Help with daily calories

[loseitforever]

Hi everyone!  I am very new to all of this - there is so much info out there, but I find it somewhat overwhelming!  I am trying to figure out how many calories a day I should be consuming.  I know what the fitbit app tells me, but sometimes I just don't feel that it is correct.  I have done my own calculations based on information I have read online - but I read so many different methodologies and get different answers depending upon where I look.  This is me:  48, almost 49 year old female.  I weight 180 lbs and would like to loose 1-2 lb per week.  I sit at a desk all day, but I go to boxing class 2x/week and bootcamp 1 or 2 times a week and I have just started going to yoga 2x/week.  The fitbit tells me I burn anywhere between 450-600 calories during a 50 minute boxing class - which seems like a lot to me.  Any help is welcome!

[Bill_k]

I would use the fitbit 24 hour calorie burn information as a base starting point. Just before midnight it will show your daily burn or if you go into the app and look at your history you can also see it . It resets to 0 at midnight.

Then decide on a deficit number which is the number of calories you want to eat 'less' than your burn number to lose weight.

Maybe 500-800 to start with.

As the fitbit is not completely accurate and your food calorie numbers won't be exactly accurate either you can use a scale to watch to see if you are losing any weight .

If not then you will have to adjust your diet,your exercise or both until you do.

The fitbit constantly rings up a 'sedentary' base calorie burn during the day that is set by the personal information you fed into the app when you bought it and set it up.

Your 'non-sedentary' calorie burn on the fitbit is determined by your heart rate so any activity that gets it up to the next zone and beyond will register a higher calorie burn .

I assume that in boot camp and boxing it likely gets up fairly high.

For now i'd take the boxing class readings as truth until proven otherwise but really it's the big picture reading over 24 hours that is the important thing for weight loss.

[Dominique]

I agree with @Bill_k  that your total energy expenditure over 24/7 (168 hours / 10,080 minutes) matters more than what you burn over two weekly boxing sessions (100 minutes). If you think the Fitbit estimate for total calories burned may not be accurate, you can get a second opinion by using an online calculator such as this one. If you want to double-check calories burned during your boxing sessions (or any other activity/sport), you can use the MET numbers found in the Compendium of Physical Activities. Here are a few boxing-related activities taken from the Compendium:

Generally speaking, your diet will play a bigger role in your weight loss than your workouts. Doesn’t mean working out is pointless, just that you should think of its benefits primarily from a health and fitness point of view.