A Little help with calorie intake please

wednesday

Full Member
Hi everyone
ive just started calorie counting last week and im a little confused and looking for some advice, MFP says i should have 1200 calories a day, but when i put in my exercise it goes up to 2100, should i be eating 1200 or closer to 2100??? that seems like way too much :eek: my exercise right now consists of the 30 day shred each morning, about an hours walk each day with the dogs, and about 45m on a gravity strider in the evening.
many thanks.....
cathy
 
You should eat your exercise cals, net cals (what you've eaten minus exercise) should not be less than 1200... if you change your settings to show you have an active lifestyle (if dogwalking, shred, strider are part of your routine everyday rather than extra) then MFP will give you more cals as a baseline rather than you adding them seperately.
 
ah, thank you so much i will go and change the settings as when i first started using mfp i was doing little or no exercise....
 
If your base is 1200, looking at your weight and activity, 2100 is possibly correct as I'd guess you burn about 200-250 in the shred, 150-200 walking - maybe less (MFP horribly overestimates walking calories) and 500 on the strider? 250+200+500 = 950, 1200 + 950 = 2150. However, I may have overestimated your burns - I didn't really exercise very much when I was your weight so I have no point of reference as to how much more you'll burn than me! I know personally I wouldn't burn anywhere near 950 calories doing that (more like 650 at best) so you may want to work it out properly :)

I personally use the sedentary setting, because my job is office based, although I exercise pretty 6-7 times a week. Then I can have a more accurate account of calories burnt from exercise on TOP of that - simply because I'm not sure what they deem "activity" and people putting themselves as very active because they exercise every day (but doing something like yoga) are obviously not going to be burning as much as somebody who does intense cardio every day.

I'd advise you to stick at 1200, and then eat the exercise calories on top of that :) That way you don't risk under or over-eating.
 
If your base is 1200, looking at your weight and activity, 2100 is possibly correct as I'd guess you burn about 200-250 in the shred, 150-200 walking - maybe less (MFP horribly overestimates walking calories) and 500 on the strider? 250+200+500 = 950, 1200 + 950 = 2150. However, I may have overestimated your burns - I didn't really exercise very much when I was your weight so I have no point of reference as to how much more you'll burn than me! I know personally I wouldn't burn anywhere near 950 calories doing that (more like 650 at best) so you may want to work it out properly :)

I personally use the sedentary setting, because my job is office based, although I exercise pretty 6-7 times a week. Then I can have a more accurate account of calories burnt from exercise on TOP of that - simply because I'm not sure what they deem "activity" and people putting themselves as very active because they exercise every day (but doing something like yoga) are obviously not going to be burning as much as somebody who does intense cardio every day.

I'd advise you to stick at 1200, and then eat the exercise calories on top of that :) That way you don't risk under or over-eating.
yeah those are the figures mfp give me when i enter them, but it does seem alot i know the walking is probably only about 130 ish the strider bout 400 and the shred when i google is says about 230 so if i stick to around 1600-1700 calories a day i should be ok then?
many thanks for you help!!
cathy
 
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