Minimum Caloric Intake

gasman

gasman

New member
Hey guys I have what I think is a pretty simple question.

When people talk about "minimum calories" I often hear 1200 calories for women, 1500 calories for men. Are these total intake calories or "net calories"?

I target 2000-2200 calories per day, but I never subtract my exercise, or use my exercise as an excuse to eat more.

example:

Monday I ate 1950calories
I ran 35minutes at 10min/mile for an estimate calorie burn of 600 calories.

My "net caloric intake" would be 1350 calories, have I eaten enough for that day? I am below the recommended minimum if I use net calories, but in a good place if I use my total intake.
 
I wouldn't look at it like this. I recently blogged about this elsewhere on the net... this might help you:

I see this question asked all the time here. There's obviously a lot of confusion with the concept of eating your exercise calories back and to be honest, there isn't a universally accepted answer.

Probably because it truly does depend.

Let's try to make this real simple:

Maintenance is where calories in = calories out, right?

We know that a calorie deficit is required if fat is to be lost, so calories in < calories out.

Large deficits can have negative effects such as increased cravings, muscle loss, irritability, unsustainability (I made that word up), etc.

So we want a moderate deficit, which I'd label as 20-35% off of your maintenance. There are exceptions to this rule, but we're speaking generally here.

So if your maintenance is 2000 calories, anywhere from 1300 to 1600 calories would be realistic for fat loss.

That's a deficit of 400-700 calories per day.

Said deficit, in theory, could come from many, many combination of factors.

On one end of the spectrum you could simply eat 400-700 calories less per day.

On the other end of the spectrum you could keep eating 2000 calories but increase calories expended via exercise to 400-700 calories per day.

If you went with this later scenario, you wouldn't have to eat back your exercise calories because the expended calories from exercise put you in the sweet spot, calorically speaking.

Now if you cut calories by 400-700 AND increased activity by 400-700, then you'd be running too large a deficit unless you ate back your exercise calories.

Follow that logic?
 
Steve is right on, but I take a slightly different approach, which is pretty much exactly the same as what steve just said, only approached in a different way.

Basically, what I do is when I figure out my maintenance level caloric expenditure, I include "activity" into that number - all exercise. Its more of a guess really, because I don't really determine how many calories I burn through exercise. Then, I subtract the calories from my calculated maintenance level, as if I'm creating the entire defecit through reducing intake, and eat that much. The real work is done adjusting intake - if you're losing too quickly, eat a little more, too slowly, eat a little less. In the end, I've determined somewhere between 2500-3000 calories allows me to lose around 3lbs per week, which I can then determine to be a defecit of ~1500 calories, giving me a maintenance of 4000-4500 calories, and the level I'm eating at is a ~33-38% defecit - pretty much the high end of steve's moderate defecit, and I don't get cravings, because 2500-3000 calories is still a ton of food when its not pizza and mountain dew :p. I did undershoot my first guess - I started out trying to eat 2000-2300 calories a day, and determined it was too little based on seeing too rapid weight loss.

But the point is, I do it backwards - I start out with only a rough estimate of maintenance, which includes all activity and exercise, create a guess at a defecit, and then adjust my intake to achieve the results I want, which allows me to more accurately determine my true maintenance (again, includes activity) and defecit. I let the results dictate my intake, rather than trying to accurately predict BMR and then add in calorie expenditure from ALL my activity and trying to come up with an exact maintenance number.

tl;dr vesion: yes you have to account for your exercise when considering your defecit - you can consider it part of your activity when determining maintenance, or you can add it in afterwards as its performed. Important to remember that BMR, activity, maintenance - its all dynmanic and changes, so you need to monitor your results and adjust your intake accordingly.
 
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