Question

 Hi all.  So I'm just wondering if anyone can tell me how many calories we are supposed to aim to consume in a day.  I assume it has something to do with height.  I track my eating with my fitness pal and it puts 1380 calories as my goal and I know that is not accurate for me and discovered I can adjust it.  Just need to know what to adjust it to.  I am 5'5

Thanks

I too am 5'5" and weigh 183-4 lbs.  I have been aiming for 900 calories lately but my weight has been stuck for about 3 weeks and I wonder whether I need to eat a bit more.  I am 10 months out. 

There are a few different ways to figure this out:

1)  The standard old "ask your weight loss group".

2)  To maintain your weight you should be eating roughly 10 calories for every pound, so if you wanted to maintain at say 200 lbs, you should be eating roughly 2000 a day.  If you wanted to lose a pound a week (at 3500 calories per pound), you would have to cut back 500 calories every day.  In summary if you are 200 lbs and want to lose a pound a week, eat 1500 calories per day, if you want to lose 2 pounds a week eat 1000 calories a day.  Now that is if you weigh 200 (if you weighed 150 to maintain you eat 1500 calories per day, cut it back to 1000 if you want to lose a pound a week).  Again this is a very rough estimate and your mileage may vary just because of your own particular metabolism and definitely depending on how much exercise you get a day.

3)  You could get your basal metabolism calculated.  I did this at a special course and at almost completely at rest, my body burns about 1370 calories a day, so with minimal exercise like doing the stairs a few times a day, doing laundry walking around the office, getting groceries or whatever, I can easily burn another 3-400 calories and can eat 1600-1700 calories a day to maintain my weight.  I am almost 5'8" by the way.

4)  If I remember right,, you are about 3-4 months out?  I think I was eating around 800-1000 calories per day at that point.

I'm not sure if this makes any sense to you or not, but I just wanted to let you know that there are different schools of thought on this and quite frankly everyone's body burns differently as well. Oh and I found that I optimized my weight loss eating less than 40 carbs a day even without worrying about how many actual calories.

Best wishes!

 Wow, that was a very well worded and informed answer.  Thanks so much for your help.  I work out almost every day at the gym and shoot to burn 800 calories in cardio and then do weight on top of that so most days I don't even come close to consuming what I've burned.  I usually eat about 500-750 calories a day and burn 800 at the gym alone without counting the calories I burn in my daily functioning.  For some reason if I do eat a couple hundred more calories I loose little or no weight which is frustrating because I think the excersize should give me a bit of a buffer.

Sandy, how would a person get their basal metabolism measured?

Monica, I hope I have the right wording on that, because it sounds a little funny to me today, lol.  Was it your BMR?  Anywho, I went to a class in Ottawa where a speaker gave us different strategies and had us all get on a scale like machine where she input our height and we held on to something (yes, I'm very technical, lol), that took readings through some sort of waves sent through our bodies and spit out that number.  Did that all make sense?  If I had a better memory, I could be dangerous, hehe!

Sounded right to me! BMR... yeah.. i think so. I've heard of that being done... i wonder if i could ask my doctor about that. (your technical knowledge is outstanding!!! lol. I'm right there with you on the dangerousness. If i could remember half of what i knew, i'd be on FIRE!!!)