Fiber

I use myfitnesspal and it sets my dietary fiber goal at 13 grams a day. I see every day posts about sugar, fat or protein intake, but never about fiber intake. Most days I am over my 13 grams aloud. Is there such a thing as too much fiber?? Or doesn't fiber really count??

Is 13 grams all you're "allowed" or the minimum you are supposed to get? That's not a huge amount. I can't see how more than that would be bad for you if you are getting your protein in and not having too many calories or sugar - you should be fine to get more.

With my weight and calorie set at 1200 that's the amount myfitnesspal puts in automatically.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the automatic goals from MFP so I manually set mine. I guess in theory you could get too much fiber but have never heard of someone actually consuming too much. Maybe if you were doing suppliments AND ate a high-fiber diet... My NUT told me not to log my Metamucil as the extra calories from that fiber don't really add up to much and as long as I'm pooing daily, I'm doing good. When the system starts slowing down, that's when I up the fiber intake. Just creates a bit more gas, but that's what GasX is for!

I agree about manually setting goals with MFP. I'm also at 1200 calories, but I set my fiber amount to 25 g. Now that it's something I pay attention to, I regularly get 35-50 g.

A quick Google search shows "How much fiber do you need? Women need 25 grams per day and men should get 38 grams per day, according to an Institute of Medicine formula based on getting 14 grams of fiber for every 1,000 calories." from webmd.com.

Warning: dramatically increasing your fiber intake will result in "gastrointestinal distress" for a month or so. It goes away once your guts get used to it, but it can be pretty miserable for a while.

Thank you for the information. I appreciate your response. I will definitely have to go manually change my fiber intake in MFP.