Does anyone know of any accurate calorie calculators?

[SunsetRunner]

Hey, I’ve been using several different calorie calculators to track how much I should be eating to lose weight. But all of them give me different results. I know that it’s all a numbers game, so it’s really up to how your body reacts to certain calorie in vs. out values and all, but what it’s recommending is 1200-ish, and that seems pretty low to me. For reference, I’m 5’2” and 125 lbs. My goal weight is 113, and my BMR is roughly 1,368.

[SunsetRunner · Accepted solution]

Start with what you are currently eating. Track your food for a week and average out the calories for that week. Don’t change how you eat just yet. That will give you a starting point. Then cut your calories by about 200 calories. You don’t want to drop calories by a drastic amount. Just a little bit at a time. Slow and steady wins the race so to speak.

Those calorie calculators don’t consider the fact that everyone’s metabolic rate is different. You can have two people with exactly the same stats but if one person has more muscle than the other for example, the person with more muscle will burn more calories at rest.

[SunsetRunner]

That makes a lot more sense to me. I was wondering why each calculator I tried kept giving me a different result. Their selection of activity level also throws me for a loop, because some of them classify anything that isn't actually hitting the gym as being lightly active, regardless of how many calories you burn on a daily basis. Thanks for your help!

[Baltoscott]

I agree with @SunsetRunner, especially not dropping calories too much from where you are now. Big changes can easily lead to binging undoing all the hard work and discomfort.  But since you asked for a calorie counter recommendation my suggestion would be to look at the one developed by the NIH.  It is backed by a lot of statistical modeling and is a good place to start if you are going to log your calories as you try to lose weight.

[SunsetRunner]

This is by far the best calculator I've found, thanks for the recommendation. According to this, I'm right where I should be, I think I just need to change up my exercises now that I'm 12 lbs. away from my goal weight. It gets harder to lose those last few 😞 Thanks again!

[SunsetRunner]

Cronometer.com is an excellent food tracking site-you'll get detailed info (calories, carbs, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals, etc) and it links with Fitbit to import your info (but not the food). If you link it with your Fitbit, select sedentary as the lifestyle because if you don't the calories count will be off.   You can also select how much weight you want to lose each week and crono will tell you how many calories you have left to eat to reach that goal-which is awesome.  It will include the calories burned (as told by Fitbit) in those calculations.  I'm down 14 pounds since June 1 following their recommendations.

[SunsetRunner]

OMG. This is great! Super detailed and helpful, thank you so much!