This may not be the right forum so if anyone advises, I can post this ealsewhere. According to http://www.caloriecontrol.org/calcalcs.html
I need to eat 2200 cals a day to maintain my weight. I never eat that many calories. I count them in Fitday. I have trouble eating 1200 a day. I don't eat junk or sugar or flour. I am5'7" and weigh 170 and am always asked If I am pregnant. I can't do much exercise because of chronic pain. I am frustrated. The numbers are deceiving.

Calories in /calories out is a crock.

According to that calculator, I need to eat about the same number. I usually eat between 1500 and 1800.

That calculator says I need 2436 calories a day to maintain? BAH - I need around 2600-2700 to maintain....and oh, heck, I'm eating over 3,000 these days just to see what'll happen if I keep carbs low and exceed requirements to maintain - thus far I've lost 4-pounds eating too many calories and am finding it more and more difficult to eat in excess of what I need to maintain.

Calories in calorie out --- phooey

Calories in/calories out is not a crock. The problem is people are either not tracking their calories closely, or they are over/underestimating their expenditure.

Read the fine print on that site:

"This calculator is meant to be an estimate only. Actual calories needed to maintain weight may vary based on muscle mass, activity and a variety of other factors such as illness, pregnancy, etc. If you are obese, your actual caloric needs may be less accurate."

The only way to know how many calories YOU need to maintain is to track your own weight, calories, and activity over time. This calculator actually underestimates my maintenance, which is around 2600--it tells me 2200.

A good friend of mine has been starving herself at 500-900 calories per day for a year and has gained 12 pounds. It is a crock or else she would be a walking stick. Another friend I know cycles and was estimated by her trainer to be burning over 3000 calories with her cycling (major distances) while only taking in 1500 and she has stayed at 215lbs. for the last year.

Thanks for the input everyone. I feel abit releived now. Certainly body mass, muscle mass and activity play a part. Also, I feel that being on Thyroid pills has an influence although a doctor will never acknowledge that. I have tried. Our Thyroid is like a little engine that drives the car. If it isn't working properly because of having cells killed off and being on pills to maintain a level...then surely that would influence metabolic rates.
When I stuck to induction years back I was hard pressed to take in 1000 cals a day. I lost weight, about 15 pounds. I figured it was from the low calories. I hardly eat carbs now but limiting them like in induction might have been the key for me. a potbellied woman.

Calories in calories out is an incomplete explaination of how the body works with what it is provided and what is stored. It's not simply just what goes in must come out to reach an equilibrium to maintain weight.

Obviously her metabolism slowed to accommodate her exceedingly low cal intake, so that she would become more efficient with her energy usage, thus lowering expenditure. Even so, there is a limit to what the body can do before it WILL lose weight--consider the anorexic, or prisoner of war in a starvation camp. Keep in mind estimates are just that--estimates, not fact. Most likely, her body became efficient enough so that she wasn't burning as much as thought, plus the metabolism slows to conserve.

This is the thing that can suck with keeping your calories intentionally low for long periods of time--your body will conserve energy, so that it uses less energy. It's still cals in/cals out.

It really is a simple equation: cals in=cals out to maintain weight. The kicker, though, is that it can sometimes be hard to determine exactly what influences each side of the equation. This is where the quality of the calories and metabolism quirks come into play.

Calories in/calories out ignores hormone function.

"The second Golden Rule of orthodoxy is: 'A calorie is a calorie is a calorie' – no matter where it comes from. This means that if you eat X number of calories more than you use up, you will put on Y amount of weight, wherever those calories come from. However, as has been demonstrated over and over again from many studies looking at diets with equal calorie content, but different constituents, this is far from true. Dieters on fat-based diets consistently lost much more weight than dieters on carb-based diets, even though both diets had exactly the same number of calories.

