How many calories did you used to eat?

I would like to hear from people who tracked their calories before they started to diet.  Occasionally I find some weight-loss success story from someone who kept a pre-diet food diary and was shocked to learn he ate x amount of calories when he weighed x pounds. I am not interested in numbers based on computations and formulas... these provide a rough idea only.  So, please respond only if you are actually tracked it and fairly sure within a few hundred calories. Also include your gender, age and height.

The examples I have found so far tend to be for very obese... I would like to hear from moderately overweight as well. If you have met your goal and are maintaining, I would like your numbers too.  I am interested in people of all sizes.

Here are a few examples:

202-pound man ate 3500 calories
340-pound man ate 4500 calories
128-pound woman eats 1550 calories
175 pound male eats 2750 calories

I tracked calories for 1 month before making changes to my diet. I averaged 2500 calories per day. I don't know exactly what I weighed but somewhere between 160 and 170. I'm 5'6", female, sedentary.

At my peak weight, 205, I estimate that I was eating 2700 calories per day on average (including about two full bowls of ice cream a day).

This is very embarassing but I tracked for a week before I started losing weught and I was averaging about 4500 a day! I did not eat a ton but I ate all bad. greasy food. No wonder I was so fat., I was around 290.

Hi natesmomma, you forgot to say what you weighed at the time.
Thanks.

don't even want to know cause it was bad. I will sometime look things up that I used to eat and they are like 700 cals I would hate to see the total for a day YIKES!!!!!

pre diet, as 5' 8" and 145 lbs i ate about 2500-3500 calories a day, highly dependant on alcohol. thinking back i ate healthy for the most part, but allowed myself desert and huge portions because i was so active. despite getting a lot of exercise i still managed to gain the good old freshman 15

I ate 2 meals a day before I started.  Not really extreme amounts of food, but it was terrible high fat, high calorie things.  I fried everything, had rich desserts, 2 glasses of whole milk at each meal, and drank regular sodas all day long.  I added it up on here once, what a typical day was for me including drinks and dessert (which I always had with dinner) and was pretty shocked to see I came in at nearly 6,000 calories. It's no wonder I'd gained such an extreme amount of weight.  Now, volume wise, I actually eat more food but it's scattered throughout the day instead of crammed into 2 sittings, and it contains waaaay less calories.   Just replacing my high calorie soda and milk with water / unsweet tea dropped my calorie intake by nearly half.   

Oddly enough on average I used to eat 500 calories a day but around 3000 on the weekends thats when I wieghed 167 lbs!  That is so not good for your meatabolism!

Thanks for input

At 145 I was at 2000 - it varied slightly, but it was always close to that, within 200 either direction and averaging at or very near 2000. At 135 it was 1800.

At 168 pounds.  Didn't count but I ate 2 people's worth of fast food a day as long with a large starbucks and 4 whole fully filled meal with every mineral and nutrient posible  =)

At 154 pounds 5'6" female somewhat active, I averaged about 2750 calories a day and I tracked it for about a month in a food journal.  I didn't eat a lot of junk, but dessert and sauces, and I didn't watch portions.

6'4" Male
when i was 185 pounds I had about 3800 cals a day
went through depression
now im 143 pounds at about 700 cals a day.

trying to gain weight for 3 weeks eating 2000cals a day now but havent gained anything.

I didn't really care about how much I ate 6 months ago.  Since I've started keeping a log I've had some 3500 calorie days, which felt like old times.  I've also looked at typical lunches from pre-diet, and they could easily go 1500 calories.  Combined with whopping bowls of Frosted MiniWheats, sugar, milk and fruit in the morning, I was well over 2000 calories before dinner, which usually wasn't any smaller than lunch.  So 3000-3500/day is probably a good estimate for an average.  BTW, I'm a 5'8" male who started at 215 lb.

all that sugar is probably what gave you the extra pounds.

i know my situation is a bit different but i find it really really hard to take in even 1600 calories a day. and im a 6'4" male. i eat healthy stuff and never eat much sugar. maybe thats the reason? maybe if i pound down some more McFlurrys i'll be up higher. ;)

octaviusmes, do you eat nuts, or seeds like sunflower or pumpkin? I was amazed when I found out how many calories were in peanuts and sunflower seeds. A handful of each will add several hundred calories to your total.

i find myself eating lots of granola now and flax seed. i havent had peanut butter in a while. maybe i should get some. the only thing is i wanna get healthy and not just become fat. i shouldnt say fat, but i wanna bulk up and not just the tummy if you know what i mean. i dont have self-image problems but yeah, like most people, i dont wanna just get a huge beerbelly from too much fats. what do you think?

idk. but i just remember going to mcdonald's like 2-3 times weekly after school and getting 2 large orders of fries. soooo good but terrible for me :-//