How many calories is enough?

[Kinghaven]

Good afternoon!

I am a 25 year old female and I've been following the workout program P90X3 and I've been loggin everything in myfitnesspal.com.

My question is myfitnesspal.com gives me 1300 calories to eat a day, but then it adds extra calories for my 10k steps and my P90X3 workouts (that I log), now should how many calories should I eat? I want to lose aother 20 lbs, but I keep seeing online, make sure you eat enough. Is 1300 calories enough if I walk my 10,000 steps plus lose a good 300 calories with my workout?

Soooo confused.

Thanks for all the help 🙂

[Heybales]

MFP eating goal is based on a deficit from maintenance with NO exercise being done. That's why you have to log it when actually done.

Fitbit is informing MFP (if you have it synced, which you should) that your maintenance is actually higher than it estimated, therefore your eating level goes up.

You are getting 1300 calories to eat when you do NO exercise and you are as active as you guessed in your MFP settings and Fitbit daily burn agrees.

Otherwise, your goal is always going to be higher. Actually look at your Food diary, what is the actual eating goal?

Meet your goals, since that's what a goal is. If missing goal by 20% is acceptable, you've probably already done that with your weight goal, but you aren't going to stop trying to reach that one, right?

Also, you don't give enough stats for anyone to give a thoughtful answer, but I can tell you are not using the tools correctly.

Some tools used wrong still may kind of do what you want, usually they don't work, many times they can hurt you.

Good job on logging the heavy workouts, because Fitbit would badly underestimate those.

All you need to do is look at what MFP says is your eating goal, not net, and meet that goal daily.

Use the net goal for planning your day out close to where you will end up.

Only 300 calories for the P90X?

What are you using to estimate calories burned from that?

[slysam]

I don't know whether 300 calories is necessarily too low, though it does sound on the low side. My heart rate monitor tends to credit me with a little over 300 for a vigorous aerobic hour and similar for a circuit training/plyometric class I took (though this involved strength training with plyos or aerobic drills on the "rests" so not the type of activity hrm's can accurately estimate). That is lower than the exercise database would, for vigorous calisthenics or circuit training it credits me about 500 calories an hour (and I am not sure whether gender is even factored in there so that is possibly generous). I think weight lifting, vigorous effort would be similar (vigorous calisthenics and circuit training are credited exactly the same). For an activity that is vigorous that I can sustain an hour, that is about as good as it gets. I know the P90x yoga workout is 90 minutes, but aren't the others about an hour? It has been a while since I did one of these workouts, but I think my old hrm credited about 400 for plyox and that was the highest burning of the workouts--I was younger and heavier then so imagine that estimate might decrease now. But if the original poster is light in body weight or petite in height, maybe? I guess it depends on the workout and the source for calories burned. If she is just using the fitbit, then I agree it would be underestimating most of these workouts (if not all). With a HRM, it depends on the activity and settings as you know. The exercise database tends to give me the most generous estimates (second only to some gym cardio machines) but it does put it in the right ballpark for activity intensity.