I was reading a thingy by Tom Venuto and he recommends 20% of your maintence calories to lose weight, if I understand correctly. How do I know what my maintence is without some fancy smancy tools and the such?

A while back someone posted this site:
http://www.freedieting.com/tools/cal...alculator.htm#
and I found it really useful! You can just enter your age, weight, height, gender and exercise level and it spits out your maintenance and "fat loss" calories.
It must be using the same formula, because when I just checked I had 1730 for maintenance and 1384 for fat loss = exactly 80%.

It has some fun features where you can see calorie-cycling and also see what reducing your body fat and/or increasing weekly exercise does to your calorie estimates... hope this helps

Thanks Emma. I found it interesting too that when I used that site and then incorporated Tom's 20% method to the maintenence number from freedieting, the number for fat loss was the same. It is a couple hundred more than I had decided to stick with so now I am confuzzled, lol.

If you currently track your calories you can work maintenance backwards.

Average cals in last 30 days

Add -- # of pounds lost, multiplied by 3500, divided by 30

(that second number is roughly how much of a deficit you've created each day)

It's not a perfect system, but if you're a calorie counter it might get you closer than online calculators.

Oops - I meant to add a point that the number is based on your current level of activity. For example, my maintenance level (doing nothing) is about 2500 calories a day. However, I usually average 300 cals/day in exercise when I total it and divide it. So if I keep up the exercise I can eat about 2800 calories a day to stay at the same weight (did it 6 or 7 weeks ago, it works). However, if I do nothing I only need the 2500 to maintain.

Thanks Anne