Calorie intake for 6 days of exercise

boraorak
boraorak Posts: 1 Member
in Health and Weight Loss

Hello, I am 25 years old, weigh 100kg, am 182cm tall, and have a body fat percentage of 25%. I will be doing kickboxing 3 days a week and weight training 3 days a week. My target weight is 80kg. Based on this, what should my calorie intake be? I calculated it to be 2700 calories. Do you think this is correct?

Answers

  • tomcustombuilder
    tomcustombuilder Posts: 2,542 Member
    edited September 28

    It's easy to over estimate calorie burn from exercise. Your weekly calorie counting accuracy also plays a big part of getting things right. At your bodyfat amount you can run a good sized deficit.

    Think around 2,000- 2,200 calories a day, or actually around 14,000-15,000 per week. Starting too high and you'll waste a month finding that you lost no fat. Slightly lower and you can always raise after a month if you're losing too much however that is rarely the case.

    A great way to figure things is to eat normally for a week and count those calories. If your weight has been reasonably stable then this is your maintenance calories. Use your exercise calories burned as your deficit and continue with your current calorie amount with the correct amount of protein.

    You have to be very careful because when you add in a decent amount of exercise, it can raise your hunger so you need to be sure that you aren't going to be eating more due to that.

  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 38,077 Community Helper
    edited September 28

    Your calorie intake would be whatever MFP tells you when you input your goal i(gain, lose, maintain) and accurate demographic data.

    Stick close to that estimate for 4-6 weeks (if male or menopausal) or one whole menstrual cycle (for those who have them). At the end of that time, compare your average weight loss per week with your target loss rate. If it's close, that's the right calorie level (at least until your activity or body weight change significantly). If it's far off, use arithmetic plus the assumption that 1100 calories per day is about a kilogram of weight change per week.

    Calculators, rules of thumb, even fitness trackers just tell you the calorie needs of the average person for whom reseach has collected data. You're not an average, you're an individual. Most people are close to average, by definition. A few may be noticeably above or below average in calorie needs; a very rare few may be surprisingly far off. You don't know where you fall until you run the personal experiment. (MFP and a good brand/model of fitness tracker estimate my calorie needs around 25-35% differently from what I've seen in over 10 years of calorie logging. That's around 500 calories daily in my case.)

    MFP is designed for you to set your activity level based on your life activity other than intentional exericise, i.e., things like your job, home chores, etc. Then it expects you to log exercise when you do some, and eat those calories, too.

    However, another method also works: Averaging your exercise plans into your activity level, then being sure to do that exercise. (Optimistic exercise plans coupled with not exercising: Common way people cause calorie counting to fail.)

    Pick one of those methods, set up and use MFP accordingly, then run the multi-week personal experiment, being reasonable consistent throughout. Then you'll know your own personal calorie needs, as accurately as it's possible to know them.

    P.S. With 20 kg to lose and at 100 kg now, I'd strongly encourage you not to try to lose faster than 1kg per week, and half a kilo would be better. Another common way for dieting to fail - calorie counting or otherwise - is to make the plan so difficult that we can't stick with it long enough to lose all the weight we want to lose. That applies to extreme low food intake, or extreme high exercise: Increases odds of failing. Losing more slowly also helps us learn the habits needed to keep the weight off long term, as a bonus.

    As you lose weight, slow the loss rate, too, shooting for something around half a percent of current weight per week, certainly no more than one percent, unless severely obese and under medical supervision for nutrition deficiencies or health complications.

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