How do you know your caloric needs to lose weight but not eat too little? page

[ninjas.rawk]

I am just curious how you all know what calorie zone you should be eating in to lose weight, or not to gain weight in a healthy way and not go too low calorie or too high calorie?


Details:

Female.
5'0"
128 lbs
Not very active at the moment.. just a medium paced walk for 30-45 minutes 4 days a week.

[sbhikes]

There are calculators online that will give you an answer. The only trouble with them is they are probably wrong. It's a decent place to start but I wouldn't allow yourself to freak out if you go above or below what they tell you. Eating more calories instead of less may make you want to get more exercise which will help more than just sitting under a blanket freezing to death because calories are too low because some dumb calculator told you that's what you need for weight loss.

[ninjas.rawk]

Yeh... all the calculators tell me 1200... then again it says that for most females... so wasn't thinking that was too accurate. Right now I exercise as much as my body allows me. I seem to be getting around 1200 anyways but I didn't wanna be under eating if that's what I'm doing.

[emmie]

If you're eating at a reasonable caloric deficit, you should lost one or two pounds a week--as an average. Hormonal shifts in women during the month suggest that this should be calculated monthly rather than weekly because water retention during the cycle will often mask weight loss.

Scientists suggest that any more than 2 lbs a week, then the perso is losing muscle in addition to fat.

If you're losing too fast, your calories are too low. If you're not losing at all, then you're eating to maintenance and need to create a deficit by eating less.

[ninjas.rawk]

Thank you, that makes sense.

[Pebbles67]

Look for a basal metabolic rate calculator. Then multiply by the harris benedict formula to calculate in exercise. Try to eat 20% below that caloric burn rate. I'm a female 5" 10". I burn about 2500 cals/day. I try to eat no more than 2000 cals.

[Pebbles67]

Female 5' 128 lbs 30 yrs old (random, didn't know your age) BMR 1352. Harris Benedict x 1.375 for light exercise = 1859
Minus 20% =1489

[ninjas.rawk]

Close enough, I'm 33.

[meeshar]

Everyone is different, so the calculators aren't always accurate. I was religious with counting calories using FitDay for almost a year, but by the first couple of months I'd figured it out. Activity level does play a part, but when I'm generally sedentary (desk job, walking daily) I lose weight when I eat less than 1200 calories, gain when I eat more than 1400. My reality was much lower than the calculator on the FitDay site said. I did have to up my calories when I was taking martial arts classes, I was in starvation mode and my weight loss stalled.

[ninjas.rawk]

Well, I don't got much to go on right now as I only started Primal Feb 27. So far, I have lost only 3.8lbs and my net calories have looked like this per week:

netcalories.jpg