While in cut phase, should I consume calories originally suggested?

jknipper9484 wrote: »

I’m post-menapausal 56 yr old female. Currently in cut phase consuming 1450 calories daily as the app suggested for losing weight. I exercise 5-6 days/week including cardio and strength training. The app suggests more calories based on how much exercise I do. Some days it’s near my caloric intake for maintaining weight. What should I do? Stick with the 1450 or eat the additional calories?

I ate the exercise calories all through weight loss (at age 59-60) and now in long-term maintenance, after estimating the exercise carefully. It's worked fine.

How are you estimating the exercise: Fitness tracker sync to MFP? MFP exercise database? How many calories for what type/duration exercise? (Exercise calorie estimating is surprisingly subtle. That's why I'm asking. But close is good enough. )

Your "maintenance calories" change (increase) when you do more exercise. It's not a fixed thing. That's one (useful) thing that MFP is trying to teach.

MFP's instructions say to set your activity level in your MFP profile based on activity that does not include your intentional exercise. i.e., job, home chores, and that sort of thing. That's very important if you log exercise from the MFP exercise database manually. (It's less important if you have a tracker sync-ed to MFP, and have "allow negative adjustments" turned on in MFP.)

Making up numbers here, if my maintain-weight calories (with MFP set up per instructions) were 1800, I'd lose weight at (say) 1450. But if on some given day I do 300 actual calories of exercise, my maintain-weight calories aren't 1800 any more, they're 2100 on that day. That means that if I eat 1450+300=1750 calories, I have the same calorie deficit as I had at 1450 calories with no exercise, and can expect to lose fat at the same rate. That's true even though the 1750 calories would be very close to my no-exercise maintenance calories. I hope that makes sense.

Best wishes for success!

If your getting adequate overall nutrition with 1450 calories and the fact that counting accuracy is generally notoriously low, then you'll just be using more body fat for your energy, nothing wrong with that as far as I'm concerned. I do advocate for a maintenance break every 12 weeks for a couple of week, then back at it. jmo

Set your target calories to maintain instead of lose, every exercise session will put you into deficit for weight loss... if your can't be bothered with tracking exercise sessions of course.