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Calories in/calories out logic doesn’t make sense on app

I don’t understand the logic behind the calories in/calories out tile. It seems to me the “target calorie intake” each day starts at the basic metabolic rate. If that’s the case then why would you want to eat that many calories without knowing how many additional calories you would burn. To me it seems if you eat the total calorie target your essentially eating “maintenance level” calories. I feel like you should treat the “target” as more of a deficit target. For example, if you want to lose 1 pound a week, shouldn’t your target show 500 calories left over at the end of the day? I feel like if you have zero calories left over at the end of the day you pretty much had a wash between what you ate and what you burned. I don’t know if this makes sense to anyone what I’m saying, but it makes sense to me. Thoughts?

0 CindiL over 3 years ago

My tile is calorie details showing resting, active and total. You must be referring to calories in/out after linking with myfitnesspal? I used to have mine linked but something annoyed me about it and I unlinked it. Can’t remember why now though lol.

I think you can look at your average day total calories expended (resting + active) to get an idea of your average total and then set your goal for 500 or so under that.

I think maybe you’re looking at it wrong because there is never a day that is only the resting calories output. I mean you’re right you don’t know how many active calories you’ll have each day but there should be a general average, like for me (female, 60 years old) my resting plus active is around 1900-2100 every day. I aim to eat around 1,400 a day to lose weight (which is extremely hard at my age!) I get what you’re saying, the very very base resting calories is close to your subsistence level. But every day you will burn some active calories even if you don’t exercise simply by living, moving around, showering, going to the grocery store, gardening, walking the dog, The base resting calories is only metabolic, i.e., the function of your body. They add resting and active together but say you have 500 active calories, that’s a 500 calorie deficit right there so if you eat the resting calories alone you’re at that 500 calorie deficit because you burned an extra 500 calories then it takes to live. They add them together to show the total output but you can almost look at it like you need a certain amount of calories to survive and the active calories are a deficit to that. If you eat less then the total of those two, there is your deficit I. Hope that makes sense? My take of it anyways.