muscle mass gain takes even more persistence and patience than weight loss, generally. It's still worth pursuing, of course!

Strength training does burn calories, and the method Riverside suggested is a reasonable way to estimate them. It can also help us keep our existing muscles while losing fat through a reduced-calorie eating routine. (Overweight people tend to have more muscle mass than non-overweight people of similar activity level, just from moving that extra weight through daily life. Might as well keep it, eh, since it's so slow to (re-)gain?)

Most cardiovascular exercise burns more calories per minute than strength exercise, but doesn't have the same muscle maintenance/gain potential benefits.

Without knowing more about you than in your OP, it's possible that 1800, even accurately counted, wasn't a very big calorie deficit. Seven pounds loss in 3 months suggests that it was about a 300 calorie deficit, which seems plausible based on what a TDEE estimator suggests your TDEE would be. Results over 4-6 weeks are the best indicator of how big our calorie deficit is: MFP, fitness trackers, and other calorie calculators just give us a statistical estimate, basically the average for people similar to us. But we're not a statistic, we're individuals - we can vary from the averages, perhaps for no obvious reason.

If you're doing the same strength training exercises every day for 5 days in a week, that's probably not optimal. Recovery - the time between strength workouts - is where the magic happens, in the form of muscle repair. Generally, as a rough rule of thumb, you'd want to allow 48 hours of rest between working the same muscle group(s) again.

If you're not following a documented program from a good source, you might want to do so, either via a personal trainer, or as a fallback perhaps one of the programs in this thread:

http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10332083/which-lifting-program-is-the-best-for-you/p1

FWIW, I joined MFP at around your current size. (I was 5'5", mid-150s pounds, already down from 183 when I got here . . . but 17 years older, at age 59.) I've been maintaining for 7+ years since initial loss of 50ish pounds in just under a year, currently in the lower 130s/upper 120s. Riverside gave you good advice above - she also has lost a bunch of weight and maintained long term. You can do this, too.

Best wishes!