Minimum calorie intake

Whiplashy

What is the minimum safe daily intake of calories? I'm 5 ft. 9 and weigh about 18 st I want to lose about 5 st. I'm using the my fitness pal app to track what I'm eating rather than some gimmicky diet. I've been doing it for just over a week and the calorie intake has been between 800 and 1050 each day. Every day the app tells me that I'm eating insufficient calories. I know if I'm eating too few the weight loss is supposed to take longer. What would be a good calorie target per day?

RedXIV

Whiplashy wrote: »

What is the minimum safe daily intake of calories? I'm 5 ft. 9 and weigh about 18 st I want to lose about 5 st. I'm using the my fitness pal app to track what I'm eating rather than some gimmicky diet. I've been doing it for just over a week and the calorie intake has been between 800 and 1050 each day. Every day the app tells me that I'm eating insufficient calories. I know if I'm eating too few the weight loss is supposed to take longer. What would be a good calorie target per day?

Did the app not give you a target calorie intake?

seamus

Your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) is a measure of the number of calories required by your body on a daily basis, ignoring any physical exercise.

There are a few ways of calculating it, and like most things related to diet, there's no way of pinning it down exactly. However the calculations get it fairly accurate.

So you use your BMR to see how many calories you need to maintain your current weight, then you reduce your intake below this amount in order to lose weight. It's typically said that eating 20% less is the way to go, you shouldn't eat way below your BMR.

The formula for men is:
66 + ( 6.23 x weight in pounds ) + ( 12.7 x height in inches ) - ( 6.8 x age in year )

So assuming you're a 30 year old male, your BMR is
66 + (6.23 * 252) + (12.7 * 69) - (6.8 * 30) = 2307 calories

That's the amount of calories your body naturally burns if you do nothing else. Assuming that you don't vegetate in bed 24 hours a day, there are additional calculations. If you are generally sedentary, you multiply the figure by 1.2. Which gives 2768 calories.

If you were to reduce this by 20%, that means that you should eat 2214 calories per day.

This would give a calorie deficit of 500kcal per day, which is 1lb per week weight loss.

That's the simplest way of doing it, but the figures above are examples, you'll need to plug your own figures into it, and the calculations are quite different if you're female.

A lot of people don't agree with the "starvation mode" theory of eating too few calories, but most people agree that eating too few calories will impede your weight loss and will also have other side effects such as weakness, tiredness, etc.