Therefore, 'a calorie is a calorie is a calorie' is not so meaningful after all: a carbohydrate calorie is obviously much more fattening than a fat calorie. So obviously some calories don't count as much as others. "
http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/do...ally-count.html

"weight gain is determined by the hormonal regulation of fat tissue and not by calories-in-minus-calories-out"
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/b.../Letters-t.html

Then there is this fellow forum member who intentionally overate to try and gain wright. It didn't work
http://magicbus.myfreeforum.org/ftopic846-0-asc-0.php

Calories in calories out is a crock because it completely ignores biological function and how those calories are measured in the first place.

The measurement of calories is a crock because there is no human body that acts like a bomb calorimeter and no evidence at all that the numbers arising from bomb calorimetry measurements in any way reflects the calories available to the body from a specific food. There is no evidence that 100cals each of fat, protein and carbohydrates contain the same bioavailable energy. All evidence points to the fact that they contain different amount of bioavailable energy.

Then there is the complicating factor of the different biochemical pathways taken by fats, carbs and proteins, and how those different pathways can result in fat storage or depletion of fat reserves.

A good starting point for some of this is Taubes compilation of research. But even that fails to touch on bioavailability of energy, likely because there is such a huge lack of research in the field.

No it doesn't. Or as you would say, WRONG! Hormone function (or dysfunction) can definitely skew the balance of cals in or out, as I mentioned in my previous post. Thyroid hormone is a great example of this. People with low thyroid output def. have their metabolism lowered more than people of similar weight and activity levels, but it just means they have to adjust their cal intake accordingly, and/or take a thyroid supplement.

How does this refute "calories in/calories out"? That's what we're discussing here, not QUALITY of calories. Consider TEF, or the thermic effect of protein. The body will use more energy digesting protein than it does C and F. So for diets equal in calories, the one with more protein will cause one to burn slightly more energy. This doesn't change the fact that if that person is eating MORE calories than their body needs, they will gain.

You can't make something out of nothing. You can't create weight out of thin air. Something is happening in the body so that calories in are greater than calories out. What is that something? This is what we need to figure out.

I'm happy to discuss this further with you, if you'd like to start a new thread, and PM me the link. It's really off-topic for this thread now.

A Calorie is a unit of energy. A pound is a unit of mass. They are not the same thing. You can't mix units and expect the results to have any meaning at all.

Taubes said something like, It's not about the calories you put in your body, it's about what your body DOES with the calories you put in your body.

If we played semantics we could ALWAYS say that it's just a calorie equation, and if someone stays 200# while eating 500 calories a day (or me, who easily has stayed nearly 400# while eating 1000 calories a day), that it's "merely that their metabolism has slowed down so they need to reduce their calories to match their metabolism."

The problem is, this sounds great on paper, but fails abysmally in the real world. Plenty of animal and human studies, as Taubes book lists, show that insufficient calories will leave a person or animal FAT, while eating up their muscle and vital organs for energy.

So it seems sort of ... oh I dunno, semantically not-inaccurate, but a little patronizing as a real-world recommendation, to suggest that it's all about calories, since in many cases, UNTIL the "nutrient ratio" is adjusted to drop insulin so finally the fat cells will release it for energy and quit stuffing everything someone eats into them (no matter how little it is), weight loss -- unless you don't mind sacrificing muscle and vital organs for it (while maintaining the fat) -- is just not going to happen.

(There are also BTW a few studies that make clear that larger calorie numbers actually resulted in more weight loss than lower (when the eating plan was essentially highfat/lowcarb).)

So if her friend is eating 500-900 calories a day and she is still fat and not losing the fat, it isn't about calories; she is probably already eating up muscle every day, and if she dropped her calories any further to win that "calories in vs. out contest" she would merely be eating liver, heart and brain tissue that much more quickly.... not losing more fat.

The whole calories concept is based on assumptions about the laws of thermodynamics that are not accurate -- read Taubes's book, which is a far better explanation, for how that all fits together.

If only it were that simple, obesity would be non-existent.

Here is a simple question - if it were truly just a matter of calories in calories out, why would quality even matter? What makes one type of calorie different than another?

And I'm still trying.